Blogger Priest

I watched a television program several years go where a reporter interviewed a sampling of priests who left ministry for marriage. They were aging men and one in particular told a very touching story about how he came face to face with his need for a wife and family when he was baptizing the first child of his brother. He said that he knew then what he wanted. Nevertheless, he admitted that if the Church asked him to return to ministry tomorrow (as married man), he would leave his lucrative business in an instant. He still felt that he was called to the priesthood. Indeed, he rightly said, he would always be a priest. However, the images that followed stripped away the sympathy I felt for him. He was involved with other ousted married priests in conducting religious services and Mass, even though they had been stripped of faculties to do so. As is so often the case with such priests, his problem was not merely a failure to keep his promise of celibacy, but also of ecclesial obedience. If the Church authorities should deem fit to grant the priesthood to married men, then that is the Church’s business, no matter whether I like it or not. However, a man who marries without laicization and dispensation from celibacy, not only incurs censure but involves the person he is said to love in mortal sin. Yes, it is mortal because the priest knows better. If such a man tries to continue in ministry, then he draws still more people away from the true Church into his circle of rebellion. Personal weakness I can understand. But harming the souls of others is a gross betrayal of Christ. He places himself into the role of Judas, not for a sack of coins but for the temptation clothed in a skirt and stockings.

Our understanding of celibacy, as I have already mentioned, cannot be disconnected from our understanding of marriage. As topics they can be distinguished but they can only really be defined accurately in relationship to each other. It is in light of these two mysteries that we can branch out in our critique of open-ended single life and the moral ills of fornication, cohabitation, homosexual acts, polygamy and pornographic voyeurism. Of course, some might misjudge celibacy because they wrongly define marriage. This not only applies in reverse but can tamper with how we see the other areas of human sexual experience. The degradation of celibacy may expand the understanding of marriage as merely an opportunity for contractual sexual pleasure. But marriage is not licensed prostitution. Such a view would collapse moral judgment against moral ills outside of marriage. Divinizing celibacy too highly might impair marriage by reducing it to merely a necessary evil for the sake of propagation of the species. This mentality might properly exclude the listed moral evils but at the terrible price of defaming a sacrament of the Church. Although in the past marriage was defined primarily in reference to the need for human generation; Pope John Paul II’s Theology of the Body would seek to bring this into balance with the fidelity of the spouses. This is fine and good, but it has had necessary ramifications with our appreciation of celibacy. As marriage is made more appealing and even spiritualized as a means to holiness; we need to show the overriding value and benefit of celibacy. If we fail to make the case, then young men are going to view it simply in terms of an imposed hardship they must suffer to save souls and to forgive sins. This value must both be defined and made relevant in the daily life of the celibate priest; otherwise, he will become increasingly angry and resentful against the very institution he represents. The priest is the Church’s man. If he turns against the Church or gives in to cynicism, then this negativity will spread to the pews and damage efforts at evangelization.

Filed under: Anti-Catholicism, Apologetics, Catholic, Celibacy, Discipleship, Marriage, Morality, Priests, Religion, Sacraments, Sexuality, Sin | Leave a comment »

St. Paul gave practical advice about human nature when he warned that it was better to marry than to burn; in turn some have viewed his words as an assault against marriage. Given the analogy of marriage as a reflection of Christ’s relationship to the Church, this is ridiculous. Marriage is a sacrament by which Christ grants grace. It is holy. The Manichee taint hates matter and despises marriage because it binds men and women in the flesh and creates still more corporeal beings. Christian celibacy cannot rightly raise up itself as an institution on the bones of marriage. If marriage falls, so does celibacy. Evidence of this fact is apparent in modern society. People are largely sexually active, but increasingly without benefit of marriage; simultaneously, celibacy is ridiculed and vocations to the priesthood cannot keep up with the need for shepherds. Christian marriage and the family constitute the cradle and birthplace to celibate vocations. This is one of God’s sweet absurdities or ironies. Our Lord delights in contradictions and makes them signposts to his kingdom: we must die to live, we must surrender to find treasure, we must forgive those who hurt us, we must love our enemies who hate us, and we must first have married vocations before we can have celibate priests. Social theorists might speak of marriage as a human construct imposed to protect civilization from the brute animal that would pillage, rape and murder. It restrains man’s lust and inhibits him from taking the wife or daughter of his neighbor. It gives man a structure of support and also ties him down with responsibility within an intimate communion of interdependence. The Christian would argue that marriage is a natural bond of divine institution. It is marriage and not the lascivious beast that defines him. Men and women are made for each other but not in a way analogous to the apes or animals. Husbands and wives find something of God’s watchful gaze in each other’s eyes. They discover a facet of divine love in their intimate embrace and know they are not alone. They participate in the Almighty’s awesome power in the creation of new human life. The promotion of celibacy and the quality of it as a sacrifice is necessarily enhanced when marriage is enthroned upon it’s rightly high throne.

The Church and society have long been at loggerheads about marriage and virginity. A female who embraced virginity and spiritual marriage with Christ was praised in pious circles. However, an unmarried woman might ordinarily be derided as a spinster and pitied by married women. A handsome man who became a priest is sometimes lamented by women as “what a waste!” A single man might still be regarded as a catch but a confirmed bachelor is viewed with suspicion. Is he gay? Is he eccentric and too much to handle? Maintaining a healthy tension has often proven difficult or impossible.

Our traditional regard for sexual innocence readily touches something spiritual, but what? It may be our Lord’s admonition that we must become like innocent little children. It may also reflect a dim memory of our own childhood and the innocence we once knew prior to the full emergence of reason, on one hand, and the breakthrough of puberty, on the other. We had yet to be possessed by the movement of passion, trusted our parents with a faith that was only second to God and saw the world with both wonder and a sense of simplicity. Religious virginity and vowed celibacy hint to what we shall become in the kingdom by opening windows to our first days in this world where we knew the trust and unblemished saintliness of children. At the moment of our baptism, we became perfect saints. We desperately want to return to that innocence and holiness.

Filed under: Anti-Catholicism, Apologetics, Catholic, Celibacy, Discipleship, Marriage, Morality, Priests, Religion, Sacraments, Sexuality, Sin | 2 Comments »