BishopAccountability.org
	In Defense of Celibacy By Mathew N. Schmalz On Faith May 15, 2009 http://newsweek.washingtonpost.com/onfaith/panelists/mathew_n_schmalz/2009/05/in_defense_of_celibacy.html Should the Catholic priesthood be restricted to single, celibate men? Do clergy restrictions based on gender, marital status or sexual orientation make sense these days? The case of Father Alberto Cutie should give us all pause. It should give us pause not only because it raises questions about the contemporary relevance of celibacy and the very possibility of living a celibate life. Instead, it should give us pause because Father Alberto is a human being who has confessed to some very human longings. Because of this, it is important to resist the temptation to spin polemical arguments about the case. When speaking from a conventional Catholic perspective, it is all too easy to adopt an uncritically defensive posture about celibacy without admitting its complex and conflicted history in the Catholic tradition. But it is also deceptively simple to condemn celibacy as anti-human, without recognizing that such criticism implicitly limits the possibilities inherent in all kinds of human experience. Oddly enough, my defense of celibacy is also a defense of Father Cutie in his, and our own, painful human vulnerability. Celibacy is not a universal requirement of priests within the Catholic Church. For example, priests in Eastern Rite Churches can marry and this has most certainly not affected their full communion with Rome. It is also well known that married Anglican and Lutheran priests have been ordained as Catholic priests after their conversion. Such apparent tensions in part reflect the changing rationale behind celibacy as a clerical discipline in the Roman Catholic Church. After Christianity became legal in the Roman Empire, there was a renewed interest in aspects of Jewish law that understood priests to pass through a temporary period of impurity after consummating sexual relations. But the development of Christian attitudes toward sexuality owes the most to Augustine of Hippo. Augustine, who himself had a long-time mistress, posited that procreation before the Fall was devoid of sexual desire. Indeed, one of the primary results of original sin was the lack of human control over the genitalia. This vision, combined with a philosophical emphasis upon the spirit in opposition to the body, led to an intense preoccupation with sins of the flesh or "concupiscence," to cite a rather technical term for a something that is hardly difficult to understand. After the Council of Elvira in the early fourth century, celibacy for clergy slowly became mandatory in the Western Church, although it only began to be rigorously enforced by Pope Gregory VII in the eleventh century. By that time, monasticism and related ascetic practices had become the primary models for the religious life. But there were also more worldly concerns that shaped the requirement of celibacy for Latin rite priests, such as the prevalence of clerical concubinage and the threat of damaging inheritance claims by children fathered by priests. Up until the early 20th century, celibacy was regarded as an indisputably higher vocation. In fact, according to the 1917 Code of Canon Law, a husband and wife could mutually dissolve their marriage bond to enter celibate religious life. With the Second Vatican Council, justifications for celibacy began to change. The association between sexuality and impurity declined and there was a renewed emphasis upon marital sexuality as sacred. For example, John Paul II and Benedict XVI both penned encyclicals that are rapturous in their praise of nuptual love. Now, the emphasis is much more on the connection between celibacy and freedom. Because priests are celibate they are not tied to family relations and thus may be fully open to others. Closely associated is the point that celibacy provides the context for the freedom to obey--a rather paradoxical formulation that again affirms how the lack of immediate familial bonds enables a priest to fully serve the Church. Some might say that since the rationale for celibacy has changed, there is no coherent reason to maintain it. To be sure, if Latin rite Catholicism continues to maintain celibacy as a discipline, it is likely that the number of priests will continue to decline. But in spite of this, I would still argue that celibacy has meaning and should be retained: not as a form of self-control, but as a form of self-surrender. Sexuality is the primary way in which humans seek continuity. The conjugal embrace is not only humankind's most fundamentally creative act; it also offers a foretaste of divine union. But all human relationships, no matter how compelling or fulfilling, are finite--they involve pain, vulnerability, and inevitable loss. Celibacy is an admission of our own human limitations, of our own very human need for a continuity and completeness that only God can give. Of course, God's voice is often so hard to hear, and His touch is often so gentle that it can easily escape notice. Perhaps that lies at the center of Father Alberto Cutie's struggle, for certainly all of us have experienced times when God's apparent absence brings us to the edge of despair. In those moments, there is an overwhelming need to cling on to anyone or anything in order to endure what seems to be a never ending darkness. Answering the call of celibacy is an act of self-surrender in and to this darkness. Celibacy is a cry that God alone can and should be enough.
Any original material on these pages is copyright © BishopAccountability.org 2004. Reproduce freely with attribution.