UNITED KINGDOM
The Guardian
Andrew Brown
guardian.co.uk, Monday 4 March 2013
The fall of Keith O’Brien is more than just the humiliation of a proud and lonely man – a humiliation certain to be prolonged by the apparent dishonesty of his partial confession. It is also a further suggestion that the discipline of celibacy can’t much longer be maintained for the vast majority of the Catholic priesthood.
I don’t want to suggest that celibacy is impossible or pointless. Clearly it need be neither. I have known some very good, honest, loving and trustworthy people who have taken vows of celibacy and so far as I know they have kept them. I have also known a brilliant alcoholic whose life never really recovered from leaving the Jesuits to marry. The only major religion that places no value on celibacy at all is Judaism – and there are plenty of sex scandals involving rabbis, too. Marriage on its own solves no more problems than celibacy does.
But the Roman Catholic church is the only major denomination that tries to enforce celibacy on all its clergy almost without exception. There are a number of Eastern Catholic churches that contain married parish clergy but celibate bishops drawn from their monastic orders. In the UK, America and Australia, there are a few married former Anglican clergy. No successors are planned for them. The ban has been in place since the 12th century, and more or less enforced since the counter-reformation of the mid-16th century.
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