AUSTRALIA
The Guardian
Michael Arditti
Saturday 10 June 2017
Although Christ equivocally declared that some men “have made themselves eunuchs for the Kingdom of Heaven’s sake”, nowhere in the New Testament is celibacy enjoined on priests. St Paul, while advocating chastity as an ideal, assumed that most church leaders would be married, and St Peter, traditionally regarded as the first pope, had one of the most prominent mothers-in-law in the Bible.
Priestly celibacy, which was only enshrined in law in medieval times, emerged less for spiritual than for practical reasons. The church was determined to consolidate its property and its power: in the first case, by preventing priests from leaving their possessions to their children, and in the second by controlling their most powerful human instincts. Carnal passion was denigrated as animalistic and women as the instigators of their downfall. Priests should strive to emulate the sinless, sexless Christ.
Historically, clerical celibacy has been more honoured in the breach than in the observance. The most notorious offenders were the Renaissance popes, but there has been a long tradition of “the priest’s woman”, often his housekeeper. Statistics are understandably hard to obtain, but in a survey by the University of Chicago, quoted by Thomas Keneally in his new novel, 60% of Catholic priests admitted to sexual experience of one kind or another, findings that have been duplicated elsewhere.
It is those who repress their sexuality until, at breaking point, they target their most vulnerable charges who wreak irreparable damage on both their victims and their church. In an authorial preface, Keneally, who as a youth trained for the priesthood, acknowledges that “the education to make me celibate … could create, encourage or license the young men whose abusive tendencies are mourned in this novel”. That awareness permeates the entire book, from its central conflict to case studies, such as that of the priest who, having abused an altar boy, declares with horrifying candour that “a man is only human”.
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