Ecclesiastical celibacy is not a dogma. The scriptures do not impose it. It is even easy to effect the change. I take up a pen, I sign a decree, and the next day, priests who wish to may get married.
John XXlll
The Church as Institution . . . cannot bring healing to others until it first heals its broken notion of the human person. Nor can it be holy, or even recognize and affirm what is holy in the world, until it purges itself of unhealthy ideas about men and women and supplants these ideas with healthy ones instead.
Eugene Kennedy
At the recent synod on the Eucharist in Rome, many churchmen staring the obvious fact right in the face, stood up and basically said that the Roman Catholic Church is sacrificing Eucharist on the altar of celibacy. The adamantine wall of denial and the "see no evil" approach of John Paul ll had already been forgotten. This "elephant in the sacristy"(celibacy) for twenty-five years has been ignored by the previous pope who famously said to a Canadian bishop that God would provide celibate males. There would be no relaxation of the celibacy requirement despite half of the Catholic world's parishes being without a priest. Studies have consistently shown that the main reason for a dearth of candidates in the Roman Catholic priesthood is the celibacy requirement which the great Pope John XXlll stated he could end with a stroke of his pen. The time was not ripe for the sainted pope, but it assuredly is today.
Nobody questions that effective ministry need be coupled with celibacy. Our Orthodox and Uniate relatives as well as our Protestant and Jewish cousins seem to get along quite well without it. Granted marriage by itself does not confer effective leadership on a community either, but why this adamantine refusal to countenance a relaxation of a medieval demand? One reason of course was the ferocious personal commitment to the discipline by the late Pope John Paul ll. There can be no doubt that Karol Woytyla lived his celibacy in an heroic manner, yet the personal predilection and iron discipline of a pope should never override the wisdom and wishes and demonstrable needs of the whole Church. The simple fact is the insistence on celibacy has had grave consequences for the credibility of the Church.
Quite simply celibacy does not work, has not worked and the pretence that all is well is badly damaging the credibility of the Roman Church. The explosive sex abuse scandal has once again focused people's attention on this "precious jewel," as Paul Vl termed it. And while celibacy cannot be deemed the reason for such widespread sex abuse, there can be no doubt the unresolved and unsuccessful integration of sexuality is a major cause.
In the past (from 1139 CE onward), celibacy simply was the price that many paid for priesthood. For many it was a necessary burden which came with the territory. Many seemingly succeeded largely because of the extraordinary seamlessness of the Catholic culture --the great respect with which priests were held, their status unquestioned in the community along with the many unearned perks they received as "men of the cloth." The iron discipline and hierarchical nature of the Church was a given, as was the overall culture conservatism of repressed sexuality. This legalist authoritarianism structure was tacitly accepted by Catholics who found themselves in a largely Protestant culture. All this changed with the 1960s. The Second Vatican Council, described by English historian Eamon Duffy as "the most revolutionary Christian event since the Reformation," proclaimed that holiness was endemic to every state in life. Celibates had no great claim to virtue or holiness. Marriage now was championed as much for its mutuality as its procreational function. Celibates began to feel alone and unsure of themselves. The mass exodus of priests began, the overwhelming percentage to marry.
Celibacy always (as we will see) had been a burden, but had been propped up by the Catholic culture. It is commonly accepted that the most talented men left the priesthood, leaving many of the remnant angry, confused, and bitter. They had to work along with the genuinely fine priests who had made their peace with the hard discipline. With the cultural props disappearing, and with a more holistic view of sexuality appearing, celibacy's casualties became more obvious. The higher rate of alcoholism in the priesthood was revealed. One did not have to be Freud to observe the deleterious effects of celibacy --the "dried prunes" of crotchety pastors, their often-stunted emotional lives along with their loss of affectivity and capacity for laughter. Too many were obviously suffering a low-level depression. Michael Crosby quotes fellow Capuchin Martin Pables reference to "low level hostility" among some clergy. "They are not angry people; they are quietly and passively resentful. They resent the burdens of celibacy, the ineptness of religious leadership, the confusion of theology and the ingratitude of the faithful."
Crosby also points to process addictions among clergy --gambling, shopping, working, and exercise. The most severe, of course, is the power addictions which surfaced in the sex abuse scandals. While this is not the subject of our exploration here, it is necessary to point out the obvious problems which celibacy has brought. In my first essay I referred to the huge examples of concubinage existing in Africa and Latin America, not to mention that given the mass exodus of healthy heterosexuals and the obvious homosocial environment of the clerical life, we now have a predominantly gay priesthood. While this should not be seen as condemnatory of homosexuals, serious questions certainly need to be asked about such high percentages.
Why celibacy in the first place?
As we know the Church came out of Judaism as a reform movement led by Jesus, a liberal Pharisee. The first thing to say here in the Jewish world, celibacy, the voluntary renunciation of marriage is an utterly foreign concept. This is so obvious that we need not discuss it. "Be fruitful and multiply" was a duty particularly in a world where longevity was not known.
Judaism, however, like many movements of antiquity was radically affected by the dualism of Greek culture. From Pythagoras (6th c. BCE) to Plato (d. 347 BCE), the body is suspect while the soul is elevated and noble. We know Plato had a huge influence on Christianity with its distrust of matter and the body. We shall see this in the writings of the Church fathers later.
Historian Joseph Swain tells us that, "a wave of asceticism swept over the whole Greek world in the first century BCE." Philosophical schools like the Epicureans and Stoics promulgated celibacy. Stoicism, the greatest school of ancient philosophy, had its most profound impact from 300 BCE to 250 CE. Stoicism naturally lauded celibacy over marriage. A true Stoic like Seneca (d. 65 CE) could write that one "resists the assault of passions and does not allow himself to be swept into the marital act." Pliny the Elder (d. 79 CE) praised the elephant for mating only every two years! All over the Mediterranean pagan priests observed purity laws, denying themselves sexual intercourse before the sacred ablutions were performed. The Vestal Virgins were honoured in Rome and the largest mystery cult of that time, that of Mithras, championed the unmarried state.
Uta Ranke-Heinemann writes that "the negative assessment of sexual pleasure in the two centuries after Christ was further strengthened by the invasion of pessimism...which came out of the east...and would prove to be the most dangerous competition for Christianity. This we know as gnosticism." The latter movement greatly exacerbated the distrust of the senses and the hatred of the body which so infected the new religion. The only worthy part of the human is the spark of light from another world, the soul. The body was "the grave you carry around with you." A further departure from God's good creation you could not find --and Gnosticism's denigration of corporality had a deadly effect. Marcion, a Christian gnostic leader (c. 140 CE) identified sex with evil matter. For Marcion, Jesus could not have been born through the sex act and probably floated down from heaven. He himself was celibate and demanded the same of his followers. Though he had a large impact on the early Church, Marcion's extreme sexual asceticism got him bounced from the Church of Rome in 144 CE. In the desert area of Syria the Encratites held sway and they too deeply influenced the early Church. For them marriage was "polluted and a foul way of life."
Although the Church rejected the most extreme of these teachings, there is no doubt that she was radically influenced by them. The year 150 CE is chosen by historian Peter Brown as a Rubicon in this area. By then the powerful life-affirming and positive influence of Judaism had begun to wane, and the dualism and pessimism of the Hellenic world became dominant within Christianity especially in the areas of marriage and sexuality.
Looking back we see nothing in the apostolic community, which wedded celibacy to the essentials of Christianity. The earliest witness Paul, says he received nothing from the Lord on this matter. The canonical Gospels do not raise the issue. The first apostles and leaders were all married. We know nothing of Jesus marital state and the fact that nothing is said in the gospels about his traditional single state probably indicates that he more than likely was married. The writers assuredly would have commented on an itinerant Jewish rabbi who was unmarried. The Gospels are simply disinterested in biography. Other than the fact that we know Jesus had brothers (Mk.6: 3) we know little of his biographical details. The Gospels are simply not that type of literature. They are proclamations, sermon fragments, testimonies of his lordship. There is so little material about his life that we simply cannot know. What we have in traditional spiritual writing is well recognized today as sentimental conjecture with no historical basis. The eminent Notre Dame theologian Richard McBrien phrases it well: "Is it possible he was married? Yes…and without any compromise of the church's historic faith in him as truly God and truly, truly human." That the Church had a vested interest in proclaiming his single celibate status is beyond question. Infected by the Gnostic pessimism described above and the denigration of the body, the early Church fathers (and most especially the giant Augustine) elevated celibacy over the married state.
Virgin birth
As Christianity moved into the Hellenic world hobbled by the pagan asceticism above, and as the Hebraic unity of flesh and spirit was broken apart by this new anti-body sentiment, sexual abstinence was elevated to new heights. Nowhere is this seen as in the use of the virgin birth story as a buttress to the celibate state as superior and ultimately to be linked with priesthood.
As early as 310 CE, the Council of Elvira (Spain) was the first Church council to attempt to separate the sacred from the sexual and establish a clerical elite. Prominent of course in this whole area has been the use of the Virgin Birth story as a welcome support to the superiority of the single state and the degrading of sex. The story, unknown to Paul and to Mark, was interpolated into the Christian scriptures at a late date. The early Church theologian Justin Martyr simply understood the myth as parallel to other Mediterranean stories about superstars like Plato, Alexander and Augustus who it was said, were sired by gods copulating with women. The story is about Jesus, not Mary --his uniqueness, his singularity and deep origin in God. Nobody in the first century would have taken it as history. Yet the beautiful myth of "God's paternity" often seen in Hebrew scriptures (Isaiah 43:6, Hosea 1:10) was literalized. The poetry that new life was "fathered" in Mary by God's spirit has been rendered dead by fundamentalism. Even the genius Aquinas, a man of his time, had fallen prey to this anti-sex bias. In response to Jerome's nemesis Helvidius (c. 380 CE) who dared to suggest that Joseph had sex with Mary after the birth of Jesus, Aquinas huffed that "This error is an insult to the Holy Ghost whose shrine was the virginal womb wherein he had formed the flesh of Christ: wherefore it was unbecoming that it should be desecrated by intercourse with man." (Summa lll.28.3)
Here we see something which should not shock us. Aquinas, the greatest doctor of the Church, breathed in quite naturally the noxious fumes of the Church's anti-body history. Today this need not trouble us. But to insist on celibacy and an all male celibate priesthood is to ignore the persistent promptings of the Holy Spirit.
I conclude these reflections next month.
Ted Schmidt is Editor of Catholic New Times.
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