It has about it a certain pragmatism....it is easier to deploy single people than it is to deploy families. But we need also to ask ourselves about whether the price of the enforced pragmatic solution is simply too high.
The price is paid by
1. The celibates themselves
2. The community of faith
3. Those who are victims of distorted sexuality.
It should be clear from both anecdotal and actual evidence that there are many priests in the Roman Catholic church who do not see celibacy as something that can be maintained. Anything up to and over 50% of American clergy say they have broken their vow of chastity, many maintain ongoing relationships with a partner. There is a web of deceit and sadness about all this.
Recent analyses of clergy in different places suggests that many priests are emotionally immature and are not only having to deal with the tension of enforced celibacy but also an underdeveloped psyche to enable them to deal with this.
The community of faith suffers at the hands of such people. There is a certain degree of caricature about what childless males might tell hapless families about moral issues such as contraception, divorce and the like; and we might not need to take this so seriously until we realise that this is also the counsel of those who are least equipped emotionally to give it!!
It is not true to say that all celibates are emotionally immature or psychologically damaged and damaging...but a signioficant number are!
There is also the sad cost of the number of fine men who would make excellent priests, but who have decided that God is also calling them to be married. Many felt deep hurt when renegade Anglican married priests were allowed to function as priests after defecting.
I still hear my sister-in-laws aged Catholic grandmother, whose parish priest is a married ex-Anglican, reminding her family that when she goes she want a real priest not an Anglican!
That there are also countless victims of this enforced gift is sad to behold.
But these three aspects are all sad indictments of a policy of enforced celibacy.
I am all for lauding the genuine gift of celibacy, but have increasingly less time for the notion of compulsion.
4 comments:
Anglican priests should be celibate until they have married, though.
I don't think the word is "celibate", I think the word is "chaste".
Celibate means called to remain unmarried...whereas "chastity" is what all Christian people are called to...whether priests or not, and whether married or not.
As a married person my chastity means that my wife and my wife alone is my intimate partner.
Thanks, I didn't know he difference between the two terms. Can you explain why we are all called to be chaste? Thanks, Robyn
A good question R...and I shall make a fuller entry on the main blog in the next day or so.
The Reader's Digest version in my mind is that there is a complex of influences that need to be brought to bear on such issues, these include:
the scriptural witness
the tradition and teaching of the church
personal experience
and individual conscience.
To rely on just one of these is to ask for problems and distortion...but more in the main blog later
Post a Comment