Scottish Catholic Observer

PRIESTLY celibacy is the latest target for attack by radicals campaigning to make the Church indistinguishable from the disordered world it inhabits and which it should be its mission to evangelise. Instead, the radical mindset demands that the Mystical Body conform to that profoundly un-Catholic template.

A recent example of such flawed thinking was contained in an article titled The Vatican should do away with priestly celibacy. Written by Peter Stanford, it begins by pointing out that St Peter had a mother-in-law ‘and therefore a wife,’ claiming that ‘she is surely significant.’

It then proceeds—rather distastefully —to invoke the letters exchanged between a Polish woman philosopher and Pope John Paul II, the subject of a recent BBC Panorama documentary, saying: “There is no suggestion that Pope John Paul II broke his vow of celibacy with the married Mrs Tymieniecka, but his yearning for intimacy with her is plain.”

Oh really? Where, outside the realms of Freudian charlatanry, is the evidence for that? As for St Peter’s wife, she is so ‘significant’ she never appears in the Gospels, we do not even know her name and it is likely he was a widower before Our Lord called him.

Where Mr Stanford becomes utterly cavalier in his treatment of history is in his extravagant claim that ‘for the first millennium of Christianity, priests were married…’ and that it was only from the 11th century onwards that the Church insisted on celibacy. So, how to explain Canon XXXIII of the Council of Elvira in 302AD, which imposed celibacy on all clergy, including deacons? The First Council of Nicaea, in 325AD, by Canon III forbade all clergy to live in the same house as any woman other than a mother, sister or aunt.

Of course, in the early centuries, some priests married, at a time when the Church was struggling to establish its authority, clarify its laws and communicate across vast areas. But it was increasingly recognised as an abuse. Over the centuries the Church refined and perfected its understanding of the priesthood and its sublime charism, the celebration of the continuing sacrifice of Calvary and the administration of the sacraments.

From its earliest years the Church acknowledged virginity as a higher state of life. So it was appropriate that a priesthood whose members, at the Consecration in the Mass, acted in persona Christi—momentarily took on the personality of Christ—should be dignified by the celibate state. That was the invitation Christ issued, to the religious vocation, when he praised those who ‘for the sake of the Kingdom of God’ were unmarried and urged that ‘he who can accept it, let him accept it.’ (Matthew 19:12)

St Paul concisely spelled out the straightforward principle: “He that is without a wife is solicitous for the things that belong to the Lord, how he may please God. But he that is with a wife is solicitous for the things of the world, how he may please his wife: and he is divided.” (1 Corinthians 7:7-8) That reality applies just as much today, two millennia later.

There are practical objections to married priests: The cost of supporting a family, penitents’ reluctance to confess to a man with a wife, the endless problems of family life distracting him from his duties. But the real value of clerical celibacy is on a higher plane, as the priesthood should be. A priest’s life should be exclusively devoted to God. It would be intolerable to expect God not to demand from the sacrament of ordination the exclusive commitment that a wife rightly demands from the sacrament of matrimony.

As for the shortage of priests, what is its cause? The answer is plain. It is the drought that has afflicted all the once fertile fields for vocations: The large families devoted to the Faith, the children reared in traditional devotions, the Catholic moral consensus that held aloof from the corruption of the surrounding world. With pews and confessionals empty and the family rosary replaced by solitary children trawling the internet, where are priestly vocations to be nurtured?

These are the fruits of 50 years of world-oriented radicalism and those who have caused them now illogically prescribe further radical departures from Catholic tradition to remedy them. Nonsensical claims, parroted even by Catholics, that celibacy is ‘unnatural,’ that it is ‘asking too much,’ ‘in this day and age,’ and so on reflect the materialism and relativism of secular society.

Men who endorse those weakling alibis could never make good priests. A vocation is a total and exclusive commitment to God, conspicuously absent from the secular-minded agenda that denounces celibacy as ‘unhealthy.’ Only by turning to God, especially during Lent, can we begin the restoration of Catholic spirituality that alone will give us a bountiful harvest of good priests.

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