Posted on 11/08/2003 6:58:17 AM PST by ninenot
Of course, in our Church, we have faith that God calls some to celibacy, but not all.
Very much so! And thanks for your concern. People used to worry that us Catholics were having too many children. Refreshing to find someone worried we're about to make ourselves extinct.
I'm pretty sympathetic with those who stumble in this area. ;-)
First and foremost, in the Roman Catholic Church, it would open the floodgates to allow into the Roman rite priesthood, a raft of men with no real vocation who have been impertinently banging on the door and demanding admission to the priesthood on their own terms rather than those of the Church. The National "Catholic" Register is filled with the whining of these chronic malcontents. So are such cesspools of collectve dissent as Call to Action and Voice of the Faithful and their many counerparts.
Just as they do not wish to obey the pope in respect to the traditional vows of the Roman rite, many, many, many do not wish to be in doctrinal submission either. We have ostensibly celibate priests who are rank dissenters now. Their numbers would be substantially increased if there were a general allowance of a married priesthood in the Roman rite and the Church would sustain yet more long-term damage.
The RCC allows married priests in its much smaller Eastern Rites and admits to the priesthood in the Roman Rite married men who have served as clergy of the Episcopalian and/or Lutheran Churches (who must be ordained anew). These are not permitted to marry again after ordination and the apparent reason for the exceptions is one of charity and recognition of pre-existing obligations to wife and children.
A pedophile is a pedophile is a pedophjile. A homosexual exploiter is a homosexual exploiter is a homosexual exploiter. Some of each are married and some are not. Our basic rule is that homosexuality is an INHERENTLY disordered condition (always Catholic belief) and that no one inclined to homosexuality be admitted to the priesthood (according to orders of the very liberal Pope John XXIII).
Our secular newspapers reveal regularly the failure, particularly in English-speaking countries, and most particularly in the whacko liberal precincts of the leftist AmChurch (American liberal "Catholic" "Church") of Church authorities to successfully prevent the ordination of homosexuals and other perverts just as they gleefully thumb their collective noses at Vatican orthodoxy generally.
Normal men are normal men and do not seek out other men as objects of their sexual desires, must less the newspaper boy or the altar boy. For most of us, we can remember fathers who were not casting a fond glance at the hindquarters of the neighborhood 12-year-old boy or of his twenty-something brother when mom was out of town or otherwise unavailable. Dad married mom because he loved and wanted mom. BARF ALERT: No 12-year-old boy will serve as an adequate substitute. Adultery is not a norm much less so is lavender adultery and even less so is lavender child-molesting adultery.
Whatever Hugh Hefner may imagine himself to think, men who vow lifelong celibacy are neither unrealistic nor warped. Their worship is reserved to God rather than to their body parts or those of others. Somewhere in America is a college student who plays football very well but has decided not to play so that he can concentrate on his engineering studies.
The priesthood is also consistent with an ethic of sacrifice (an important part of the priestly vocation is offering Mass) and Catholics generally see moral merit in individual sacrifice of immediate pleasures. We are famous for not eating meat on Fridays, fasting and abstaining from nourishment to some degree during Lent, et al. That is not a way of life that is encouraged by the Reformation but it IS the Catholic way of life.
Considering the evident pleasure it gives you to say this, I suspect the self-satisfaction lies elsewhere.
The Pope never saw them and went back to the Vatican as if the nuns never existed.
Fortunately both Pope and nuns posess the spiritual maturity to understand that the Church isn't all about them. They realise, in a way you comprehend not at all, that seeing the pope in the flesh while a nice thing is no substitute for their eternal communion with each other, and with millions more, in Christ. Their decision not to travel to see him is a gift to the whole Church because it's an affirmation that needs to be made an given witness, of our bond in the Mystical Body. Facts like these may be of no interest to you, but they exist nevertheless.
Pointless exercises in self denial would be pleasing to only the pettiest of gods.
God is already perfect. He has no need for anything, much less our feeble gestures of self-denial. God favors self-denial not because he gets something from it, but because it's good for us. It's a vital spiritual tool in the service of conversion.
God's redemption isn't bought with deeds.
Quite right. And too many Christians are led astray by transactional models of man's dealings with God. God's call to man is not to appease him or take advantage of something he bought for us; it's to become like him, holy -- not enjoying our juridically justified selves, but enjoying a share in his very life.
Giving up a great part of what it means to be human by forgoing sex for a lifetime
To say that we're incapable of giving up sex is to make us less than human. The decision to answer a call to chastity is a function of reason -- an eminently human faculty. Far from condemning sex, the Church celebrates it by proclaiming its role to be within marriage. In its proper use, the Church declares, the marital act is sacramental -- which is to say, it serves to reveal God and his ways to man.
Now step slowly back from the mirror and no one will get hurt.
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