Pope Paul VI and Cardinal Wojtyla, c.1967
Posted on 06/22/2014 2:42:07 PM PDT by NYer
A common criticism of the Catholic Church’s teachings on sexual morality has to do with the largely unmarried clergy who are charged with preaching the message. The accepted wisdom is that celibate males have no business telling married couples how to live their lives: “What do they know about the subject?”
I remember a particularly egregious example. In 1974, Earl Butz, then U.S. Secretary of Agriculture, ridiculed Pope Paul VI’s opposition to contraception, “He no playa the game, he no maka the rules.” He later apologized, but in reality he was only saying publicly what many, including many Catholics, were saying privately.
I’ve never understood this. Jesus, God Incarnate, was a celibate male. Why would any Christian assume that a man striving to emulate Christ in the flesh would have nothing to offer about the nature of love?
Christians agree that God is love. What they don’t agree on is what should be derived from this fact.
I’ve taught natural family planning for almost twenty years and I consider one of the most important elements of this instruction to be what is conveyed about the nature of love. I always hesitate to use an adjective such as “true” to describe a noun such as “love.” It seems inadvertently to give status to any falsehood parading as truth.
Love is what it is. Everything else is a pretender and should be described with its own noun. Love is not lust; love is not use; love is not convenience. Love is divine, with all that implies.
St. John Paul II’s pontificate emphasized church teaching about love and its incarnational aspects. From 1981 through 1984, he devoted a whole series of audiences to this subject, which he dubbed “The Theology of the Body.” These talks were later gathered into a book and became the basis of serious theological reflections
Although continence for the sake of the Kingdom was an important aspect of this teaching, the theology on marriage seemed to get the most focus when it was disseminated and discussed. Celibacy was initially given short shrift, which is unfortunate, because the fact of the matter is, if you don’t understand or appreciate continence for the sake of the Kingdom, you aren’t going to appreciate or understand the nature of the sacrament of marriage.
Pope Paul VI and Cardinal Wojtyla, c.1967
A keystone of St. JPII’s teaching in this matter is found in Gaudium et Spes:
Indeed, the Lord Jesus, when He prayed to the Father, “that all may be one. . . as we are one” (John 17:21-22) opened up vistas closed to human reason, for He implied a certain likeness between the union of the divine Persons, and the unity of God’s sons in truth and charity. This likeness reveals that man, who is the only creature on earth which God willed for itself, cannot fully find himself except through a sincere gift of himself. [24]
The essence of love is a willingness to give a sincere gift of self. We only love when we act like God. God the Son showed us what this means by giving such a complete gift of Self that He emptied Himself, as St. Paul tells us, going all the way to the cross.
Our life of love is a continuum that starts here on earth and is fulfilled in Heaven. The crucifixion was completed by the resurrection, when love conquered even death. Celibacy for the kingdom is the eschatological symbol of love and it has much to teach those of us who are married.
In a 1981 audience, reflecting on Christ’s words about the resurrection of the body found in Mt. 22:30, St. JPII wrote:
The reciprocal gift of oneself to God – a gift in which man will concentrate and express all the energies of his own personal and at the same time psychosomatic subjectivity – will be the response to God’s gift of himself by man, a gift which will become completely and definitively beatifying, as a response worthy of a personal subject to God’s gift of Himself, “virginity,” or rather the virginal state of the body, will be totally manifested as the eschatological fulfillment of the “nuptial” meaning of the body, as the specific sign and the authentic expression of all personal subjectivity. In this way, therefore, that eschatological situation in which “they neither marry nor are given in marriage” has its solid foundation in the future state of the personal subject, when, as a result of the vision of God “face to face,” there will be born in him a love of such depth and power of concentration on God Himself, as to completely absorb his whole psychosomatic subjectivity.
It is the mutual gift of self that is imaged in conjugal love. Without denigrating the noble vocation of marriage, it can rightly be said that the couple undertaking marriage can find no better guide to understanding the essential nature of the gift of self than the celibate priest who has emptied himself in imitation of Christ.
Let’s thank our priests for showing us this most radical example of self-gift.
Practice...
...or cheat, like me!
I have a program that I can type text in the way I want to post it, and then I can select the HTML code generated by it to post on FR.
HtmlDocEdit is a simple HTML designer/editor based on the Internet Explorer browser, that allows you to easily edit HTML files without any knowledge in HTML.
With HtmlDocEdit you can change the font/color of selected text, add images, add links, add ordered and unordered lists, and more...
http://www.nirsoft.net/utils/html_doc_edit.html
It took me a few months to figure it out even though it’s in the posting guidelines.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/3107232/posts
Is there an easy link to the guidelines?
Yup; posted just above.
The guidelines I was referring to are at the bottom of every posting page (below the text box where you type)
They say, “This forum allows optional use of most HTML tags. If your post does not contain HTML, it will be converted to HTML when posted, retaining paragraphs as typed. This conversion is not performed if you have anything resembling an HTML tag in your text.”
This is what they say now, but I swear it wasn’t that clear before. (At least not to me I dunno haha). Anyway, like I said it took me many months to realize HTML screws up automatic hyperlinks.
For help with HTML, there’s the HTML Sandbox thread floating around. I don’t have a link to that directly, but Elsie might.
LOL..that was obvious. Thanks for the link.
I have a friend who is a non married pastor (son of a pastor) who does not marry because he saw the strain it put on his mother and siblings. A married pastor can have conflicting priorities. This gentleman felt that he was always second best to his father’s work.
I also have a friend who is a pastor and has a bunch of kids. He was also a pastor’s son, and used that experience to help his ministry. He uses Stephan’s ministers (not sure if the Catholic church has those, but you need them) to do the things that lay people can and should do. It helps build up a parish, and frees up Pastors for other duties. This man feels he can help relate more to other families being a father and a husband that he could not have being single.
There are benefits to both paths.
I quoted you word for word. And as I said: “If you meant something different you should have written something different.”
That was Metmom’s quote.
Are you aware that the screening has completely changed after Pope Benedict XVI sent emissaries to investigate the seminaries?
Any man applying for the priesthood must undergo a two day psychological exam. His parents are interviewed. His priest is interviewed. Friends are interviewed. And it goes on from there.
Then he is put on a probationary period while he attends the first part of his schooling.
So we can all say, “Thank you, Pope Benedict!”
Time will tell whether this was actually enforced. So far it seems to me that we still have way too many gay/gay friendly priests.
Peter was married.
It didn’t disqualify him from being selected to be a disciple by Jesus Himself, nor did it disqualify him from holding a prominent position in the early church.
Scripture nowhere demands that men make vows to the church.
Money should not be a factor in determining whether a man should be a priest of not. Any church that lets financial considerations be a factor in determining that has its priorities wrong. They are trying to serve two masters and not trusting God to provide for the man that HE called to be with that congregation.
People who live in glass house shouldn't throw stones.
YOUR pope kissing the koran. Fits right in with YOUR Catechism of the Catholic church.
http://www.vatican.va/archive/ENG0015/__P29.HTM
841 The Church's relationship with the Muslims. "The plan of salvation also includes those who acknowledge the Creator, in the first place amongst whom are the Muslims; these profess to hold the faith of Abraham, and together with us they adore the one, merciful God, mankind's judge on the last day."330
Which is why the Church never considered it doctrine. Having said that, did Peter stay with his wife when he followed Jesus?
Show me one post where a non-Catholic said otherwise.
The point that we've been making about having a married priesthood is exactly that. That it would prevent the priesthood from becoming a safe haven for homosexuals. IOW, it clearly recognizes that homosexual infiltration has occurred. Can you all afford some reading comprehension lessons, or will you just try to stop filtering everything through your anti-Protestant lenses?
Priestly celibacy makes sense administratively, theologically, biblically and in all manner of other categories.
Except Scripturally where even GOD didn't require a celibate priesthood for His Jewish priests.
As an aside, this whole protestant obsession with what is "needed" and "not needed" is merely a rationalistic tendency to serve self.
Nobody said anything about needed or not needed either. We recognize that allowing a married priesthood would free up many married men to fill the role and ease the burden on the Catholic churches because there just aren't enough single priests to go around.
The suggestion is offered as a solution, one that most RC's gasp in horror over.
Oh come on now. You can do better than that.
I don’t see anyone suggesting that the RCC demand all of its priests to be married.
Do you guys not see the difference between allowing and demanding?
That response to me was completely insincere. Go back and read my post to you.
You quoted my sentence:
“Really? Someone who is not married is superior in discussing marriage to a married counselor?”
In response you wrote, “Really is it now a requirement that ALL marriage counselors be married? When did this law pass? Is it just for your state or all states?”
What you attacked had nothing to do with what I wrote, and what I wrote IS what I meant: “Someone who is not married is superior in discussing marriage to a married counselor?”
The idea that celibacy makes a person a SUPERIOR marriage counselor is ridiculous. They might still be good ones, depending on their nature and how good they are at listening, but they are not improved as counselors by being celibate.
Given your last post to me, I'd say your own words could refer to your own reading comprehension skills and bias as well.
It is also possible that she died sometime before Peter was following Jesus. The gospels never mention her, just the Mother in law. No one can for certain one way or the other.
By the same token, I guess Catholics can’t discuss non-Catholic doctrines.
It's a two way street.
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