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.
Keep telling yourself that. Long after you and I are gone, and the protestant heresy has been consigned to the dustbin of history the Catholic Church will still be here. Leading the faithful to Christ.
Where were you and your co-religionists when we fought the Mohammedan horde? Oh, that's right. Not even a twinkle in Martin Luther's eye. The Catholic Church survived, thrived and pushed back the Islamic invasion. The Church has forgotten more about defeating Islam than any post-modern protestant will ever know.
For a protestant who rejects the Roman Catholic Church as a bastion of superstition and symbolism you seem to place a lot of "faith" in this.
But then it does illustrate my original point. Protestants hate the Church and wish to see it fall. How do your nightly prayers go. Something like, "Dear Jesus please bring down your Wrath on the Romanist Papacy?"
If anything protestants are nothing but a tool of Islam. Dividing the Body of Christ with their religious pluralism.
Where was Catholicism when Apostles walked the earth? Oh that’s right. Nowhere. Christian Judaism was the religion of that day. It will be again before He comes.
Another claim with no documentation.
Good post.
How many times must we tell you that Christ founded his church on those apostles, the first bishops!
It’s in your Bible — he breathed on them and the Holy Spirit entered them.
So are you saying that you don’t believe Jesus and the Apostles?
Catholicism began in the upper room at Pentecost. When the Holy Sprit led the Apostles to all Truth of the Faith according to the promise of Christ. Long before any modern novelty of protestant understanding.
No it did not. Hope for all of mankind began in that room. Gods ministry began in that room. The institution that became Catholicism came later.
So it’s entirely possible he was a widower when he met Jesus.
Your religion is playing tricks on your mind...The scripture doesn't say Peter had both of his legs so should we assume he rode around in a wheel chair???
I am not surprised your religion comes up with this stuff but it amazes me normal people buy into it...
If Peter's wife was dead, Peter didn't have a wife...But su-prise, su-prise...If you guys would only read and believe scripture you wouldn't be wasting your time with junk like this...
1Co 9:5 Have we not power to lead about a sister, a wife, as well as other apostles, and as the brethren of the Lord, and Cephas?
So now we know that Peter was leading around a sister, or a wife...My money's on the wife...
Also, and this is what I found particularly interesting I don’t know why I didn’t think of it, he was at his mother-in-law’s house and she was the one waiting on them. I do believe if his wife was alive at the time, she would have been the one waiting on them at his (their) house.
My God, why don't you people read the scriptures before you comment on them???
Mat_8:14 And when Jesus was come into Peter's house, he saw his wife's mother laid, and sick of a fever.
It was Peter's house, NOT his mother in law's...
Mat 8:15 And he touched her hand, and the fever left her: and she arose, and ministered unto them
The MIL didn't minister unto anyone, until she was healed of the fever...And obviously it was to show that she had been healed and was well enough to minister...
Peter shared his house with his brother and God knows who else...There likely were a number of women there ministering unto the men, and kids...
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