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.
I came in after a good nights sleep and posted all kinds of stuff to those dudes!
(Psst... I saw no 'ask' in the 'request'.)
SLC; here I come!
What'll it take to PLEASE you?
n this passage Paul defends himself and the other apostles against charges from a few disgruntled people. He says he is giving "my defense to those who would examine me" (1 Cor. 9:3). He talks about a situation that applies to himself, not just to the others, yet he certainly was not accompanied by his wife, since he had no wife. We know from other testimony of his that he was unmarried.
The key Greek words in 1 Corinthians 9:5 are adelphaen gunaika. The first means "sister," and the second can be translated as either "woman" or "wife." This means the phrase translates as "sister woman" or "sister wife," with "sister" indicating not a biological but a spiritual relationship. It would make sense for the apostles to be accompanied by "sister women" who could assist them in ministering to women—for example, at full-immersion baptisms, where a question of modesty could arise, or in cases where it would be more appropriate for a woman to perform a charitable or catechetical function.
This finds support in the Fathers. "Sister woman" is found in Jerome’s Vulgate, and Jerome (347-402 AD) wrote that "It is clear that [they] must not be seen as wives but, as we have said, as women who assisted [the apostles] with their goods" (Ad. Jovinian I, 26). Clement of Alexandria (150-215 AD) agreed, saying the women were not the wives of the apostles but were female assistants who could enter the homes of women and could teach them there (Stromata III, 6).
So much for Sola Scriptura.
Ask Roget for help...
Yeah...
...this happens a lot these days; too.
Oh, I dunno Elsie. How about your conversion to the One True Faith? Acceptance of Rome as the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church.
Only because I care for the state of your immortal soul.
Don't forget COUSIN!
Huh?
You use extraneous writings to disprove the Bible?
Cool!
You must think I'm not there now.
Could you list the additional things that I need to believe, on top of what I believe now, that would indicate a fullness you seem to detect that I now lack?
Jesus answered, “The work of God is this: to believe in the one he has sent.” Accept Rome as the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church."
That’s pretty good. You’ve got it down.
The term “mother in law” is not a legal term, it’s a descriptive one. Your point about “the law” being voided at death is irrelevant. Insert “wife’s mother” in there instead of mother in law. It’s perfectly reasonable to do so, as there isn’t any distinction in the Greek. Look it up in Strong’s, it’s G3994.
Yes Icool is right I erred when I implied they were at the mother in law’s (excuse me, wife’s mother’s) house when she was ill. They were at St. Peter’s house. That only bolsters what I’m saying though, and that is if his wife was alive she would have been the one to wait on them at her own house.
Sure it’s true it’s possible she, along with any other women there were simply not recorded in Scripture, as the passage was about St. Peter’s MIL and her miraculous cure.
But you guys (Protestants/anti-Catholic Christians) are always the ones telling us Catholics, “Don’t go beyond what’s written! Don’t add to Scripture!”
So fine. I’m not adding anything to Scripture. I’m just saying you can’t prove St. Peter had a (living) wife at the time he met Jesus, using Scripture alone.
If anything, this little exercise should demonstrate exactly the mental deficiency of the doctrine “sola scriptura” (as it’s actually practiced not the formal definition thereof)
JPX: Please tell me you’re not defending JPII kissing the Koran. There is NO GOOD, CATHOLIC reason for that. Period.
I have now skimmed through the rest of this thread and based on all of the deleted comments I see it went south.
What can you expect from a filthy Prot?
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