Make up your mind…which is it?
Either the Church is male-centered…
…or do those pesky Catholics put too much emphasis on HER…
Posted on 10/18/2024 10:46:16 PM PDT by ConservativeMind
Clerical celibacy is an issue that the ongoing final sessions of the Synod on Synodality should have discussed. However, the hierarchy continues to peripheralize it, despite its deleterious impacts on witnessing Christ and evangelizing.
Historically, the androcentric Roman Catholic Church has been mired in an endless crisis over clerical celibacy and chastity with pernicious implications, especially for its lay and religious women and children.
Apart from explicit violence against them by the celibate clerics, the hierarchy’s double standards of male sexual morality have placed the burden of blame, shame, guilt and sin on women survivors — the proverbial Eves, and have treated women in relationships with clerics as moral pariahs.
The abusive clerics have almost always emerged relatively unscathed as gentlemen of the cloth. Despite its claim of being the custodian of morality, the Church has reneged on accountability behind the smokescreen of theological and legal semantics.
In the Church’s theological classification and its appalling lived reality, clerical celibacy is not a matter or reflection of faith.
Clerical celibacy is not and never has been a Catholic doctrine.
Priestly celibacy has been a discipline, a practice legislated by a designated authority to guide and serve the Church. As such, it is governed by changing rules that are historically and culturally mediated in evolving contexts.
Christ welcomed celibate and married followers in his ministry, saying that celibacy was a rare gift (Matthew 19:11-12). Some apostles, including Peter and some Fathers of the Church, were married. Some Eastern-rite Catholic Churches in communion with Rome continue to permit priestly ordination of married men.
Theologians trace its origins to asceticism among early Christians that elevated purity and chastity — equated with sexual abstinence — to core Christian values.
(Excerpt) Read more at ucanews.com ...
The trouble with celibacy and the priesthood is that...priests are not celibate! They have sex, and too often it’s perverted sex.
Make up your mind…which is it?
Either the Church is male-centered…
…or do those pesky Catholics put too much emphasis on HER…
Priestly confessions to other priests must be a riot.
In my opinion, priestly celibacy is one of the absolute stupidest things. People can contort and twist scripture all they want, and they do, but it is simply indefensible Biblically. There is Paul’s preference, but that’s it, a preference. I am positive that many men would become priests if they could have a family. There wouldn’t be no shortage like there is now. And yes, protestant preachers fail because of deviancy and abuse, but as we know catholic priests fail and abuse as well. It just makes no sense.
*Dr. Jean D’Cunha is a gender expert with a continuing body of work on women’s labor migration and the links between gender, climate change, conflict and migration. She worked with UN Women in senior management and technical positions worldwide and retired as Senior Global Advisor on International Migration and Decent Work.
Wow…this claptrap reads like nonsense we get from the left.
But when given anti-Catholic lipstick and a manicure, I guess some losers think it’s peachy.
I can still remember the days of my innocence when I believed that all priests were good and holy men. Disillusionment does not make one anti-Catholic. Just one who can recognize and accept an exceptionally sad reality.
Aquinas Dominican HS - 1962 - The Sisters - Auld Lang Syne - James Taylor
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fhDlWTJZFAk
Most major faiths view celibacy as a virtue. When I studied theology, many texts pointed to sexuality as a distraction. It was never dismissed as unnecessary but as something that could and should be eschewed as “Earthly.” Obviously procreation of the species is critical to our survival, but those who chose not to procreate could focus on “Heavenly” endeavors.
It’s part and parcel of many meditative sects across all faiths. Christian monasteries promote meditation and overcoming urges in order to grow closer to God. Buddhists and Taoists believe the same. In any meditative practice, the idea is to focus on your breathing solely and simply dismiss or let pass Earthly thoughts. This practice leads to enlightenment, so say practitioners.
If you look at it objectively, the ability for an individual, especially a male, to dismiss sexuality in lieu of some sort of enlightenment is something that requires such discipline that most modern men would find it nary impossible. We are bombarded by sexuality in every aspect of life. I see it as virtuous to be able to commit to a life of celibacy, thus elevating true practitioners.
As someone who was but a signature away from committing to the church in my early life, it was something I prayed on with all of my heart as a teenager. I was ready to accept it as a reality and truly commit myself to the doctrinal ask of celibacy and poverty, but God had other plans for me. The fact that so many go into Catholic practice and fail to abide Paul’s disciplinary stricture doesn’t make them any less faithful. We’re all human and must beg forgiveness for our sins, but the deviancy is inexcusable. If we were talking about priests breaking their vow of celibacy with adult women, there’d be almost no recriminations. We would require them to confess their sins and recommit. The fact that they’re diddling children is the problem, in my opinion, not that they’re failing to abide their vow.
Should the Catholic church change course on their doctrine of celibacy? Personally, I don’t think so. The practice of homosexuality is a far greater sin against the word of God than breaking a code of celibacy. If I could enter the priesthood as a married man, I would, but I respect those who have chosen that life and actually abide the vow. I’ll never know those who truly do practice arch-celibacy, but I choose to respect the men who devote their life to it as truly virtuous in the eyes of God.
Yes. As is devotion to The Blessed Mother.
3 articles in a row? That kind of suggests an anti-Catholic animus.
CC
Nothing in Scripture calls for “priests” to be celibate - it was a ploy by the Church to make themselves look holier than the rest - even as it bred perversions withing the priesthood...
Waiting for some Bible cherry-picker to try to tell me I’m wrong about Scripture...
“Nothing in Scripture calls for “priests” to be celibate”
Right. Actually, Scripture says the exact opposite. It’s WRONG to forbid someone to marry. Ditto for when the RCs used to forbid eating meat on Friday
1 Timothy 4:3:, “Forbidding to marry, and commanding to abstain from meats, which God hath created to be received with thanksgiving ... “
The Roman Catholic church implemented the rule requiring all priests to remain celibate at the Second Lateran Council in 1139, less than 100 years after the great schism. Orthodoxy has always allowed, and continues to allow, married priests.
It would be wise for the Roman Catholic church to cast off this innovation and return to the the practice of the church of the first millenium.
“The First Council of Nicaea in 325 permitted married men to be ordained priests and held their marriages valid. Unmarried men entering the priesthood could not marry thereafter. Only 900 years ago, the First and Fourth Lateran Councils in 1123 and 1215 respectively, decreed clerical marriages illicit and invalid (Doherty, 2018), a ruling that continues.”
“Invoking the ritual purity of the altar, they held that as “sexual intercourse was a tainting act in Christian thought, a man should not handle the Eucharist after engaging in sex” (Wertheimer 2006, 392). This was used to spiritually elevate clerics as a class above lay Catholics, consolidating a hierarchical Church under papal power and authority (Ballano, 2023).”
“The decree was a response to stem widespread sexual debauchery and to stop clerics from the pervasive transfer of Church property to wives, children and others, given that the Church owned about one-third of all cultivated land alone in Western Europe before 900 AD.”
How Protestant Churches Hid Sexual Abuse
A History of Sex Abuse in the Protestant Imagination
Abuse in the Protestant Church
Sexual abuse also a problem in European Protestant churches
Protestant abuse history has been swept under the carpet
Data Shed Light on Child Sexual Abuse by Protestant Clergy
Protestant Churches Grapple With Growing Sexual Abuse Crisis
Evangelicals ‘worse’ than Catholics on sexual abuse
Thousands of children sexually abused by German Protestant Church: study
German Protestant churches riddled with sexual abuse and cover-ups, report finds
Many thanks for that sensible statement.
Sounds like a defense for pedo.
The church has advocated celibacy for hundreds of years. It is part of a priest’s oath to Gawd. If he can’t abide that, don’t be a Catholic.
“Most major faiths view celibacy as a virtue.”
That is a statement that cannot just be thrown out, it requires proof.
And as just one counter example, there is no tradition of clerical celibacy in Judaism, and some Orthodox Jewish sects require a Rabbi to be married. Neither in Islam is celibacy required of clerics, or anyone else, and that is true in Hinduism as well. So which “major faiths” are you speaking of.
Understand the distinction between “clerical celibacy” and just celibacy. You’re talking about doctrinal requirements. I’m talking about celibacy as a deliberate meditational practice. Most monastic faiths extol the virtues of celibacy if not outright require it.
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