Posted on 06/28/2002 3:54:40 PM PDT by Lady In Blue
A priest was recently asked about priestly celibacy on a network television program.Sad to say, he responded by nonchalantly stating that the celibacy requirement for priests was only instituted about 800 years ago - "to keep property out of the hands of family heirs."
If that were true, celibacy would be worse than wrong.
Why a cleric with virtually no critical competence should have been called on as a "spokesman" for the Church can only be explained by the network. The man himself made things worse by his off-handedness.
The history of celibacy, as it has been subject to intense scholarly review in recent years, does not deserve glib treatment.Rather, it deserves the kind of thoughtful reflection it receives in Priestly Identity:A Study in the Theology of Priesthood by Opus Dei Father Thomas McGovern.
Published by Four Courts Press in Dublin, this work presents a deft response to shallow perception.It follows Father McGovern's previous, equally worthwhile Four Courts book, 1998's Priestly Celibacy Today,which was similarly mindful of celibacy as a charism.
A close reading of the new work will do much to enlighten the faithful on the true nature of priestly identity - an understanding of which is essential for any who would speak out on priestly celibacy.
INDIVISIBLE IDENTITY
Recent crises in the Catholic priesthood have provoked hostile demands for restructuring. Many of these calls are notable only for their lack of understanding about what a priest is and why Christ instituted the priesthood the way he did.Father McGovern explains the big picture in clear language, paying close attention to detail.
The romantic utopianism that animated many naive churchmen in the period of Vatican 11 was sorely dashed by the volcanice eruption of defections from the priesthood and the decline in vocations, especially in the West. The author writes from Ireland, which has experienced the sharpest rate of decline in the number of seminarians in all of Europe.
Papal teaching since Vatican 11 will be as highly regarded in future generations as it has been ignored in our time.That neglect is in part accountable for the moral disarray around us. Yet people continue to look to their priests and have even become almost presbyterian in their support for faithful priests - and their frustration with an episcopate that has become, in popular opinion,excited by the secular media:a symbol of clerlicalism impeding priestly life. A high theology of the priesthood cannot be separated from a high theology of the episcopate that embodies the fullness of the priesthood. Such theology cannot breathe if the priesthood degenerates into a bureaucratic caste.
Father McGovern recovers the essence of such seminal documents as Pope John Paul 11's 1992 apostolic exhortation Pastores Dabo Vobis(On the Formation of Priests in the Circumstance of the Present Day)to explain what the Church means by the man ordained for others.He divides his analysis into three sections that parallel,perhaps by a happy intuition of grace,the Father,Son and Holy Spirit:His account of the priestly life is in terms theological, spiritual and pastoral.As the Holy Trinity is undivided, so can these aspects of priestly life be isolated one from the other only at the price of priestly integrity.
Most people know their priests from their words at the altar, in the confessional and behind the pulpit. And, indeed,all other aspects of the priest's work flow from these places.Josef Pieper said that the crisis in priestly indentity is rooted in a defective faith in the sacrifice of the Mass. Father McGovern is very practical in describing what has happened to the liturgy,preaching and spiritual direction, profiling a priesthood that transcends "democratic" and "autocratic "models alike.
It is not impious to say that papal documents generally lack popular diction. Apologists exist to popularize them;good apologists render them in the vernacular without abusing them. The McGovern book, not prodigal with words,would be valuable if only for its bibliography. This cites not only the expected conciliar documents and classical sources, but also the likes of such popular popularizers as Joseph Pierce, Catherine Pickstock, Wanda Poltawska, Malcolm Muggeridge, John Saward, Janet Smith, Eamon Duffy, Alec Guiness and Aidan Nichols.
GIFT AND MYSTERY
Soul-numbing mistakes have been made in the liturgy and seminary formation. Even earnest churchmen invested so much of themselves in those miscalculations that, in their sunset years,they cannot admit the essential defects in their dated enthusiasms. Meanwhile saintly modern examples of priestliness have been undercut by a failure to correct bad examples.
A notorious instance was the 1982 visitation of seminaries in the United States,whose failure has only now been acknowledged. A new generation has appeared for whom all that is a curious history. Its members need good guides.What Father McGovern writes could not be more timely.
The ranting of Pharisees in the press is a warning of how much ignorance fuels a hatred of the priesthood which, as one French historian wrote of the Revolution of 1789,is the oldest animus in Western civilation.With prescience - if understatement,in light of the present crisis - Father McGovern says:"One cannot help feeling at times that the active prosecution of failure in celibacy by the media is another way of attacking the Church's stand on sexual morality by trying to show it to be self-contradictory."
As the priesthood is Christ's gift to the Church to enable the Church to be the Church and given the confusion over the priesthood in our time, Priestly Identity should be required reading for lay faithful as as priests.
I'll bet that it was that heretic McBrien. Although, unfortunately, there are many candidates who could have said it.
Posted on 08/16/2002 5:53 AM Pacific by WriteOn
Ad Majorem Dei Gloriam (To the Greater Glory of God)
For: Friday, August 16, 2002
19th Week in Ordinary Time
Optional Memorial: St. Stephen of Hungary
From: Matthew 19:3-12
Marriage and Virginity ---------------------- [3] And Pharisees came up to Him (Jesus) and tested Him by asking, "Is it lawful to divorce one's wife for any cause?" [4] He answered, "Have you not read that He who made them from the beginning made them male and female, [5] and said, `For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one'? [6] So they are no longer two but one. What therefore God has joined together, let no man put asunder." [7] They said to Him, "Why then did Moses command one to give a certificate of divorce, and to put her away?" [8] He said to them, "For your hardness of heart Moses allowed you to divorce your wives, but from the beginning it was not so. [9] And I say to you: whoever divorces his wife, except for unchastity, and marries another, commits adultery; and he who marries a divorced woman commits adultery."
[10] The disciples said to Him, "If such is the case of a man with his wife, it is not expedient to marry." [11] But He said to them, "Not all men can receive this precept, but only those to whom it is given. [12] For there are eunuchs who have been so from birth, and there are eunuchs who have been made eunuchs by men, and there are eunuchs who have made themselves eunuchs for the sake of the Kingdom of Heaven. He who is able to receive this, let him receive it."
***********************************************************************
Commentary:
4-5. "Marriage and married love are by nature ordered to the procreation and education of children. Indeed children are the supreme gift of marriage and greatly contribute to the good of the parents themselves. God Himself said: `It is not good that man should be alone' (Genesis 2:18), and `from the beginning (He) made them male and female' (Matthew 19:4); wishing to associate them in a special way with his own creative work, God blessed man and woman with the words: `Be fruitful and multiply' (Genesis 1:28). Without intending to underestimate the other ends of marriage, it must be said that true married life and the whole structure of family life which results from it is directed to disposing the spouses to cooperate valiantly with the love of the Creator and Savior, who through them will increase and enrich His family from day to day" (Vatican II, "Gaudium Et Spes", 50).
9. Our Lord's teaching on the unity and indissolubility of marriage is the main theme of this passage, apropos of which St. John Chrysostom comments that marriage is a lifelong union of man and woman (cf. "Hom. on St. Matthew", 62). On the meaning of "except for unchastity", see the note on Matthew 5:31-32).
11. "Not all men can receive this precept": our Lord is fully aware that the demands involved in His teaching on marriage and His recommendation of celibacy practised out of love of God run counter to human selfishness. That is why He says that acceptance of this teaching is a gift from God.
12. Our Lord speaks figuratively here, referring to those who, out of love for Him, renounce marriage and offer their lives completely to Him. Virginity embraced for the love of God is one of the Church's most precious charisms (cf. 1 Corinthians 7); the lives of those who practise virginity evoke the state of the blessed in Heaven, who are like the angels (cf. Matthew 22:30). This is why the Church's Magisterium teaches that the state of virginity for the sake of the Kingdom of Heaven is higher than the married state (cf. Council of Trent, "De Sacram. Matr.", can. 10; cf. also Pius XII, "Sacra Virginitas"). On virginity and celibacy the Second Vatican Council teaches: "The Church's holiness is also fostered in a special way by the manifold counsels which the Lord proposes to His disciples in the Gospel for them to observe. Towering among these counsels is that precious gift of divine grace given to some by the Father (cf. Matthew 19:11; 1 Corinthians 7:7) to devote themselves to God alone more easily in virginity or celibacy [...]. This perfect continence for love of the Kingdom of Heaven has always been held in high esteem by the Church as a sign and stimulus of love, and as a singular source of spiritual fertility in the world" ("Lumen Gentium", 42; cf. "Perfectae Caritatis", 12). And, on celibacy specifically, see Vatican II's "Presbyterorum Ordinis", 16 and "Optatam Totius", 10.
However, both virginity and marriage are necessary for the growth of the Church, and both imply a specific calling from God: "Celibacy is precisely a gift of the Spirit. A similar though different gift is contained in the vocation to true and faithful married love, directed towards procreation according to the flesh, in the very lofty context of the sacrament of Matrimony. It is obvious that this gift is fundamental for the building up of the great community of the Church, the people of God. But if this community wishes to respond fully to its vocation in Jesus Christ, there will also have to be realized in it, in the correct proportion, that other gift, the gift of celibacy `for the sake of the Kingdom of Heaven'" (John Paul II, "Letter To All Priests", 1979).
*********************************************************************** Source: "The Navarre Bible: Text and Commentaries". Biblical text taken from the Revised Standard Version and New Vulgate. Commentaries made by members of the Faculty of Theology of the University of Navarre, Spain. Published by Four Courts Press, Kill Lane, Blackrock, Co. Dublin, Ireland.
Reprinted with permission from Four Courts Press and Scepter Publishers, the U.S. publisher (see below).
"The Navarre Bible: Text and Commentaries" are currently limited to the New Testament and Pentateuch (the first 5 books of the Old Testament) books only.
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