Posted on 01/04/2005 2:34:33 PM PST by churchillbuff
I've never understood why Catholics believe their priests shouldn't be married. Then again, I've never understood the Catholic priest thing in the first place.
I see a dating service opportunity here ...
Does your knee show no sign of failing on you? ;o)
"I was thinking more about transferring before seminary. Or are they on to that, too? : )"
No - that can be done! However, while the Eastern Catholics can ordain married men to the diaconate in the West, in theory they are still not supposed to ordain them to the priesthood.
Having said that, if your Arabic is good and you and your wife can stand living in Syria for a few years, it is possible. (Good test of a vocation I suppose!!!)
;)
"The priests I work with are good men, but they take very few evening appointments, insisting that they need that time to "read, meditate, and prepare homilies." "
Really? Do they have floodlit golf courses in the States?
:)
That's an interesting point of view.
I just never thought of Jesus that way.
The truth is that the Church's obligation of celibacy goes back to the apostles in an “unbroken” line. And the motivation for celibacy was the closer following of Jesus Christ, who required his apostles to leave wife and family, to become soley "married" to Him and His church.
Okay. You don't believe in the doctrine of the Incarnation. I get it.
What a silly remark.
I just don't believe in some of your interpretations of that particular doctrine.
What advanced degrees do you hold in Theology, and from what source?
"homosexual, coined in 1892, solecistically combines the Greek homo with the Latin-based sexual. The word homoerotic is preferable because it combines the Greek homo with the Greek-based erotic."
oookie-dokie. If it works for you...:)
Another ROFTER! Cheers.
I'm surprised at how many people are willing to "chuck" something that they really don't understand. The arrogance of neo-Catholics (and Protestants) who don't comprehend the wisdom of the Church through the ages will never cease to amaze me.
This will help:
Excerpt from the taped interview of Fr. Malachi Martin by Bernard Janzen :The Eternal War: the Priesthood in Crisis:
(transcription by me)
"...the idea is to do away with the priesthood. The thing that really militates against the popular taste today about priesthood is celibacy. They regard nowadays, in the society in which we live, the expression of sexuality whether within marriage...outside of marriage whether by yourself or with somebody of the same sex, or with an animal is regarded as quite normal.... If you don't "frighten the horses" so to speak. Provided you don't violate any "rule of decent living".
The idea that men, young men of twenty say,..take a vow of celibacy. That they will never get married. And that they can keep that without getting twisted and psychologically moronic and finally ending up in pedophilia or sadism or in some twisted psychology. That is the normal attitude towards priests today. So the idea of Roman Catholic celibacy is something that is utterly alien to the mind.
Why? Because the idea of priesthood is. And this is where the great lack in teaching in seminaries and in the Catholic populace lies.
You see...a priest..Christ was once asked, (they pointed out a eunuch to him... a eunuch was somebody who accidentally or for some reason or another couldn't have sex. His genitals were destroyed or something.)
And somebody said to him, "Lord what do you think of the eunuch? And he said,"There are three kinds of eunuchs. There's the man who's born like that from nature." ( Deficient in other words, he hasn't got the where-with-all). "There's the one who men made a eunuch." (Because they used to castrate people to make them eunuchs because eunuchs are very useful in palaces. 'cause they wouldn't touch the women and they were very good guards. And eunuchs always developed a very great cruelty. I suppose in reaction to their mutilation. And also if you did that, the voice remained high-pitched and beautiful through teenage years. And then he said, "There is a third kind of eunuch who does it to himself for the sake of the kingdom of God. He said, very mysteriously, "whoever understands, let him understand," [Fr. Martin then quotes the phrase aloud in Latin]....meaning there is a very deep mystery.
The mystery is this: I can look on my celibacy if I am a priest, as a chastity belt. And the Church has locked it and thrown away the key. In that case then, I'm just somebody deprived of what I should have a right to by a greater force that's thrown away the key.
That's not celibacy at all. That is enforced continence.
I can look on celibacy then as something acceptable to the Church but a pain in the neck or a pain somewhere else. I still am very far from it.
The celibate is somebody who says to himself or herself (a nun), "My greatest power of love is in reproduction and in living with another human being. And in having children and in exchanging our love and warmth and friendship and confidence. And giving each other the intimacy of our very being, soul and body, which a true marriage does.
But, I will give that up because..when I become a priest, Christ puts a seal on my soul. The seal of his priesthood. And that seal cordons me off for a higher destiny. And the destiny is to have a very, very particular union with God, with Christ.
And that union is the union of somebody who is going to hold God's body in his hands at Mass. And is going to be a special emissary bringing blessing and shriving people from their sins and healing their souls. That's what true celibacy is. It's a segregation of your soul from all the lovely things in life that human love can bring and marriage can bring.
By the way, Look. It also has its ills and its difficulties but in general, it's regarded as a great benefit to be married. Or to live with somebody as we do nowadays. [sarcasm from Fr. Martin]
But to cut that off deliberately and to do it lovingly and to make it a positive contribution, and to devote all the energies that nature has given us for human love... to devote them to Christ. And to concentrate all that on..the Sacrifice of Christ and the preaching of his Gospel and the transmission of his message of love and salvation to souls and healing them and shriving them and helping them supporting them guiding them and welcoming them to the truth. That is the highest vocation a man can have.
Similarly with a nun who takes a vow of chastity. The same thing, She says to herself, "I'm going to imitate Our Lady, who is a virgin. who is the Mother of God. I'm going to have spiritual children and most of Our Lady's children are spiritual. (She had only one child of her own who was called Jesus.) But, I'm going to have those children by my prayers and by my identity with the great mother: The Mother of God.
And I'm going to do all that by renouncing this: Not because it's ill or bad. It's not bad, It's good. God made it. It's good, he said, 'Increase and multiply, love each other, be one flesh. It's a sacrament in the New Covenant. But I'm going to renounce that because I'm going to have a greater identification with Our Lady because God is calling me to that. And all the love and sympathy and empathy and the perceptiveness of love, I'm going to transfer that to Our Lady and Our Lord. And I'm going to make that my special sacrifice."
And in the beginning it is a sacrifice. And then, with the passage of time and fidelity, suddenly...this flower blooms in their souls.
And they achieve this marvelous tranquility and this marvelous warmth that people always saw in the traditional priest. This amazing power to get inside you. This light, this feeling that they were there for you. They weren't riven in their sympathies. And they were there for you because Christ was their man, Christ was their King, Christ was their High Priest. That idea of priesthood....you won't find that anywhere today in Catholic manuals or preached in sermons or anything like that. Celibacy is regarded as...like Fish on Friday , a law we want to change and do away with."
Yep. My g'grandaddy was a bishop! (not kidding)
Thanks for posting this. :^)
Catholic authorities will run the Catholic Church without the uninformed opinions of outsiders. If Western societies were obsessed with theft or murder, should we encourage thievery and murder among the clergy?
To vindicate the parable of the workers and the vineyard?
Very nice. Thanks.
Another consideration favoring the admission to the priesthood of those non-Catholic clergy who are married upon conversion to Catholicism is that it would be quite unjust to the clergyman's wife to suggest that divorce should be his path to the Catholic priesthood but not at all unjust to require him not to remarry if she should die (which also is a requirement of the permanent diaconate, is it not?). I suspect that the RCC would similarly admit Orthodox married clergy. Perhaps, the provision should extend to those of other Christian religions. Marcus Grodi, Gerry Matatics (at least years ago when my wife and I were acquainted with him), and some of the other converts from Presbyterianism would probably make first class priests. Obviously we are not going to admit women clergy from any of those Churches, as Pope John Paul II has definitively ruled.
The world ought conform to us and not vice versa.
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