As America’s Catholic bishops convene in Dallas to reform the church’s rules for handling sex abuse cases involving pedophile priests, there looms ominously in the air broader questions about the sexual integrity of Catholic priests in general and the possible harm being done unwittingly to them by the church’s system of mandatory celibacy. Priests who conscientiously strive to live celibately, while lacking the psychological capacity for it, may be endangering themselves and others.
Having lived celibately as a Jesuit during the prime years of my life (from 22 to 37 years of age), I can attest personally to the hazardous effects of obligatory celibacy. The 15 years of my celibate existence didn’t turn me into a pedophile, but as a lifestyle it hardly conduced to the wholesome integration of my sexuality. When I entered the Jesuit novitiate in 1972, I learned from the outset that sexual repression was the unspoken rule. My sexual feelings, even my natural desire to be a husband and father, represented a threat to my priestly vocation, a temptation which I needed to resist and overcome. Whenever my sexual feelings were stirred, I either whipped myself with the rope “discipline” I had received or plunged myself into icy cold showers, all with my novice-master’s blessing. Only many years later did I realize that God did not will for me to do this kind of violence to myself.
If the eroded confidence in the church’s ordained leaders is to be restored, the sexual integrity of its priests and bishops need to be made plainly manifest. Priests who have received the gift of celibacy, and who creatively and responsibly exercise that gift, do not demonize their sexuality but celebrate it. Their sexual feelings and needs are openly faced, integrated and appropriately expressed. They voluntarily choose to be sexually abstinent, not because it is required of them by some external authority, but because that is the way they desire to order their lives and relationships. Subsequently, they do not feel deprived but consistently fulfilled in their personal and spiritual life and function fully and effectively in their ministerial work. If all priests felt this way, or at least recognized within themselves the potential to feel this way and the burning desire to actualize that potential, obligatory celibacy would not be an issue.
The problem is that few priests really experience their celibacy in this healthy and life-enhancing way. For many, their celibate way of life is not inherently constitutive to who they are but is merely reflective of a law imposed upon them from outside their true selves to which they conform. For them, to affirm, celebrate and responsibly exercise their sexuality would naturally lead them into a loving marriage. Since this choice is not an option, many priests either repress their sexuality and perilously arrest their psycho-sexual development at considerable risk to themselves and others, or they act out their sexuality in ways that are less forthright and honorable.
There survives from the early church a legendary story of a famous Egyptian monk-bishop named Paphnutius who participated in the church’s first ecumenical council (Council of Nicaea, A.D. 325). When a proposal to impose mandatory celibacy on all the church’s clergy was being advanced among the Episcopal assembly, Paphnutius reportedly stood up and proclaimed with a strong voice, “too heavy a yoke ought not to be laid upon the clergy, marriage and married intercourse are of themselves honorable and undefiled; and the church would be harmed by such extreme severity, for all could not live in absolute continence.” Paphnutius spoke with such persuasive power that the entire assembly voted unanimously to reject the proposed law and respect the freedom of the clergy to decide for themselves whether celibacy or married love best sustained them in their ministry.
Although the story may be apocryphal, it reflects a perspective among certain Christians in the early church whose prophetic wisdom, like an idea whose time has come, is unfolding in our midst. Paphnutius’ ancient voice of warning reverberates today with remarkable resonance. It is not enough for the church’s bishops to protect children from pedophile priests and improve their handling of sex abuse cases. Such reforms are only part of the solution to the deeper crisis of confidence gripping the church. The most daring challenge facing the bishops is to rethink and restructure a clerical system which harmfully imposes life-long celibacy on many of its good and holy priests.
