THE CELIBATE JESUS AND PRIESTLY CELIBACY
Fr.Mervyn Carapiet
A Square Peg
Some of Jesus’ teachings and habits - his prohibition of divorce, his rejection of showy fasting, his voluntary celibacy - did not square with the beliefs and practices of the major Jewish religious groups of his day. Had Jesus married, he would quite comfortably have floated on the cultural mainstream. As a working adolescent, he would easily have found a bride to his taste and earned the acclamation of the neighbours. And Jesus was surely not unaware of the tradition that expected every Jewish male to sire a legitimate son by the time he was 18 years of age. As an itinerant preacher, he enjoyed himself at wedding celebrations. Some of his parables were about the bridegroom, weddings guests, and bridesmaids - all painted in bright positive colours. Jesus saw sexuality and marriage as blessings given to humanity by a gracious Creator concerned with man’s happiness. Yet it is historically certain that Jesus chose to remain celibate, thereby going against what would have been unthinkable in his time.
Family Circumstances
It is worth noting that the New Testament is quite loud about Jesus’ familial circumstances. The story of his conception and birth brings into play a lot of family ties and lines running up and down the family tree. (A few of his ancestors were scoundrels and prostitutes !). Apart from his mother and her paradoxical marriage to Joseph the craftsman (“tekton” in Greek), a lot of gospel coverage is given to “his brothers and sisters.” Indeed, from the various statements of Mark, Luke, John, Paul, and Acts, we learn about Mary, the mother of Jesus, about his thought-to-be father, Joseph, about his four brothers named James, Joses, Jude, and Simon, and about his unnamed sisters.
The second century Jewish-Christian writer, Hegesippus, mentions Clophas, an uncle of Jesus, and Symeon, a cousin. The gospel story also pulls in a lot of characters with family connections, who figure in Jesus’ public ministry: Mary Magdalene, Joana, the wife of Chuza, steward of Herod, Susanna, Mary, the mother of James the Less and Joses, Salome, and the mother of the sons of Zebedee, and, last but not least, Martha and Mary, the lady friends ! With so many familial characters thrown around him, like flowers in a garland, what prevented the gospels from popping in the name of a wife, if any ? The loquacity of the New Testament about the one raises the question regarding the silence about the other; the answer to which is quite simply, there wasn’t any other ! If Jesus had married, the gospel writer would have hurried to throw in the last piece and completed the family snapshot with grace and ease ! But the total silence about a wife and children of Jesus, named or unnamed, has an obvious explanation: none existed.
Family Opposition and Loyalty
Jesus’ mother, brothers and sisters survived into the period of his public ministry, though not without tension between them and him - they thought him crazy (John 7,5); or that Jesus refused to meet with them (Mark 3, 31 – 35). If Jesus had a wife, where was she in all this ? Did she resist the family opposition, like a loyal wife, or ditch him to go over to their side ? His resurrection, however, demolished the family opposition; otherwise how explain that his brother James became a prominent leader of the Jerusalem church, with other family members following on ? How is it that the gospel says that some of his disciples left their wives and children to follow him, while never speaking of that precise sacrifice in his own
case ? The answer, quite simply, is that he had made an earlier and more radical sacrifice.
The Celibacy Option
In the face of all the information about members of Jesus’ family, the total silence about a wife or children is best taken as indicating that Jesus chose the highly unusual, but not unknown, path of celibacy. It was not that he was puritanical, if one remembers how he railed against the puritanical customs of the Jews. Jesus’ celibacy was not a rejection of but a tribute to marriage. He refrained constructively from that one-to-one relationship inasmuch as he went to the heart of it, namely, to the essence of self-giving and surrender to God at the service of humanity. If, indeed, marriage is not the building of community in God, it is nothing. This is the ultimate reality of which marriage is one of the perceptible signs. Jesus Christ engaged the heart of reality; he could do without the sign.
Interiority
Interiority was his intent and goal. Christ accomplished the requirements of traditional rules, not by multiplying obligations but by calling attention to the dispositions from which unlawful behaviour derives. According to him, it was not enough to exclude adultery as long as the underlying lustful mentality remains intact. Nor must murder only be done away with but much more the contempt and cruelty that find expression equally in words of hatred and derision. Immoderate revenge is not the basic evil but rather the malice of vindictiveness itself.
Jesus did not exhaust the several potentialities of human nature, taken discretely. This would have been impossible in one historical lifetime. For instance, he was not a great painter or philosopher or a statesman or a great husband. We must admit, though, that he was a teacher par excellence, combining in that activity a great amount of true art and poetry. The point is that Jesus concentrated in himself all the power and energy that human nature is capable of for energising any of the avocations that a man/woman may choose, and he concentrated it to a degree so high as to make it fit to be used by God. This power was the power of his self-sacrificing love at the service of the Word. Thus, in preference to all other possibilities, Jesus chose the underlying and most distinctively human potentiality of all, the one that has the most radical claim on all men and women: self-surrendering love.
Celibacy, a Tribute to Marriage
The Catholic priest’s celibacy is continuous with Jesus’ in essence and intent. It is not a denial of but a tribute to marriage in terms of self-sacrificing love and openness to humanity. “From the beginning” God gave Adam and Eve their sexed individuality so that, in becoming one, they might overcome their essential incompleteness and come into existence as the one essence intended by God. Our sexuality reveals to us, however imperfectly, that the Creator lives in self-giving communion. The experience of communion between woman and man, without either’s dominance, is more like the inner life of God than anything else we encounter in creation, the closest that any human experience can attain. Way back as a young priest, Fr. Karol Wotjtyla, now Pope John Paul II, understood celibacy in the light of marriage, the sacrament by which the Creator reveals to us the communion of his own nature. (cfr. Michael Novak, “Body and Soul”, in The Tablet, 10 February 2001, pg. 184). This is the love that breathes life into the woman or the man who commit their lives, for that kingdom of heaven’s sake, to celibacy. Marriage and celibacy are two flames of the same love energy working for the good of the neighbour. Both loves, matrimonial and celibate, are embarked on a life-long project to integrate the baffling and difficult-to-mollify reality known as sex in order to build a new and harmonious world.
Pragmatic Emergence
One need not deny that economic considerations were as influential as the spiritual for the emergence of clerical celibacy in the Latin church. In mid-eleventh century, political power and economic solvency in Europe depended on ownership of land. The freedom of the church, a much-needed cachet in the time of a weak papacy, was based similarly on land holdings. If the practice of priestly marriage had been permitted to continue unabated, all ecclesiastical lands would have been alienated to new landed families, and the church would have been bereft of “freedom”. In terms of the 11th. century life in the West, the imposition of celibacy would have made good sense. The other reason that made celibacy the nobler status vis-à-vis marriage arose from the dim view of sex in the church. Professor Edward Schillebeeckx has shown in his book, Ministry, how the obligation of complete continence for priests emerged from the requirement of abstinence from sexual intercourse the night before the celebration of the Eucharist. Poised on these two historical premises, it would be easy to impugn the law of celibacy. Besides, if celibacy is a charism, the church law about it is apparently unjust, it being understood that charism cancels law, “vide” the liberated (i.e. charismatic) behaviour of Jesus Christ and St. Paul’s letter to the Galatians.
Beyond Pragmatism
There is a wisdom in being historical, provided one avoids slipping into a time warp produced by a few facts. A time warp is a fixation that chokes developmental thinking. There is greater wisdom in Scripture, provided again one does not tie himself down to a few texts, thereby ignoring the life of an ever-flowering community. Nowhere does the church pin its teaching on celibacy solely on a few texts of Scripture, but rather on the dynamic evolution of its own life and activity in which the principle of historicity is an operative factor. Not all men and women can take in the demand of life-long continence, but only certain people, among whom are priests and vowed religious. And why cannot the Holy Spirit work through the church’s historical circumstances (two of which were mentioned above) in order to lead the Christian people to a perception of higher values for a nobler cause? Prayer for the gift of celibacy blends compliantly with the designs of spiritual development, and if quoting Scripture enriches the tapestry, one could weave in the thread from St. Paul, “So with you, as one eager to have spiritual powers, aim to be rich on those which build up the community” (1 Cor. 14, 12). This text corrects any pretension to taper off the vocation to celibacy to make it seem like an incapacity for marriage. Quite the contrary, the sexless celibate, untouched by emotional warmth, is as much a caricature as the grim-faced battlers against the flesh, who parade their depression like a hard won trophy.
Internalisation and Witness
It is true that celibacy is a law for the Latin church, but like any other law that touches us deeply, it can be internalised, even though the process is painful and fraught with faltering. This is a feature of growth, and celibacy is interminable growth in the positive values of self-sacrificing love, which transcends legislation. Any life decision consists in engaging a definite option, which implies cutting oneself away from other options. “Doing without” is the mark of a mature avocation, and celibacy (without tears !) is the deed and sign manual of a Roman Catholic priest.
Our society is obsessed with sex (not the same as sexuality), but it is not well informed about it. We are only approaching the low foothills in our appreciation of the mystery of sexuality into our personality. It is not celibacy that causes hurt but the inappropriate uses of sexuality. A celibacy that is sincerely lived, and not merely endured, makes a powerful counter-cultural statement in today’s society that trivialises human relationships and revels in conspicuous self-indulgence. The witness of a person who is celibate by vocation and choice, and whose life is marked by meaningful relationships and constructive service, is a robust support for people who struggle to discover a sense of their own worth and dignity. They see in such a person one who relies on God’s merciful providence and who is in touch with the living streams of his deeper self. In such a person they can discern an inner freedom and respect for others that enable him to discover and share life through loving and wholesome relationships with a variety of people. And what is attractive is that this generativity takes place without the benefit of marriage or genital sexual activity.
The effects of original sin are alive and well in all of us. At the same time our baptismal commitment invites us to make moral choices which are increasingly life-giving and motivated by love
The trainee priest should be helped to understand that the law is only an introduction to a special art of loving, that celibacy is not a depreciation of but a tribute to conjugal love, and that he is in the process of assessing himself in terms of the readiness to offer God the gift of his sexuality as an act of voluntary poverty. The real issue for us is maturity and integrity, not sexual orientation. It is vital that future priests are able to relate at real depth to a wide range of people. Bishop Peter Smith of East Anglia says, “The key issue is not orientation, but whether an individual is mature and able to make the free decision to live a chaste and celibate life which is the norm for Catholic priests.” (The Tablet, 12 May 2001, pg. 711)
Writers of books and article on this topic are putting their readers on the spot and contributing to the expanding discussion on the topic. Development is unavoidable, since we believe that the Spirit is allied to the historicity of a living community. Whether it will take the form of a deepening of the value of celibacy or its adaptive accommodation to changing circumstances and variegated cultures, (and cultures need correction, too), only God’s good time will tell.
Feast St. Thomas, Apostle
2001.
Fr.Mervyn Carapiet
A Square Peg
Some of Jesus’ teachings and habits - his prohibition of divorce, his rejection of showy fasting, his voluntary celibacy - did not square with the beliefs and practices of the major Jewish religious groups of his day. Had Jesus married, he would quite comfortably have floated on the cultural mainstream. As a working adolescent, he would easily have found a bride to his taste and earned the acclamation of the neighbours. And Jesus was surely not unaware of the tradition that expected every Jewish male to sire a legitimate son by the time he was 18 years of age. As an itinerant preacher, he enjoyed himself at wedding celebrations. Some of his parables were about the bridegroom, weddings guests, and bridesmaids - all painted in bright positive colours. Jesus saw sexuality and marriage as blessings given to humanity by a gracious Creator concerned with man’s happiness. Yet it is historically certain that Jesus chose to remain celibate, thereby going against what would have been unthinkable in his time.
Family Circumstances
It is worth noting that the New Testament is quite loud about Jesus’ familial circumstances. The story of his conception and birth brings into play a lot of family ties and lines running up and down the family tree. (A few of his ancestors were scoundrels and prostitutes !). Apart from his mother and her paradoxical marriage to Joseph the craftsman (“tekton” in Greek), a lot of gospel coverage is given to “his brothers and sisters.” Indeed, from the various statements of Mark, Luke, John, Paul, and Acts, we learn about Mary, the mother of Jesus, about his thought-to-be father, Joseph, about his four brothers named James, Joses, Jude, and Simon, and about his unnamed sisters.
The second century Jewish-Christian writer, Hegesippus, mentions Clophas, an uncle of Jesus, and Symeon, a cousin. The gospel story also pulls in a lot of characters with family connections, who figure in Jesus’ public ministry: Mary Magdalene, Joana, the wife of Chuza, steward of Herod, Susanna, Mary, the mother of James the Less and Joses, Salome, and the mother of the sons of Zebedee, and, last but not least, Martha and Mary, the lady friends ! With so many familial characters thrown around him, like flowers in a garland, what prevented the gospels from popping in the name of a wife, if any ? The loquacity of the New Testament about the one raises the question regarding the silence about the other; the answer to which is quite simply, there wasn’t any other ! If Jesus had married, the gospel writer would have hurried to throw in the last piece and completed the family snapshot with grace and ease ! But the total silence about a wife and children of Jesus, named or unnamed, has an obvious explanation: none existed.
Family Opposition and Loyalty
Jesus’ mother, brothers and sisters survived into the period of his public ministry, though not without tension between them and him - they thought him crazy (John 7,5); or that Jesus refused to meet with them (Mark 3, 31 – 35). If Jesus had a wife, where was she in all this ? Did she resist the family opposition, like a loyal wife, or ditch him to go over to their side ? His resurrection, however, demolished the family opposition; otherwise how explain that his brother James became a prominent leader of the Jerusalem church, with other family members following on ? How is it that the gospel says that some of his disciples left their wives and children to follow him, while never speaking of that precise sacrifice in his own
case ? The answer, quite simply, is that he had made an earlier and more radical sacrifice.
The Celibacy Option
In the face of all the information about members of Jesus’ family, the total silence about a wife or children is best taken as indicating that Jesus chose the highly unusual, but not unknown, path of celibacy. It was not that he was puritanical, if one remembers how he railed against the puritanical customs of the Jews. Jesus’ celibacy was not a rejection of but a tribute to marriage. He refrained constructively from that one-to-one relationship inasmuch as he went to the heart of it, namely, to the essence of self-giving and surrender to God at the service of humanity. If, indeed, marriage is not the building of community in God, it is nothing. This is the ultimate reality of which marriage is one of the perceptible signs. Jesus Christ engaged the heart of reality; he could do without the sign.
Interiority
Interiority was his intent and goal. Christ accomplished the requirements of traditional rules, not by multiplying obligations but by calling attention to the dispositions from which unlawful behaviour derives. According to him, it was not enough to exclude adultery as long as the underlying lustful mentality remains intact. Nor must murder only be done away with but much more the contempt and cruelty that find expression equally in words of hatred and derision. Immoderate revenge is not the basic evil but rather the malice of vindictiveness itself.
Jesus did not exhaust the several potentialities of human nature, taken discretely. This would have been impossible in one historical lifetime. For instance, he was not a great painter or philosopher or a statesman or a great husband. We must admit, though, that he was a teacher par excellence, combining in that activity a great amount of true art and poetry. The point is that Jesus concentrated in himself all the power and energy that human nature is capable of for energising any of the avocations that a man/woman may choose, and he concentrated it to a degree so high as to make it fit to be used by God. This power was the power of his self-sacrificing love at the service of the Word. Thus, in preference to all other possibilities, Jesus chose the underlying and most distinctively human potentiality of all, the one that has the most radical claim on all men and women: self-surrendering love.
Celibacy, a Tribute to Marriage
The Catholic priest’s celibacy is continuous with Jesus’ in essence and intent. It is not a denial of but a tribute to marriage in terms of self-sacrificing love and openness to humanity. “From the beginning” God gave Adam and Eve their sexed individuality so that, in becoming one, they might overcome their essential incompleteness and come into existence as the one essence intended by God. Our sexuality reveals to us, however imperfectly, that the Creator lives in self-giving communion. The experience of communion between woman and man, without either’s dominance, is more like the inner life of God than anything else we encounter in creation, the closest that any human experience can attain. Way back as a young priest, Fr. Karol Wotjtyla, now Pope John Paul II, understood celibacy in the light of marriage, the sacrament by which the Creator reveals to us the communion of his own nature. (cfr. Michael Novak, “Body and Soul”, in The Tablet, 10 February 2001, pg. 184). This is the love that breathes life into the woman or the man who commit their lives, for that kingdom of heaven’s sake, to celibacy. Marriage and celibacy are two flames of the same love energy working for the good of the neighbour. Both loves, matrimonial and celibate, are embarked on a life-long project to integrate the baffling and difficult-to-mollify reality known as sex in order to build a new and harmonious world.
Pragmatic Emergence
One need not deny that economic considerations were as influential as the spiritual for the emergence of clerical celibacy in the Latin church. In mid-eleventh century, political power and economic solvency in Europe depended on ownership of land. The freedom of the church, a much-needed cachet in the time of a weak papacy, was based similarly on land holdings. If the practice of priestly marriage had been permitted to continue unabated, all ecclesiastical lands would have been alienated to new landed families, and the church would have been bereft of “freedom”. In terms of the 11th. century life in the West, the imposition of celibacy would have made good sense. The other reason that made celibacy the nobler status vis-à-vis marriage arose from the dim view of sex in the church. Professor Edward Schillebeeckx has shown in his book, Ministry, how the obligation of complete continence for priests emerged from the requirement of abstinence from sexual intercourse the night before the celebration of the Eucharist. Poised on these two historical premises, it would be easy to impugn the law of celibacy. Besides, if celibacy is a charism, the church law about it is apparently unjust, it being understood that charism cancels law, “vide” the liberated (i.e. charismatic) behaviour of Jesus Christ and St. Paul’s letter to the Galatians.
Beyond Pragmatism
There is a wisdom in being historical, provided one avoids slipping into a time warp produced by a few facts. A time warp is a fixation that chokes developmental thinking. There is greater wisdom in Scripture, provided again one does not tie himself down to a few texts, thereby ignoring the life of an ever-flowering community. Nowhere does the church pin its teaching on celibacy solely on a few texts of Scripture, but rather on the dynamic evolution of its own life and activity in which the principle of historicity is an operative factor. Not all men and women can take in the demand of life-long continence, but only certain people, among whom are priests and vowed religious. And why cannot the Holy Spirit work through the church’s historical circumstances (two of which were mentioned above) in order to lead the Christian people to a perception of higher values for a nobler cause? Prayer for the gift of celibacy blends compliantly with the designs of spiritual development, and if quoting Scripture enriches the tapestry, one could weave in the thread from St. Paul, “So with you, as one eager to have spiritual powers, aim to be rich on those which build up the community” (1 Cor. 14, 12). This text corrects any pretension to taper off the vocation to celibacy to make it seem like an incapacity for marriage. Quite the contrary, the sexless celibate, untouched by emotional warmth, is as much a caricature as the grim-faced battlers against the flesh, who parade their depression like a hard won trophy.
Internalisation and Witness
It is true that celibacy is a law for the Latin church, but like any other law that touches us deeply, it can be internalised, even though the process is painful and fraught with faltering. This is a feature of growth, and celibacy is interminable growth in the positive values of self-sacrificing love, which transcends legislation. Any life decision consists in engaging a definite option, which implies cutting oneself away from other options. “Doing without” is the mark of a mature avocation, and celibacy (without tears !) is the deed and sign manual of a Roman Catholic priest.
Our society is obsessed with sex (not the same as sexuality), but it is not well informed about it. We are only approaching the low foothills in our appreciation of the mystery of sexuality into our personality. It is not celibacy that causes hurt but the inappropriate uses of sexuality. A celibacy that is sincerely lived, and not merely endured, makes a powerful counter-cultural statement in today’s society that trivialises human relationships and revels in conspicuous self-indulgence. The witness of a person who is celibate by vocation and choice, and whose life is marked by meaningful relationships and constructive service, is a robust support for people who struggle to discover a sense of their own worth and dignity. They see in such a person one who relies on God’s merciful providence and who is in touch with the living streams of his deeper self. In such a person they can discern an inner freedom and respect for others that enable him to discover and share life through loving and wholesome relationships with a variety of people. And what is attractive is that this generativity takes place without the benefit of marriage or genital sexual activity.
The effects of original sin are alive and well in all of us. At the same time our baptismal commitment invites us to make moral choices which are increasingly life-giving and motivated by love
The trainee priest should be helped to understand that the law is only an introduction to a special art of loving, that celibacy is not a depreciation of but a tribute to conjugal love, and that he is in the process of assessing himself in terms of the readiness to offer God the gift of his sexuality as an act of voluntary poverty. The real issue for us is maturity and integrity, not sexual orientation. It is vital that future priests are able to relate at real depth to a wide range of people. Bishop Peter Smith of East Anglia says, “The key issue is not orientation, but whether an individual is mature and able to make the free decision to live a chaste and celibate life which is the norm for Catholic priests.” (The Tablet, 12 May 2001, pg. 711)
Writers of books and article on this topic are putting their readers on the spot and contributing to the expanding discussion on the topic. Development is unavoidable, since we believe that the Spirit is allied to the historicity of a living community. Whether it will take the form of a deepening of the value of celibacy or its adaptive accommodation to changing circumstances and variegated cultures, (and cultures need correction, too), only God’s good time will tell.
Feast St. Thomas, Apostle
2001.
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