Although the Roman Catholic Church has regained much of the influence and prestige that it previously enjoyed during the Dark Ages, it nevertheless has encountered many 20th-century controversies that have been extremely vexing. One of the most pressing and scandalous problems is the issue of sexual misconduct by priests and child abuse. From ancient times, the Catholic Church has promulgated the celibacy of priests, a doctrine that is not upheld by scripture, but has been firmly maintained over the years.
Protestant attacks on priestly celibacy come in a number of different forms—not all compatible with one another. There is almost no other subject about which so many different confusions exist. The first and most basic confusion is thinking of priestly celibacy as a dogma or doctrine—a central and irreformable part of the faith, believed by Catholics to come from Jesus and the apostles. Thus some Protestants make a great deal of a biblical reference to Peter’s mother-in-law (Mark 1:30), apparently supposing that, if Catholics only knew that Peter had been married, they would be unable to regard him as the first pope. Again, Protestant time lines of “Catholic inventions” assign “mandatory priestly celibacy” to this or that year in Church history, as if prior to this requirement the Church could not have been Catholic. These Protestants are often surprised to learn that even today celibacy is not the rule for all Catholic priests. In fact, for Eastern Rite Catholics, married priests are the norm, just as they are for Orthodox and Oriental Christians. Even in the Eastern churches, though, there have always been some restrictions on marriage and ordination. Although married men may become priests, unmarried priests may not marry; and married priests, if widowed, may not remarry. Moreover, there is an ancient Eastern discipline of choosing bishops from the ranks of the celibate monks, so their bishops are all unmarried. The tradition in the Western or Latin-Rite Church has been for priests as well as bishops to take vows of celibacy, a rule that has been firmly in place since the early Middle Ages. Even today, though, exceptions are made. For example, there are married Latin-Rite priests who are converts from Lutheranism and Episcopalianism. As these variations and exceptions indicate, priestly celibacy is not an unchangeable dogma but a disciplinary rule. The fact that Peter was married is no more contrary to the Catholic faith than the fact that the pastor of the nearest Maronite Catholic church is married. CATHOLIC ANSWERS: Celibacy And The Priesthood by Nihil Obstat, August 10, 2004.
The reasons behind the unwillingness of a great many in the Catholic hierarchy to discuss celibacy are, for Scheper-Hughes and Devine (2003: 20), very clear and consist of the fact that the mantle and aura of prestige that has been accorded to Catholic priests allowed them to be treated for generations as special agents of God, as mediators between ordinary humans and the divine. Celibacy endowed Catholic priests with awesome, almost magical, power and authority. Celibate priests were not “ordinary men”. It is this aura, this “mystical halo”, that the pedophile priests have taken advantage of to gain easy access to naive religious families and their vulnerable children. And it is just this powerful aura that the American bishops want to protect. Hence the cover-ups, the secrecy, and the stonewalling of prosecutors. Hence also the Vatican’s resistance to all well-reasoned proposals for eliminating mandatory celibacy for Roman Catholic clergy; for opening up the priesthood to women and married clergy; to an open discussion of an identified subterranean gay subculture of premier American Catholic seminaries; and, consideration of what might be a more positive and healthy alternative to this. CELIBACY AND SEXUAL ABUSE: Is There A Link by Marco Marzano, 2004.
(TO BE CONTINUED).
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