With the Richter-scale crack in Roman
Catholicism caused by Benedict XVI's dramatic resignation it seems an
apt moment to take another look at priestly celibacy.
If the retiring pope seeks to make way for a more energetic
successor, one able to confront the "questions of deep concern to the life of faith", issues of sexuality, gender, and relationship in
general must be front and center. The RCC's response in all these areas is existentially conditioned by its
insistence on celibacy for ordained ministers
Jesus states clearly that celibacy is
a gift and an option "for the sake of the kingdom of heaven" (Matthew 19:10). In other
words it's a possible choice to be made by some for whom the coming
of God into the world is an overriding personal event and meaning.
There is nothing about a "vow of celibacy" in his
statement. Simply a decision for something--from one point of view
quite brutal ("making oneself a eunuch," i.e.
desexualized)--because another, transcending relationship has
completely overwhelmed and replaced this vital aspect of human
existence.
A living sense of the in-breaking of
God in the world could do this, I am quite certain. But it seems
evident that this is a deeply personal, individual choice, a solitary
Kiekegaardian leap of faith, not a standard membership rule of an
institution.
There are other, more human reasons for the rule of celibacy. The classic one is taking arms to fight for
king and country. A war disrupts all normal domestic life. By and
large a conscripted man or woman will be deprived of sexual
relationship during the course of active service. The urgent
necessity of confronting the threat of the enemy overrides this most
basic of human situations.
But in the case of war enforced
celibacy is temporary. It is contingent on the time of war and its
extraordinary emotions and responses. Once the war and its
supercharged mood are gone, ordinary sexual relationship will resume.
The church instead requires that the extraordinary condition of
celibacy determines the whole of the priest's life, and--again--does
so as a matter of a rule.
As a point of historical reference one
of the underlying causes for the progressive enforcement of celibacy
in the eleventh and twelfth centuries (known as the Gregorian reform) was its part in a struggle to wrest control of ecclesiastical appointments from
the German nobility. To be unable to marry was a critical way
of signaling a "real" priest, different from the worldly men
appointed by feudal lords for worldly reasons. There is, therefore,
an enduring element of Roman Catholic "spiritual militancy"
against the saeculum in its celibate tradition. This militancy
does not use weapons of war but turns the suspension of sexuality
into its own form of weapon against the world.
But it is Mimetic Theory which perhaps
enables us to reflect most acutely on the question of celibacy.
Mimesis and its cousin science of mirror neurons show us how
profoundly the self is made up of and by "the other".
Either we are governed by the other in a relationship of rivalry, or
we experience identification with the other through what Girard
calls a relationship of "vertical transcendence," where we
look on the other in awe and refuse to enter into rivalry. But there
is also the third possibility, one of identification through surrender in
love, something Girard does not talk about but must certainly be the
goal of marriage. The key question here is who or what is the
other for a celibate?
In the aftermath of the Second Vatican
Council, over the years I was a celibate, I experienced at first hand the collapse
of the old-style vertical transcendence in respect to the church: the
habit of looking at it with awe as a perfect institution. In its
place there really was a tremendous sense of rivalry with established
authority with its rules and regulations. The walls really did come
tumbling down. I believe the Council intended to seek out
and discover the third possibility in regard to "church":
the surrender to each other in love of active Christian community.
But that is spiritually very demanding and, against the background of
continuing hierarchical structures and mass membership parishes, I
think people hardly knew how or where to begin. When they tried the
Vatican generally hated the results. In the meantime I believe priestly celibates fell into four broad groups and my guess is
those groups still basically cover the territory.
1. First: in-group gays who were
closeted but experienced a clear liberation in terms of
self-affirmation and, to some degree, lifestyle. In my experience
this group made up at least a third of priests and they were
definitely the happiest group around.
2. Second: church militants. These were
men who hung on to the medieval sense of an embattled church taking
on the forces of a hostile world. The church was a noble cause to
which they had given their lives, and for them "vertical
transcendence" was still real.
3. Third: the rest. This was the
amorphous group which included alcoholics, chronic malcontents, sex
abusers, materialists, men having affairs with women, sports fanatics
and pure intellectuals. Until I left I essentially belonged to the
rest.
4. Genuine celibates. Having said "the
rest" there doesn't seem to be room for another group, and there
are so few of them they really should be included in number three.
But because this handful of men (and personally I think I knew three
or four) was so exceptional in every sense it really merits a group
on its own.
Meanwhile the celibate who does not
know a self-transcending relationship is up against himself as his sole horizon, and must inevitably, I think, fall into group three. The
married person is up against an/other, they live the self-as-other
relationship day by day. This may become boring and dull, but it is
still a fact. It may become unbalanced and destructive, in which case
it is in need of healing, and at limit of being dissolved. But in the
age of the collapse of vertical transcendence--the thing that Girard
regards as the character of modernity--celibates are at an
enormous risk of at best shallow, at worst destructive lives. When
the celibate looks in the mirror there is far too often an endless
presence of the same, where there should be the transcending gaze of
the other.
My guess is Benedict knows all this in
his heart of hearts but has kicked the can down the road. He can only
kick it so far. His abdication is the historical equivalent to John
XXIII's calling the Second Vatican Council back in January 1959. It was an enormous
shock then, because hardly anybody in the Roman church saw its ecclesial
necessity. Benedict's decision is an inverted way of taking exactly
the same revolutionary step. The cultural urgency comes from outside the
church, just as it did back then, but Benedict cannot convoke a
council. He is too compromised in the negative reaction he has led against the last. He now surrenders his papal voice in order, I
believe, for someone else to have the courage to make the call.
Tony Bartlett, T&P TinR