Fred Sneesby - Observations on Culture, Faith and Politics

That Celibacy Thing Again …

November 17, 2006

Pansies – my Grandma Sneesby’s favorite flower - are an annual plant, that is, they only last one year. I buy them every spring and plant them in the garden. Inevitably, in my springtime renewal of the small gardens we keep, I always discover pansies that I didn’t plant. Somehow, they re-seed, survive the harsh winter conditions, and come back. Conversely, I have so-called “perennials” in the garden – and I am thinking of a particular daisy plant – that disappear after one year and never return. Of course, I have weeds that always come back.

The celibacy discussion might be a stubborn annual, an actual perennial, or a weed, depending on your perspective, because it keeps coming back. Regardless of the efforts to end the discussion through authoritative pronouncements, or, to avoid the discussion because it becomes so tiresome or pointless, it returns to the headlines. It was there this past week. “Pope Opens Summit On Celibacy for Clergy,” followed by the inevitable, “Vatican Reaffirms Celibacy for Priests” article a few days later.

Apparently, this was all caused by the wacky Archbishop Milingo of Zambia. He may be perfectly sane and the model of holiness, but just knowing that he married a South Korean woman at a Moonie ceremony with several hundred other couples raises an eyebrow or two (or three, if we had one). I suppose he can’t be too wacky because he was taken seriously enough by the Vatican to convene this summit. More than likely, his “power” to ordain priests and consecrate bishops raises some sticky canonical questions that require complicated answers only a summit can provide.

Let’s be very clear right away: maintaining the Church law that only unmarried men may be ordained priests in the Latin Rite of the Catholic Church is a very deliberate choice that the hierarchy makes with each successive pronouncement. They could choose otherwise. Everyone knows, starting with St. Peter’s mother-in-law, that this is a law of the Church that came into being gradually and was only universally promulgated and enforced rather late in Church history. It was not written on the back of the tablets on Mount Sinai or the back of a napkin at the Last Supper. This is a discipline of the Church that can be changed. Yet they cling to it and the controversy keeps coming back.

Is it an important issue? Sort of. If you are married and want to be a priest, it’s a problem. If you are a Catholic priest and want to get married, it’s an issue. But on the grander scale of things, it only becomes important when it is bound with other issues that really are important, namely, the status of women, the distribution of power in the Church, and the neglect of the Church’s mission.

The question of who you admit to Holy Orders goes immediately beyond married men to women, married and unmarried. As long as people are talking about the perimeters they are drawing around the pool of eligible candidates for ordination, it doesn’t take much to notice who else is outside the boundaries.

Is every religion hostile to women? It kind of looks that way although nothing is black or white. I do know that in this day and age when large populations in the world oppress women through their cultural institutions, including religion, it is not helpful that the Catholic Church excludes women from Holy Orders because they are women. It is, in fact, sinful because it aids and abets the oppression of women.

Why can’t the Catholic Church be the champion of women? Yes, I know that there are beautiful teachings and practices and traditions that exalt women, but as long as the Church says they cannot be ordained, they mean nothing. It’s like having a house that is breathtaking in every respect except that you have a pile of horse manure in your living room. You’re not going to make Better Homes and Gardens.

It also hurts the Catholic Church’s essential stance against abortion on demand. Keeping women out of the loop just kills the Church’s credibility and reduces the effectiveness of the message.

The “loop” is kept pretty tight. The law of celibacy keeps the power, sacramental and otherwise, in the hands of a few and restricts the personal obligations of those few. The power structure in the organization of the Catholic Church does not have many layers, it is well-defined and narrow. Celibacy is a very powerful tool in maintaining that and it is not serving the Church well. If the Church resists the democratization that has spread to much of the world and is still growing, the Church will shrink into irrelevancy if it hasn’t already. Widening the pool of candidates for priesthood will not by itself solve the problems surrounding decision-making in the Church, but it is a necessary ingredient in that struggle.

Finally, it appears that the hierarchy prefers that the Church shrink rather than open ordination to women and married people. In doing so, it is betraying the mission given to it by Jesus. Parishes are closing. More and more Catholics are going without the Eucharist, the heart of Catholicism. There is a solution ready at hand but it has become more important to the hierarchy and their supporters that the status quo be maintained than to draw more and more people around the Lord ’s Table.

The same law and order obstinacy can be seen in the American bishops’ pronouncements this past week on the Eucharist, birth control (see next week’s column), and homosexuality. Even though 96% of Catholic married couples use artificial birth control, the American bishops feel perfectly comfortable recommending that those stay away from Communion. I imagine they will. Even though the bishops are hauling out a teaching that was shown to be flawed forty years ago, it is more important to them to be obeyed than to speak the truth. Maybe if fewer people go to church, the shortage of priests won’t seem so bad.

Now how did I get on this rant from pansies? Oh, yeah, they keep coming back. So will celibacy and its attendant issues unless they are honestly and courageously dealt with.