The Church, celibacy and canon law: a brief history
He claims that the Church’s rules on clerical celibacy are to blame for many problems over the centuries, including clerical concubinage, homosexuality and paedophilia. How odd that he should accept as dogma this discarded Freudian fundamentalism.
However, I agree completely with him that many of the people who were ordained priests over the centuries were just not cut out for the celibate life.
But to cite the Church’s rules on celibacy as a factor in various problems is to mis-state the problem. Most sexual abuse of children occurs within the home. Many homosexuals, in fact, are bisexual and can beget children.
The 16th century Council of Trent declared: “If anyone says that the married state excels the state of virginity or celibacy, and that it is better and happier to be united in matrimony than to remain in virginity or celibacy, let him be anathema.” (Canon 10 on the Sacrament of Matrimony: Twenty-fourth Session).
As regards clerical concubinage, the problem is overstated. Until the Second Council of the Lateran in 1139 the marriage of a priest after ordination in the Western Church was valid, but illicit. From then on in the Western Church such a union was neither valid nor licit in canon law for priests still active in the priesthood. The trouble is that there was a number of ways legally to have one’s cake and eat it.
Traditionally, custom is held to be the best interpreter of law and, in an age of very poor communications, heterodox custom survived for very long after Lateran II, and the basic teaching had to be restated at the Council of Trent.
It is clear that homosexuality is a big issue today, with the likes of Fr Donald Cozzens, a liberal, claiming that most priests in some US dioceses are homosexuals. Thinking in Rome at present is tending to the position that homosexuals should not be ordained. What is being sacrificed in the promise, or vow, of celibacy is the opportunity for heterosexual relations and, specifically, the chance of being a parent. Those who are profoundly homosexual can’t be parents, for psychosexual reasons, and therefore there would be no point to their promise or vow of celibacy.
As to paedophilia, canon law fails to make the distinction between paedophilia (sexual attraction to prepubertal children) and ephebophilia (sexual attraction to teenagers and immature adults).
Canon law, has been excessively lenient with paeophiles/ephebophiles. The canon law problem can be rectified without much difficulty.
What is really needed for long-term reform is deeper recognition of the counter-cultural nature of the promise or vow of celibacy, and the greater level of maturity required to take on such a commitment.
Entry into seminary or novitiate should be delayed until the candidate is in his/her late twenties, and the final promise, or vow, shouldn't be made/taken for seven years after that.
In that way it would be much easier to recognise those who can’t make the grade as regards celibacy, whether because of paedophilia, ephebophilia, homosexuality, or a psychological inability to remain celibate heterosexually.
For the present we must trust firstly in God, as he is the only one ultimately who can make good to come from the current evil.
Séamas de Barra,
83 Beaufort Downs,
Rathfarnham Village,
Dublin 14.
