Tag: Mandatory Celibacy

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For Priests’ Wives, a Word of Caution

COMMENTARY — SARA RITCHEY

WHAT will life be like for the wives of Roman Catholic priests?

On Sunday, the Vatican announced the creation of the Personal Ordinariate of the Chair of Saint Peter, a special division of the Roman Catholic Church that former Episcopal congregations and priests — including, notably, married priests — can enter together en masse. The Vatican has stressed that the allowance for married priests is merely an exception (like similar dispensations made in the past by the Vatican) and by no means a permanent condition of the priesthood. If a priest is single when he enters the ordinariate, he may not marry, nor may a married priest, in the event of his wife’s death, remarry.

Nonetheless, the Roman Catholic Church is prepared to house married priests in numbers perhaps not seen since the years before 1123, when the First Lateran Council adopted canon 21, prohibiting clerical marriage.

Now as then, the church’s critics and defenders are rehashing arguments about the implications of having married priests in an institution that is otherwise wary of them. But in the midst of these debates, we should pause to ponder the environment that the priests’ wives might expect to encounter. After all, the status of the priest’s wife is perhaps even more strange and unsettling than that of her ordained Catholic husband.

While the early Christian church praised priestly chastity, it did not promulgate decisive legislation mandating priestly celibacy until the reform movement of the 11th century. At that point, the foremost purpose of priestly celibacy was to clearly distinguish and separate the priests from the laity, to elevate the status of the clergy. In this scheme, the mere presence of the priest’s wife confounded that goal, and thus she incurred the suspicion, and quite often the loathing, of parishioners and church reformers. You can’t help wondering what feelings she will inspire today.

By the time of the First Lateran Council, the priest’s wife had become a symbol of wantonness and defilement. The reason was that during this period the nature of the host consecrated at Mass received greater theological scrutiny. Medieval theologians were in the process of determining that bread and wine, at the moment of consecration in the hands of an ordained priest at the altar, truly became the body and blood of Jesus Christ. The priest who handled the body and blood of Christ should therefore be uncontaminated lest he defile the sacred corpus.

The priest’s wife was an obvious danger. Her wanton desire, suggested the 11th-century monk Peter Damian, threatened the efficacy of consecration. He chastised priests’ wives as “furious vipers who out of ardor of impatient lust decapitate Christ, the head of clerics,” with their lovers. According to the historian Dyan Elliott, priests’ wives were perceived as raping the altar, a perpetration not only of the priest but also of the whole Christian community.

The priest’s nuclear family was also seen as a risk to the stability of the church. His children represented a threat to laypersons, who feared that their endowments might be absorbed into the hands of the priest’s offspring to create a rival clerical dynasty. A celibate priest would thus ensure donations from the neighboring landed aristocracy. Furthermore, the priest’s wife was often accused, along with her children, of draining the church’s resources with her extravagance and frivolity. Pope Leo IX attempted to remedy this problem in the 11th century by decreeing that the wives and children of priests must serve in his residence at the Lateran Palace in Rome.

Given this history, I caution the clerical wife to be on guard as she enters her role as a sacerdotal attaché. Her position is an anomalous one and, as the Vatican has repeatedly insisted, one that will not receive permanent welcome in the church. That said, for the time being, it will be prudent for the Vatican to honor the dignity of the wives and children of its freshly ordained married priests. And here, I suggest, a real conversation about the continuation of priestly celibacy might begin.

Until then, priests’ wives should beware a religious tradition that views them, in the words of Damian, as “the clerics’ charmers, devil’s choice tidbits, expellers from paradise, virus of minds, sword of soul, wolfbane to drinkers, poison to companions, material of sinning, occasion of death … the female chambers of the ancient enemy, of hoopoes, of screech owls, of night owls, of she-wolves, of blood suckers.”

Complete Article HERE!

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New church group to assist gays draws criticism

A new program by the Archdiocese of Hartford to provide a spiritual support system to assist men and women with same-sex attractions to live chaste lives has drawn criticism from the gay community who say it can do more harm than good.

The new program called Courage, which has chapters around the world, does not condone physical sex between same-sex partners. But it creates a “spiritual support system which would assist men and women with same-sex attractions in living chaste lives in fellowship, truth and love,” according to the Courage website.

“We really needed to do something because a lot of people are hurting, because families are torn apart by this, and we really need to be responsive,” said Deacon Robert Pallotti, who operates the Courage program in Connecticut.
“We do have a pastoral responsibility to do all we can to make people feel welcome in the church.”

Catholic pro-gay groups generally had a negative reaction to Courage.
“Courage does not want to convert you to become heterosexual, so in some ways, it’s a little more enlightened that the other programs that the Catholic Church has had for gays,” said Phil Attey, executive director of the national group, Catholics for Equality. “But at its core it’s still rooted in dangerous, harmful and barbaric thinking. The idea that you can suppress someone’s sexuality and still have that person develop into a happy, well-adjusted person, well, there’s very little evidence that that’s possible.”

Attey, however, said the church’s stance on gays isn’t pushing him out of his faith.

“Most non-Catholics don’t understand the Catholic experience, which is very much rooted in family and community,” Attey said. “It’s not unlike someone who is a Jew. He might not attend his synagogue, but that doesn’t make him any less Jewish. We will always be Catholic, regardless of what comes out of our hierarchy.”

Attey said that most rank-and-file Catholics, in fact, support the gay community, and because of this, gays feel comfortable in the church.
“American Catholics are the most supportive faith group in the country on LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender) issues. That may come as some as a surprise to a lot of people, given the harsh statements from the hierarchy, but if you look at the people and the `body church,’ it’s the most pro-gay church in the country.”

Marianne Duddy-Burke of the Dignity USA agrees. Dignity USA is the nation’s largest advocacy group for LGBT Catholics.

“You really have to differentiate between Catholics and the church hierarchy,” she said. “Even the Catholics who go to church every single week are more supportive toward gays than the population as a whole.”

She said that this might spring from the Church’s demands for the humane treatment of a host of other groups that have often go neglected and even hated — prisoners, the sick, the poor, men on death row, and so forth.

“Catholics are more supportive of gays than any other denomination according to the Public Region Research Group, and that surprises a lot of people,” she said.
As for the future, Attey said he doesn’t expect the Vatican to change its posture on gays anytime soon.

“We don’t expect any dogmatic change on LGBT issues anytime soon, but what we do expect is that more and more Catholics will be speaking out on their own on LGBT rights,” Attey said.

“This is a place where the leaders have to catch up with the truth that Catholics are living out every single day in their families and in the workplace,” said Duddy-Burke.

Pallotti said not all of the hierarchy in the archdiocese was on board with Courage from the outset.

“Many of them were fine with this, but we wanted to educate those deacons who had a reluctance to get involved or had some resistance, and many were dealing with their own personal feelings on this,” Pallotti said.
He said that Courage is sanctioned by the Vatican as the “only approved approach.”

The Rev. Paul Check of St. Mary’s Church in Norwalk, who runs the Courage meetings, explained that Courage “addresses homosexuality as a lived reality in the lives of individual people.”

Check said that “there’s no doubt” of the difficulty of the church’s teaching on homosexuality.

“But we have a way for people to live this teaching, and that’s where Courage comes in,” Check said. “Really, as a matter of natural justice and pastoral charity, we have to have a way for people to live that teaching. It’s difficult and challenging, but it helps people with this particular struggle.”

The roots of the Connecticut Courage chapter grew in the gay marriage debate in the state, Pallotti said.

“I was very fearful of the emotional backlash that was I was witnessing in Connecticut during the gay marriage debate,” Pallotti said. “So I went to the archbishop and I said, `OK, yeah, this is our position (to oppose gay marriage), but I’m concerned about people who are whipping up hate against gays as if they have the Plague or something — and some Christian churches were doing that. We had to confront this head-on.”

The Connecticut Courage chapter will meet twice a month “somewhere in Greater Hartford,” he said, and the exact location will be disclosed only to those who plan to participate. If there’s sufficient interest, other chapters might be set up in the state.

Complete Article HERE!

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Thoughts on the Personal Ordinariate of the Chair of St. Peter

COMMENTARY by Lisa Fullam

The New York Times reported on the launch January 1 of the new ordinariate (like a diocese, but nation-wide in scope,) for Anglicans wishing to swim the Tiber and become Catholics. (For more about the ordinariate, go here.)

Is this good news or bad news, and for whom?

I react with dismay to the perception that these folks were finally motivated to move to Rome because of two issues–ordination of women (which strained the camel’s back,) and the Episcopal Church’s stance of openness to same-sex partnered clergy and laity, (which seems to have been the proverbial last straw.) Sure, some folks were likely wanting to rejoin Rome for some time, but the door’s always been open–it does seem to me that these two issues are the key turning point. The establishment of the ordinariate means that the new RC’s will be able to use a variant liturgy that echoes the Book of Common Prayer, and of course their clergy in this generation may remain married, though future applicants to seminary must promise celibacy like regular Roman priests.

My dismay is that once again the Catholic Church is defined by negation–”Don’t like the idea of women in ecclesial leadership? Come join us! Don’t like gay people? We’re the Church for you!” Along with the US magisterium’s attack on Obamacare because it might involve paying for contraception–”We’re Catholic! That means we’re against the Pill!”–Catholicism is seen as summed up in negative positions. The fact that Episcopal priests need only take an on-line course to qualify for ordination underscores the idea that the point here isn’t educating new clergy in the fullness of Catholic tradition (which is distinct in many ways from Anglican tradition, right??) but in welcoming in people who take the “right” position on these few issues, teach them a few things about liturgical particulars, and they’re good to go.

A point of curiosity is how the wives feel about being tolerated for a generation as an exception. Many, doubtless, believe that clergy should be celibate. Still, the implicit attack on their marriages must sting. “Sure, your husbands are welcome in our ranks, and we’ll let you stay married to them–but no future married priests will be allowed! You wives are a distraction and obstacle!”

And perhaps there’s good news, too. Good news for the Episcopalians, surely, who will continue to celebrate the vocations of women, married men, and partnered gay people with less internal opposition. The message of the Episcopal Church USA as a place of welcome for those disdained by Rome will be more clear than ever. I’m curious about the magnitude of the reverse flow of RC’s who have moved to the ECUSA–I suspect that far more are swimming the Tiber in the opposite direction than are swimming toward Rome. I know some very good people who are now Episcopal laity or clergy, and lots of Protestants, too. I’ve been in churches where half the congregation (by the pastor’s estimate,) are former RC’s.

A final point–the one-two punch of rejecting women’s ordination and excluding gays as defining why people would become Catholic should remind Catholics that those of us concerned about the role of women and concerned about attitudes toward gay people in our Church are natural allies. The issues facing the two groups are not the same, to be sure. Women are not described as “disordered,” nor are women described as a threat to society should they marry. On the other hand, women with vocations to priesthood cannot “pass” in a hostile Church the way gay men can. And there are other points of difference. But still–let’s remember and cultivate those natural alliances of all those regarded as outsiders in the Roman Church, yet remain Catholic nonetheless.

Complete Article HERE!

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US Catholic bishop with secret family, Gabino Zavala, quits

A Catholic bishop who fathered two children has stepped down.

Pope Benedict has accepted the resignation of Gabino Zavala, an auxiliary bishop of Los Angeles, the Vatican said.

The Archbishop of Los Angeles, Jose Gomez, wrote in a letter to worshippers that Bishop Zavala told him in December that he was the father of two teenage children.

The children, who are minors, live with their mother in another state.

Archbishop Gomez said that the archdiocese was offering the family “spiritual care,” as well as funding to help the children with college costs.

In his letter he described the news as “sad and difficult” and said Bishop Zavala had been living privately and not participating in ministry since resigning.

Bishop Zavala is 60 and was born in Mexico. He has campaigned against the death penalty and for immigrants’ rights.

The Vatican did not spell out the reason for Bishop Zavala’s resignation in its statement, but made reference to canon law which allows bishops to step down before normal retirement age if they are ill or unfit for office for some other reason.

The Pope has shown no sign of relaxing the Roman Catholic Church’s rule on priestly celibacy, which has been in place since the 11th Century.

In March 2010 he described celibacy as “the sign of full devotion, the entire commitment to the Lord and to the ‘Lord’s business’, an expression of giving oneself to God and to others”.

Priests are not allowed to marry but married Anglican priests who convert to Catholicism are exempted from the celibacy rule.

Two days ago Pope Benedict appointed an American married priest to head the first US structure for Anglicans converting to Roman Catholicism.

Complete Article HERE!

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Homosexuality among church leaders discussed at Jesuit university event

In late October, on the day an out-of-season snowstorm some have called “epic” and “historic” broke nearly 200-year-old weather records and almost shut down parts of the Northeast, something else happened that was perhaps unprecedented: A Catholic university hosted a daylong formal discussion on the topic of homosexuality within communities of nuns and priests.

For the 100 or so theologians, members of the clergy, women religious, students and others who braved the heavy snow Oct. 29 to attend “The Care of Souls: Sexual Diversity, Celibacy, and Ministry” conference at Jesuit-run Fairfield University, the day was packed densely with history, stories and plenty of questions.

It was the final event of a four-part series of talks titled “More Than a Monologue: Sexual Diversity and the Catholic Church.” The series aimed at expanding the conversation on lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender issues within the Catholic church.

“Unfortunately, any speech about Catholicism, sexuality and clerical power is so vexed, so scandalous, that I can’t begin the meditation without underlining three more cautions against misunderstanding,” said the first speaker, Mark Jordan, a professor of divinity at Harvard University Divinity School.
“First, I’ll be talking about the configuration of power in relation to sexuality within ecclesial systems, not about all of the individual lives under those systems. It is, of course, possible to lead a Christian life of unstinting love, of vivid witness, of embodied grace under the present system of Roman power,” Jordan said.

“Second caution: I want to talk about this clerical power as homoerotic. By this I don’t mean to imply anything about the sexual acts, real or fantasized, of those who participate in this power,” he said. “This form of clerical power seems to me the object, and the instrument, of sharp longing, of desire.

“Third and final caution: I speak of the configuration of homoerotic power in the Roman Catholic clergy at particular times and places. There are partial repetitions across church history, I think, and there are striking structural similarities across church cultures in a given time. But if we know anything about the Catholic church, it is that it is not one thing. It is a complex network of thousands of different communities.”

Before beginning his discussion about power and the Catholic church, Jordan traced the church’s history of thought in relation to homosexuality over the past few decades, a history that would serve as backdrop and context for the speeches that followed.

Loretto Sr. Jeannine Gramick of New Ways Ministry in Maryland talked about the organization’s role in discussing homosexuality within the Catholic church, beginning in the 1970s, and particularly about its work in support of lesbian nuns.

After reflecting on the past 40 years of history and discussion, Gramick said she has seen three central issues emerge: celibacy, sexual identity and “coming out.”

In the first 20 years, in the 1970s and 1980s, the overriding question that surfaced for women religious was “sexual identity,” Gramick said. “People wondered about — how do you know you’re lesbian?” In the 20 years that followed, she added, “the overriding question seems to be [about] coming out.”

Throughout this time, however, Gramick said much of the emphasis was placed on the question of celibacy. But the important question to ask, she continued, is, “How do lesbian sisters — and by extension how do heterosexual sisters — live out their celibacy in healthy ways?”

Following Gramick’s detailed analysis, speaker Jamie Manson, who is an instructor in religious studies at Fairfield University and a columnist for the National Catholic Reporter, began with humor:

“I am firmly convinced had I been born, rather than in the 1970s, in the 1940s, I today would be a lesbian nun,” Manson said. “And I would not have become a nun simply just to avoid having to face married life with a man; I would have answered that because I have a call of intense witness to the Gospel — I still have that — but being able to avoid marriage wouldn’t have hurt, either.”

Manson said there is a difference between the experience of gay and lesbian Catholics.

“For lesbians the experience of being Catholic affects more than their sexual orientation; it relates to the anatomy itself. By banning women from serving as priests, the hierarchy says — in this great cosmic hubris — that God simply cannot work sacramentally through the body of a woman. For most lesbians, and many straight women, this leads to feelings of isolation and disempowerment,” Manson said. “I cannot stress enough how corrosive it is to the spirit to have never seen a woman’s bodily form wear a stole, stand behind an altar, raise the bread and wine, place her hands in the waters of the baptismal font, step through the center door of the confessional.”

If you are a lesbian, Manson continued, “you’re in double jeopardy with the church. You’re alienated because of your body and also because of the way your body relates in response to desire and love in erotic relationships.”

The conference, which wrapped up with a panel discussion about future exploration of this topic, also featured remarks by Elizabeth Dreyer, religious studies professor at Fairfield; Fr. Donald Cozzens, writer in residence at John Carroll University; and Gerard Jacobitz, religious studies professor at St. Joseph’s University in Philadelphia.

In closing, Paul Lakeland, professor of Catholic Studies at Fairfield and one of the organizers of the conference series, said he was pleased with the outcome of the program, and the cooperation between the four host schools. (Previous conferences were held at Fordham University in New York, Union Theological Seminary in New York and Yale Divinity School in New Haven, Conn.)

“A lot of gay and lesbian and straight, and Catholics and non-Catholics, but especially Catholics, got together on four weekends and talked about issues that the church would really — the institutional church — would really rather they didn’t, and the sky didn’t fall in,” Lakeland said. “We, I think, are collectively a little wiser, I’m sure, and hopefully a little more encouraged as we go on from here.”

Complete Article HERE!