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Inside
NCR Deacon did a lot without compulsory celibacy
First of all I will blow my own horn, this man writes. He
wishes to trumpet that he has been a deacon -- make that a married deacon --
for the past 25 years. He did wakes, marriages, Marian devotions, Lenten
devotions, homilies, penance services, AIDS ministry, the list goes on. Then he
gets to the point: What is important is that I was not
celibate.
Think of him as writing from Seattle, which is a lie, but the
church is much the same everywhere, and so is human nature, so lets just
call him Someone because his wife thinks hes notorious enough
already.
He has big reservations about compulsory celibacy.
Here we should take time out to clear the air. There is no need to
dismiss Someones comments on celibacy as church-bashing or disloyalty.
That would allow us not to take him seriously. The time-out needs to be taken
because letter writers and other smear campaigners are saying to the pope that
he should up the ante on loyalty; that those who dont parrot every
Vatican thought on everything are disloyal Modernists, Americanists or whatever
(such people are experts at name-calling). This is a pathetic excuse for
Christianity, which for centuries has boasted not only of divine inspiration
but of the ability and freedom to use our heads.
This Someone, after all, gave a big chunk of his one and only life
to the church, helping people, no angles or ideology. And anyway, he has
nothing against celibacy, he simply doesnt believe compulsory
celibacy has worked.
He has no big thesis, just writes a letter that wanders about.
Leaving the ministry, for priests, is a kind of dying -- for the leaving
priest, for relatives, for priests who remain. ... So many thousands of priests
who have left the active ministry need reconciliation.
One pastor told him, Priests who leave are rank
materialists. This gets Someone going about priests he knows with cozy
cottages by the beach or up the mountain. One has a Lincoln for everyday
car and a Jeep for beach driving and his suits custom-made by an expensive
tailor. Someone has lots of anecdotes.
Then he recites from the Council of Toledo in 655, which
decreed the enslavement of the offspring of clerics. Later, the wives of
clerics shared the same fate. Once the church decided on celibacy, it
went at it with gusto. This has caused all kinds of broken hearts for
centuries.
Meanwhile, as luck would have it, in an article in America,
Archbishop Francis T. Hurley of Anchorage, Alaska, suggests the U.S. bishops
write a letter on mandatory celibacy (NCR, March 27). When Hurley
ordained a married former Methodist minister two years ago, people began asking
why could Protestants become married priests while pristine Catholic priests
could marry only over everyones dead body.
And Hurley suggests -- a refrain one hears with growing frequency
-- that if the bishops were to get together and get courage to speak out,
we would win more public respect and appreciation for priests and at
least a better understanding of the churchs mandatory vow of
celibacy.
Hes 79 now, this man is, and the least we could do is allow
him his 15 minutes to add to the sensus fidelium.
Were confident readers recognized the headline on page one,
Ill fares the land, as a quotation from poet-playwright Oliver
Goldsmiths The Deserted Village. The stanza is as relevant
today as when Goldsmith wrote it over two centuries ago:
Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey, Where
wealth accumulates and men decay. Princes and lords may flourish or may
fade; A breath can make them, as a breath has made; But a bold
peasantry, their countrys pride, When once destroyed, can never be
supplied.
Hilary Clinton is right: It takes a village. The deserted village
is a poignant sign of our times. We walk amid the ruins of yesterdays
villages, whether in American malls, in burnt-out hamlets in Bosnia, in the
tortured countrysides of changing Latin America (cover story) and Africa
(editorial), in the shantytowns of the misplaced wherever big wealth has forced
the peasantry off the land that was theirs since time began.
-- Michael Farrell
National Catholic Reporter, April 3,
1998
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