From the Editor's Desk

The church, holiness and sex

Claire Schaeffer-Duffy often writes on issues of war and peace, so, I admit, I was somewhat surprised when she turned in a story about consecrated virgins. ( See story)

I didn’t know it was a movement of any significance, thinking it a category of Christian life that existed solely in literature about saints of bygone ages.

I will admit, too, a certain jaded thinking about what I considered the church’s obsession with virginity or, more generally, with not having sex.

I happened to be in Rome in the early 1990s, the very week that the late Pope John Paul II released his personal reflection on women. I got an advance copy, read it and then handed it on to someone in the religious house where I was staying. It is enough to characterize the general reaction to that reflection by saying that when at the house, I could know where the pamphlet was by the howls of disapproval. This group of clerics, at least, wasn’t too keen on the pope’s ideas about women.

I also recall that the two nuns enlisted to take questions during a news conference on the pope’s new work, Spanish and French as I remember, managed to bring every answer back to the importance of virginity. No matter what the topic of the question, the answer almost invariably involved a discourse on the importance of virginity. And of course, there wasn’t any woman enlisted to take questions who was married and evidently had had sex.

Was it possible, I had to ask on another occasion, that saintly married couples were in such short supply that the pope had to find a husband and wife who were distinctive because at one point in their shared lives they decided to live as celibates?

And then there was the time John Paul was addressing a group of nuns. Noting that they had given up the chance for motherhood, he told them he considered theirs a superior maternity because, even in their celibate state, they would care for so many.

I showed my wife, the mother of four, the pope’s assessment, breaking it to her that while her “maternity” may have been significant, it wasn’t “superior.” I’ll leave her response unwritten.

I concede all that is a rather flip reading of events, but it’s no secret that the church has fostered, for many of the wrong reasons, a kind of division of goodness and the possibility of holiness on the basis of whether one engages in sex. Simultaneously the church encourages married people to have children and gives voice to all manner of noble notions about marriage.

It’s strange.

However, I found Claire’s story a fascinating look at a group of women who -- whatever one’s opinion of the theology behind the movement -- are obviously smart, articulate, remarkably dedicated and thoroughly engaged in the realities of the day.

They show that we are called in many different ways.

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What’s happening to our priests?

It’s a fair question. No matter how much one might wish for a change in the ordained ministry to include married men or women or both, the fact is that at the moment the priesthood is exclusively celibate males, and many are serving under severe strain. Part of the strain, of course, is because of declining numbers and increased demands.

Not a small part of the strain for some results from the clergy abuse crisis.

NCR arguably has spent more ink and pages on the clergy sex abuse crisis than any other publication since we first broke the story in 1984. Yet nagging questions of justice continue to pester the community and perhaps none is more significant than the question of justice for priests. Joe Feuerherd explores some dimensions of the problem in a story on in today’s issue. ( See story) It is a difficult tale to tell because priests in the midst of canonical processes are reluctant to talk. Others are reluctant to criticize a system that too often appears arbitrary and even capricious and is made all the more difficult to assess because much of the deliberation occurs in secret.

We’ll follow next week with a story by Emiliano Huet-Vaughn that looks at the morale of priests and how their lives and ministry have changed and been reshaped as a result of the abuse crisis.

-- Tom Roberts

National Catholic Reporter, April 27, 2007