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	Celibacy, the Roman Catholic Church, a Resurrection, and a Lesson from History The Times April 2, 2010 http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/faith/article7085197.ece Holy Week is the season when Christians follow their Lord in his sufferings, and meditate on the wounds inflicted on His body through a mockery of a trial, humiliation as a helpless prisoner, and then a terrible death. The dramatic turn of that story, between the darkness of Friday and the dawning light of Saturday moving into Easter Sunday, is the resurrection of that body and the dawning of new life. As the leaders of Christian Churches follow that familiar story through these three days, they will be painfully aware of the way in which the body of Christ — which is the Church in all its many forms — is wounded and in sore need of resurrection. Anglicans argue about questions of sexuality and gender, and they often seem to wish to tear their body into pieces – but a more hopeful way of looking at these Anglican lacerations is that at least they come from arguments conducted in public. It is the virtue of Anglicanism that it does not hide its scars, and that betokens an honesty which is to be prized in the Christian life. The Roman Catholic Church has not been nearly so straightforward in dealing with the troubles which have assailed it in recent years: even when acknowledging a sore illness in the body, it has been reluctant to make a proper diagnosis and suggest a workable remedy. The wound has been caused by cases of child abuse and the Church hierarchy’s efforts to contain their effects. Now the scandal has spread beyond the English-speaking world – and not just into Germany, Switzerland and the Netherlands, but into Mexico and Italy, traditional strongholds of Catholic devotion. The faithful are outraged, and still the Pope does not seem to see the whole picture. Let me suggest a three-point plan to his Holiness: First: stop implying that this is only a matter of a few bad apples in the basket. Don’t try to blame society for permissiveness and giving clergy a wrong model. This problem goes back centuries, and it resides in the structures of the Church. Second: end the Catholic Church’s fatal confusion between two honourable vocations — celibacy and the priesthood. Some people are called to celibacy so that by renouncing one particular human relationship, they can open themselves in chastity to many more. Others are called to priesthood, a representative and often a leadership role in the Church. But it has been a nine-century-long folly to say that all priests should be celibate. Third: put an end to the equally fatal notion that ordination effects a great change in the relationship of a priest to the rest of the human race. The problem is that special people may feel that they are entitled to play by special rules. That’s how a great many well-meaning people, anguished by their inappropriate and externally-imposed call to celibacy, have distorted their religious vocation, and worked out their frustrations by playing sexual power-games with the innocent and vulnerable. And it's also why the Church, assuming special rules applied to special people, covered up for them afterwards. Anything short of full recognition of the problem risks an explosion of fury from the faithful, equivalent to the 16th century Reformation, which was equally caused by the Church hierarchy not listening to the genuine anguish of one faithful son — Martin Luther — about distorted teaching. There is a curious way in which this second, modern crisis for the Church was caused by the first. From the 12th century, when compulsory celibacy was theoretically introduced, a large proportion of the clergy ignored it. But when Protestants started insisting that compulsory celibacy was wrong — indeed, that most clergy ought to get married – Counter-Reformation Catholicism really clamped down and made a reality of the celibacy project. The result was emotional turmoil for countless ordinands. And what do you get? The first great child abuse scandal in the Church’s history, in the Piarist Order in central Europe: not in the 20th but in the 17th century. And what was the Church’s reaction to that scandal then? Cover it up. Please draw the lesson, your Holiness.
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