VATICAN CITY (VATICAN CITY)
Union of Catholic Asian News (UCA News) [Hong Kong]
October 18, 2024
By Jean D’Cunha
Clerical celibacy is an issue that the ongoing final sessions of the Synod on Synodality should have discussed. However, the hierarchy continues to peripheralize it, despite its deleterious impacts on witnessing Christ and evangelizing.
Historically, the androcentric Roman Catholic Church has been mired in an endless crisis over clerical celibacy and chastity with pernicious implications, especially for its lay and religious women and children.
Apart from explicit violence against them by the celibate clerics, the hierarchy’s double standards of male sexual morality have placed the burden of blame, shame, guilt and sin on women survivors — the proverbial Eves, and have treated women in relationships with clerics as moral pariahs.
The abusive clerics have almost always emerged relatively unscathed as gentlemen of the cloth. Despite its claim of being the custodian of morality, the Church has reneged on accountability behind the smokescreen of theological and legal semantics.
In the Church’s theological classification and its appalling lived reality, clerical celibacy is not a matter or reflection of faith.
Clerical celibacy is not and never has been a Catholic doctrine.
Priestly celibacy has been a discipline, a practice legislated by a designated authority to guide and serve the Church. As such, it is governed by changing rules that are historically and culturally mediated in evolving contexts.
Christ welcomed celibate and married followers in his ministry, saying that celibacy was a rare gift (Matthew 19:11-12). Some apostles, including Peter and some Fathers of the Church, were married. Some Eastern-rite Catholic Churches in communion with Rome continue to permit priestly ordination of married men.
Theologians trace its origins to asceticism among early Christians that elevated purity and chastity — equated with sexual abstinence — to core Christian values. Such asceticism also saw sex, the body, and sexual pleasure as defiling, triggering original sin and all sin thereafter. Thus inspired, some local synods tried to ensure clerical sexual abstinence (Peter De Rosa, 1988).
Pervasive breaches led to change
The First Council of Nicaea in 325 permitted married men to be ordained priests and held their marriages valid. Unmarried men entering the priesthood could not marry thereafter. Only 900 years ago, the First and Fourth Lateran Councils in 1123 and 1215 respectively, decreed clerical marriages illicit and invalid (Doherty, 2018), a ruling that continues.
Invoking the ritual purity of the altar, they held that as “sexual intercourse was a tainting act in Christian thought, a man should not handle the Eucharist after engaging in sex” (Wertheimer 2006, 392). This was used to spiritually elevate clerics as a class above lay Catholics, consolidating a hierarchical Church under papal power and authority (Ballano, 2023).
The decree was a response to stem widespread sexual debauchery and to stop clerics from the pervasive transfer of Church property to wives, children and others, given that the Church owned about one-third of all cultivated land alone in Western Europe before 900 AD.
It also sought to prevent the hereditary transfer of religious office from father to son and to eliminate simony and clerical investiture that economically benefited mainly married clerics (Ballano, 2023), which split their loyalty between their feudal lords and the pope and weakened the Church (Hakari, 1999).
The denial of sex and marriage to clerics reflects a fear of and revulsion to sex and to women as enticers rather than valuing its natural, loving, nurturing, and life-giving dimensions. This has led conflicted clerics to enter and remain in consensual sexual relationships or leave the ministry with or without dispensation procedures that are physically, spiritually, emotionally, and legally tedious.
Sex in male-centered cultures is generally assumed to be a “biological and uncontrollable male drive,” that can be vented at will as a right. This combines with research-based profiles of clergy sex offenders who are often insecure men who may be successful, narcissistic, and sexually compulsive. It results in sexual abuse, including by some 21 popes throughout history, by asserting male, economic, social, religious, judicial and political power over women and children. In any event, clerical celibacy compromises chastity, integrity and humaneness.
Widespread sexual abuse
Well-documented survivor testimonies, investigative reports, Vatican statements and civil society databases highlight widespread sexual abuse. This includes sodomy and the rape of pre-pubescents, young children and minors often entrusted to the spiritual and socio-economic care of the clergy in Sunday schools, shelters, orphanages, schools, or engaged in church service; sexual abuse and the rape of vulnerable lay and religious women needing material and religious assistance, emotional, spiritual, or marital counseling; sexual extortion in property and money matters; clerics holding an entire congregation of nuns in sexual slavery leading to papal closure of the congregation; soliciting sex at confessionals from women and young children.
The cycle of abuse continues through the abusive outcomes of sexual violence — unwanted pregnancies, discrete birthing, siring illegitimate children – many given to orphanages, forced abortions, and discrete disposal/burial of fetuses.
However, regulations are rarely enforced against abusive clerics. Only a few are brought to trial, defrocked, or excommunicated after establishing guilt. Some priests deny having sex or abusive sex. Others insist it was consensual that they did not know the victim’s age, believed that the victim was much older, or blamed the victim for lying.
Many only admit abuse in the protective confidentiality of confessionals, saving their consciences with repeated absolutions, rendering it easier to continue abuse with confession readily available.
The Church’s silence
The Church hierarchy typically handles abuse allegations within its own moral and legal contours rather than turn them over to or cooperate with civil authorities to criminally investigate and prosecute.
Responses to complaints include silence, silencing whistle-blowers or diplomatic excuses and false assurances to placate complainants. Even so, many offenders continue their priestly functions and abuse at the same site, encountering their victims routinely.
When the chorus of complaints increases or when guilt is established, offenders may be morally censured, spiritually counseled, sent for retreats, psychological evaluations, and treatment, sometimes on assurance that canonical penalties would not be imposed if the offender cooperates with these measures and reports progress.
Most often, repentance and cooperation lead to reinstatement of priestly functions if they were temporarily suspended. Abusive priests are typically assigned to different parishes in-country or abroad, sometimes cloaking the reasons for transfers as “family or health” issues. Often the abuse continues in the new place.
As US-based ProPublica and Houston Chronicle said, “The Church’s ability to track abusive priests is more difficult internationally as the Vatican does not dictate what bishops must disclose about them, within the Church or to the public.”
Also, since 2018, many US-based Catholic dioceses/religious orders have released lists of clergy child sex offenders. Yet ProPublica’s own database shows these lists to be inconsistent and incomplete, with unspecified current status and location. Names are sometimes released decades after the confirmed abuse or when the offender is deceased.
The crisis of clerical celibacy and related Church accountability is a blatant transgression of faith woefully anchored in the doctrine of the sacrament of ordination as permanent, a fear of losing clerics and lay believers and eroding the Church’s image, power and assets (compensation to victims).
The people of God would be freed from the liability of defending clerical celibacy and the hierarchy’s malicious moves to protect offending clerics if celibacy and the priesthood were de-linked, and gender justice and women’s and all people’s rights were ensured in the Church.
*Dr. Jean D’Cunha is a gender expert with a continuing body of work on women’s labor migration and the links between gender, climate change, conflict and migration. She worked with UN Women in senior management and technical positions worldwide and retired as Senior Global Advisor on International Migration and Decent Work.