Disabled for the kingdom:

...But he said to them, "Not everyone receives [this] word, but only those to whom it is given...

...Pursuing such a calling beyond the level of how it makes one feel, through suffering to acceptance and possibly self-transcendence, is as noble a life-goal as anyone can come up with, a genuine expression of the mystery of the cross...

...Scripture scholars, such as Bruce Vawter, pointed out the tensions long ago...

...254), the spiritual realm was no longer construed as historically imminent...

...This piece of monastic lore, which the life and writings of Thomas Merton would support, begins to spell out some of the implications of the alternate model of celibacy as a natural disability which I am proposing...

...He invites the divorced disciple not to redress the loss by remarrying, but to use the loss of love and partnership as the occasion to transcend one's individual fate in favor of the kingdom's coming to birth in the community of disciples (19:29...

...Into the breach between the traditional sources of moral and religious wisdom and the habits of the sexually active population have marched all sorts of sexual fitness experts and the merchants of neurotic sexual "health...

...If it allows good to be accomplished and people to be served by providing surrogate fathers, mothers, sisters, and brothers to many in need of them, it is a tribute to the opportuneness and adaptiveness of grace, not to celibacy as an idealized nonsexual basis for relationships...

...But, Jesus could not be clearer that this level of self-transcendence is not common...

...Even though some recent notorious lapses have pointed up that private compromises with celibacy may be on the rise, any reevaluation must await the next millennium, or at least the next papacy...

...It teaches self-satisfaction and an arrogance which continually alienates the clergy from the laity whom they are supposed to serve...

...Today, obligatory clerical celibacy, while avoiding most of the professed "angelism" of the excesses of asceticism, has continued to treat complex spiritual and psychological realities too simply...

...As a clearly superior state in which, as "children of the resurrection," clergy and religious neither marry nor are given in marriage, celibacy became a sign that the end-time is realized here below, at least in the repudiation of sexual desire and generation...

...Eliot's Murder in the Cathedral and "do the right thing for the right reason," I continue to affirm my celibacy, but not because it is good in itself...

...Talented celibates act upon this paradox, whether they attend to it or not...

...He had to empty himself of any pretense of strength before his weakness could become the occasion for God's grace to transform his suffering into a new understanding of where his power really came from (2 Cor...

...Though a few young men with whom I worked are pursuing that discipleship to ordination, most are making their journey in faith beyond the bounds of celibacy, in committed relationships and marriage...

...Recognizing this unexpected reversal of values in my own life has led me to a very different evaluation of mandatory priestly celibacy...

...Predictably, sexual activity in and of itself guarantees neither health nor happiness, but things will only get worse until moral authority can face contemporary sexual understanding in other than cautionary and condemnatory terms...

...Providing them with assurances of the lightness of their actions, or of the spiritual superiority which their choice of celibacy indicates, or with the comfort of a covertly homophiliac subculture to keep them feeling secure will serve neither them nor the church well...

...Seeking to take Thomas Beckett's advice in T.S...

...Celibacy or virginity was an "eschatological" witness but it was inferior to martyrdom...

...Facing my needs in pastoral and personal relationships, I have sought to balance freedom and attachment in a way that promotes mutual growth in personal discipleship...

...Had he done so, he would not have chosen Simon Peter or a number of the others we call apostles...

...I think an honest reading of the only text in the Gospels in which Jesus speaks of celibacy will bear out this analogy and its paradoxical truth...

...Simplistic affirmation of celibacy as a heroic ideal, which requires only the will to accomplish (assisted by grace, of course), cuts a priest off from the wellsprings of redemptive suffering...

...This modern insight is contrary to the natural law's naive supposition that human nature, in general, is naturally heterosexual and that every person will function "normally" unless "perverted" from it...

...Other examples of the paradox of grace at the heart of the kingdom which Jesus announced give us an indication of the unique opportunity that came with the disability of divorce...

...While it varies from traditional Catholic thinking, it has implications for a more adequate moral and spiritual understanding of sexual issues today...

...Simple justice cannot require any of these extraordinary acts of self-abnegating agape...

...But this is also the reason priests today quietly refuse to involve themselves in the "feel good" promotions which try to entice male children and adolescents into a vocation to the priesthood by pandering to their immature emotional quest for an identity...

...Matthew 19:9-12 is the text that concerns us: "I say to you: whoever divorces his wife (except for immorality) and marries another commits adultery...

...A third, and related, consequence is the drop off in candidates for the priesthood from the ranks of heterosexually oriented young men...

...In the name of vindicating a traditional ideal of asceticism and perfect continence, it has flattened the paradox and presumed upon grace...

...Despite these exceptions, the hierarchy has been so immovable that priests themselves have generally accepted their lot...

...19:12 literally by castrating himself, but he later claimed that a rich, married man's martyrdom would have greater witness value than the martyrdom of a celibate like himself {Exhortation to Martyrdom, XV...

...it has to be achieved...

...He said that, despite their previous disobedience, the tax collectors and prostitutes are leading the high priests and elders of the people into the kingdom (21:31), and he prophesies that the Lord is working wonders by giving the vineyard to (of all people...

...The monastery functioned for them not as an arena for their heroic combat, but as a "safe house" on the underground railway...

...Not all will receive the capacity to do so, and none can arrogate the necessary energy by themselves...

...Jesus' teaching issues an invitation to the divorced to turn their broken marriage into an opportunity to associate more closely with God's plans for the renewal of creation in the dawning kingdom...

...When we remove the paradox from celibacy, we refuse to admit the extent to which celibates often need to be celibate, but that this disability can be redemptive and the occasion of grace for the individual and the community...

...Instead, I wish to draw out the force of the paradox in the celibacy/eunuch equation in Matt...

...Celibacy can do this by providing such individuals with a redemptive opportunity to achieve generativity in the community of faith despite their natural inclination not to take a partner for life and endure the risks of both intimacy and, then, parenthood...

...Consequently, Jesus' recognition that only some "to whom it is given" will accept the teaching has undergone a complete change of context...

...For them, genital sexual activity must remain latent until after marriage, a norm which originally developed in premodern, male-dominated cultures and, hence today, is honored mostly in the breach...

...If it is heroic, it is not because it preserves any of its practitioners from the normal range of neuroses which describe the human condition in this vale of tears...

...As neat and clean as the moral norms which flow from these natural law premises are, human beings in technologically informed cultures no longer understand nature or their sexuality in those traditional terms...

...Thus, even normal adolescent deviations in sexual matters are treated as "grave matter" for sin and all adult genital fulfillment remains pegged to the confines of monogamous heterosexuality, not as a developmental goal but as a natural and predetermined end...

...In verse 11, Jesus responds to his disciples' hasty conclusion that it would be better not to marry by assuring them that not everyone "receives" this teaching, only "those to whom it is given," that is, by God...

...But I am seeking to account for the changed context within which clerical celibacy functions today and to detail some of the problems and possibilities it is creating for the Catholic church...

...Many priests have come to know what they do not know...

...In the past, this general, but not intentional, dishonesty provided many men of unconscious homosexual orientation with a setting for a dignified and altruistic life which allowed them male company and a context in which they did not have to confront their homosexual preference or the larger society's disapproval...

...Damasus Winzen, O.S.B., the founder of Mt...

...Rather, they were monks in order to be saved...

...19:5-6...

...Unlike monastic and religious orders, where professed members choose their superiors, in the secular clergy the choice of leaders occurs through an unhealthy process we can call homophiliac mirroring...

...While Protestant Christianity rejected this accommodated "eschatological" tradition, and Eastern Orthodoxy reserved it for monks and bishops, Catholicism has become more rigid in its equation of celibacy with the realization of Christ's new humanity...

...Broad peer acceptance or leadership ability wins hierarchical suspicion and, therefore, the process of selection, precluding any genuine "discernment of spirits," resembles the ruling style of the pre-perestroika Kremlin...

...They not only had wives, but, as Paul observes in 1 Cor...

...Older hierarchs, themselves chosen for their ability to please their superiors, choose younger men who, in turn, fulfill their elders' needs to feel vital, successful, or validated for what they personally gave up by choosing celibacy...

...Today, celibate priests, like myself, who freely chose, and now more warily affirm their choice, would be even more affirmed if they could welcome colleagues not only from the ranks of those who, like themselves, chose to live their disability for the sake of the kingdom, but also from the ranks of those who have chosen sexual and spiritual companionship in marriage...

...Clearly, a shift of emphasis has occurred which has lost all sense of the paradoxical teaching that Jesus gave...

...But, by the time of Origen (d...

...I am not inferring that large numbers of priests are sexually active in some way...

...But church tradition has transformed this attitude completely...

...Sexual self-realization is not merely given as a natural capacity with a predetermined purpose or end already programmed into it...

...As a priest who has struggled to be reconciled with his own lack of progeny, I have come to recognize my own temptation to compensate for my frustrated paternity by building structures with and projecting my image onto the people I have been appointed to serve...

...When a man and woman join in marriage, God "yokes" them together as an image of his own creative fidelity with humanity...

...An individual's sexual identity is affected by the joint vicissitudes of both nature and nurture...

...But, as the Matthean and Pauline texts began to be mutually interpreted, Paul's greater urgency and his straightforward preference for celibacy-"I wish you were all as I myself am" (7:7)-have tended to dominate the paradoxical perspective in Matthew...

...To this assurance that God calls some to celibacy after a divorce (the original context of the discussion), Jesus adds one of his most paradoxical teachings regarding eunuchs "who have made themselves eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of God," adding again the note of optional reception, "Let the one who can receive this, receive it...

...Ironically, the dampened debate has coincided with the ordination of married men from the ranks of former Protestant clergy...

...When compulsory celibacy is compounded by compulsive compliancy in the clergy, it ends up attracting men who are comfortable with feeling dependent, disabled, and relieved at the possibility of being sexless agents of spiritual reality...

...But what seems clear is that the positive and straightforward equation of celibacy with a superior spiritual state has caused us to lose the paradoxical sense in which Jesus understood celibacy as equivalent to being disabled...

...For many others of a misogynist or gynophobic bent, the celibate priesthood provided a platform for the superiority they craved...

...But with the changes in the way society deals with matters sexual, the clergy are being "outed" from their various covert stances regarding what they euphemistically once referred to as de sexto (Latin for the "sixth" commandment...

...The "spiritual" realm hovered permanently over the "psychic" heavens, which themselves were higher than the realm of "nature" or matter...

...The phenomenon is not new...

...If celibacy is heroic today, it is so, not because it enacts a spiritual ideal which only the weakness of the flesh and the unfortunate need to regenerate the species exempts all Christians from attaining...

...These "kingdom" demands (in which Jesus' comparison of postdivorce celibacy and "castration" appears) all involve unlikely outcomes...

...Meanwhile, few moralists have paid adequate attention to the moral and spiritual challenges of a developmental understanding of sexual self-awareness...

...Being divorced and refusing to transgress against your marriage covenant, shattered though it is, responds to the same gift which allows someone to turn the other cheek, to walk the extra mile, to pray for your persecutors-in a word, to be able to act out of the same inner completeness or perfection as God does (5:48...

...Life on earth resulted from the tragic mixture of spiritual soul and material body...

...For Paul, "in the spirit" meant responding beyond the normal limits of the natural and historical ("the flesh") because of the Resurrection and the imminence of the eschaton...

...If it is heroic, it is because it allows men and women, in some way handicapped by their inability or lack of desire to achieve a successful and permanent emotional and sexual union with an opposite sex partner, to escape lonely isolation and pathological self-involvement...

...As Paul himself discovered, when pushed to his limit of strength, he had to rely on something beyond himself...

...My contention flies in the face of the recent habit of promoting celibacy in terms of the generosity and psychosexual maturity it requires...

...Nor does he impose it on all, for as he clearly said: "not all receive this teaching, but only those to whom it is given" (19:11...

...The lack of confidence of the clergy that I alluded to above is but a symptom of a deeper problem...

...Jesus saw the situation of a divorced person as analogous to the way Paul came to understand his "thorn in the flesh...

...rather it predisposes them more directly to neurotic extremes which celibates must struggle mightily to escape...

...Only those who uphold that image get chosen for high profile jobs in a diocese, and these are the same young monsignors who scale the ecclesiastical ladder of preferment...

...But, after Freud, we cannot pretend to understand the link in the same misanthropic sense which our neo-Platonic father in the faith expressed it...

...In other words, the good that I do as a priest is not a direct result of celibacy, but despite my celibate condition...

...This change has been absorbed willy-nilly by society at large...

...Vatican II actually construes this text as "open praise" which the Lord gave to those who imitate him by undertaking sacred celibacy {Presbyterorum Ordinis, 16...

...No doubt this is a welcome advance over an earlier deprecation of sexuality that equated its suppression with "perfect chastity...

...Tragically, this kind of celibate fits the psychological profile of one whose unadmitted neediness can lead to the pedophiliac abuse of either boys or girls which only now has come into the public eye...

...The paradox of grace works there too, different only in degree, not kind...

...Today, given the shift in consciousness and its concomitant discouraging of celibacy, more than the average number of candidates for the priesthood are likely to be men for whom a mature sexual identity is not firmly established...

...Hence, harmonious genital sexual union is always a victory over diffuse sexual energy and its dispersion towards deviations from the mainstream of genital heterosexuality...

...But, when Jesus refers what is a flaw in nature or a dread punishment to the condition of those who choose not to remarry after divorce, he proposes a jarring parable...

...This shift of emphasis involves a change from Paul's scheme that the end-time is dawning, but continues to overlap with this age not yet ended (cf...

...But the urgency seems greater for Paul because he thought that all options were conditioned by the imminent passing away of the world as he knew it (7:31...

...The celibate practices ministry analogously to the way a disabled person goes through life: in spite of a unique burden but with the opportunity afforded by his or her handicap...

...As more and more of them affirm the spiritual goals of achieving union with a like-minded woman with whom they can fulfill their natural and spiritual role as husband and father, their ineligibility for ordination has substantially reduced the number and quality of candidates for the priesthood...

...But it took another eight hundred years for celibacy to be mandated for the secular clergy...

...But, before celibacy can be linked to personal generosity or psychosexual maturity, we should look at it as Jesus himself presented it: celibacy is a disability...

...1 Cor...

...Divorce constitutes a grievous injury (especially when one is victimized or abandoned...

...The problem is compounded, then, because a system which forces adult men to remain compliant adolescents into their senescence cannot present to the church-at-large a model of leadership to which normally adjusted males will be attracted...

...Even granting the unintentional nature of the transgression, it is not without its evil effects...

...Divorce and remarriage throw doubt on God's faithfulness to creation (Matt...

...there too, different only in degree, not kind...

...13:4...

...It co-existed as a permanent possibility in the here and now...

...But just as truth is stranger than fiction, so life is more complex even than theology and church law...

...Jesus saw the divorced (perforce, mostly women) as similar candidates for turning around their weak position in society, not merely to accept their fate stoically...

...As an adolescent, Origen carried out Matt...

...only the surpassing justice which brings the law and the prophets to their fulfillment can demand them of the disciple (5:17-20...

...In our mentally and physically health-conscious society, it is hard to promote a calling which regularly makes one "feel bad...

...Rather, unlike the early monks who were almost all Origenists, this urban philosopher-bishop did not seek "white martyrdom" in the desert...

...Religious authority seems to be playing that role when it denies and resists this fundamental change in human self-awareness...

...Yet, as Barbara Tuchman argued so devastatingly in The March of Folly, significant historical changes have resulted from similar refusals to recognize a growing disparity between conventional ways of thinking and new religious and secular exigencies...

...One hundred plus years later, after Christianity had entered the mainstream of Roman society, Augustine chose celibacy for still different reasons: not because of the imminence of the eschaton nor because it anticipated spiritual existence in the here and now...

...Saviour Monastery in the southern tier of New York State, is quoted as telling his monks that their calling conferred no special status upon them...

...Those who accept their handicap and deal with it honestly develop creative and vivacious ministries which turn the humdrum of pastoral duties into community-building tasks that can change peoples' lives...

...Augustine linked sin, sexual generation, and human urinary and excretory functions (inter urinas et faeces nascimur) in a way that anticipated Freud by centuries...

...I will not discuss here whether this fresh reading of Matthew's text on postdivorce celibacy supports canon law's enshrining of the "indissolubility" of marriage...

...salvation meant the soul's escape from the flesh...

...Matthew has already told us, in the Sermon on the Mount, that the kingdom belongs to unlikely candidates: the poor in spirit and those persecuted for the sake of righteousness (5:3,10...

...According to Bernard Lonergan, this is the beginning of wisdom...

...the other a punishment worthy only of one's worst enemies, such as Paul would rhetorically inflict on his opponents in Galatians 5:12 ("Would that those who disturb you castrate themselves...

...This occurred when monastic spirituality and an increasingly juridical ecclesiology converged on this equation of sexual and worldly desire with the effects of original sin...

...It is impossible within the scope of this article to examine all of the reasons for this rigidity...

...The historical loss of the paradox which Jesus proposed in calling celibacy a disability brings me back to where I began: the issue of mandatory celibacy...

...Celibacy with no sense of paradox to keep it honest about itself will always tend to become a self-satisfied, but dishonest, ideology...

...His] disciples said to him, "If this is the case of a man with his wife, it is better not to marry...

...By contrast, natural law theories of sexuality continue to operate out of a basically mythological understanding of the natural destiny of ejaculated male semen for a female vulva...

...In other words, their monastic calling to be a solitary (monachus) in a supportive community of loners was a grace given to them to transform their natural tendency to marginalization into a virtue for themselves and for the church...

...But an honest presentation of a celibate vocation has to be able to confront this truth...

...When this scheme was read in a neo-Platonic vein, the "ages" were understood, not as temporally successive, but as atemporally inferior and superior "worlds" which coexist in time...

...Perhaps this is a great deal to attribute to a refusal to recognize the paradoxical, rather than the heroic nature of celibacy for the sake of the kingdom...

...By continuing to promote celibacy as a spiritual ideal in the late twentieth century, rather than recognizing it as a paradoxical mode of how grace works despite our human brokenness, the hierarchy has set itself against a change in human consciousness which sees sexuality in a different way than our Augustinian heritage has done...

...It prompts me to seek to reopen the closed debate because, though it can be a powerful witness to the paradox of grace, celibacy's continued requirement for priests is today injuring the Body of Christ...

...But increasingly, not only men, but women also have ceased to look to the clergy for counsel or follow the church's official line...

...In somewhat the same fashion Paul, in 1 Corinthians 7, fashioned an ethic of the end-time for both married and single people...

...the goyim that it might bear fruit (21:43...

...In the original, Jesus seems resigned to allow some to elect celibacy: "let the one who can receive this, receive it...

...only its exposure is as fewer parents and children engage in the denial of the brute facts...

...Yet, the surest way to guarantee adolescents a harder time "working through" their conflicts of self-discovery is for the parents to oppose their individuation at a fundamental level...

...Contemporary understanding has been shaped by the psychoanalytic insight that humans are originally disposed to a range of sexual deviations and that heterosexual behavior does not naturally occur...

...Similar to the Qumran covenanters and to rabbinic law which prohibited them to priests, Jesus prohibited second marriages because he understood marriage to replicate the covenant implicit in God's creation of humanity as both male and female...

...Today I value it, if at all, only in spite of itself...

...In the context of chapters 18-20 in Matthew's Gospel, this parable about celibacy accords with the reversal of the common order of things implied in the greatness of the "little ones" (18:1 -14) and in the demand to forgive "seventy times seven times" (15-22), coupled with the warning that God will withhold forgiveness from those who will not forgive (23-35...

...15:44...

...With the waning of sexually repressive norms, many adolescents and adults have selfishly misused their new-found freedom...

...it actually was thought to cancel or snuff out its sexual exigencies...

...By their trust that the "gift of celibacy" would always be generously bestowed by God and by their assurance that the "grace of fidelity" to celibacy would never be denied to those who ask, the bishops at Vatican II and since have effectively staunched any serious discernment on the part of the church (laity and clergy) about whether an exclusively celibate and male clergy can continue to serve the kingdom adequately within the changed conditions of the life of the church on the brink of another millennium...

...If it is legitimate to extend what Jesus said regarding one situation of possible celibacy to another, we should be able to draw some conclusions from the paradox Jesus proposes to help clerical celibates deal with their disability "for the sake of the kingdom...

...Priests today recognize that the idealization of celibacy does not correspond to the way most of them have to live and struggle...

...12:8-10...

...19:12 as this text has been accommodated by ecclesiastical tradition to undergird clerical celibacy...

...Matthew's Gospel, then, included Jesus' teaching against remarriage within a context of the eschatological demands of discipleship...

...In short order, Paul thought, matter would be universally spiritualized (1 Cor...

...In the present context, the official church's ideology of the surpassing nature of perfect continence has led us to a series of crises which few in the hierarchy and clergy have had the candor to admit...

...But this requires a genuine "turning around" of one's available energy precisely as a disabled person has to turn a natural loss into a gain which requires more than just coping...

...Society's traditional forces (those who stress "family-values") have reacted with irate disapproval to changes in moral norms...

...Some highly traditional, hold-the-line-at-all-costs members of the clergy and laity still look for every opportunity to reinsert their repressive understanding of the role of sexuality into their people's lives...

...Though I undertook celibacy as a "price to pay" for the opportunity to serve Christ's people, I have come to see that, in 1970, I was buying something different than I thought...

...In the spiritual and emotional world of Hellenistic body-denial and obsessive disgust with body fluids and genitalia, celibacy became a straightforward heroic ideal...

...To the present I continue to maintain the commitment I made, but with a different, a chastened attitude...

...Both celibacy and martyrdom represented a radical rejection of this world and the choice to live in a better world...

...For there are eunuchs who have been so from birth, and there are eunuchs who have been made so by men, and there are eunuchs who have made themselves so for the sake of the kingdom of heaven...

...let those who have the power to receive, receive it" (19:12...

...10:11...

...On the whole, the needs of the church for a committed laity, not my needs, have been served...

...Such is the paradox of grace: it does not merely add another layer to nature...

...9:5, "the other apostles and the brothers of the Lord and Cephas" took their wives with them when they traveled on mission (and seemingly drew allowances for them...

...In stark contrast, Jesus called a disciple who was divorced disabled from contracting a second marriage "for the sake of the kingdom...

...This gap between society's sexual mores and official Catholic theology has affected priests in several specific areas...

...There has been a general loss of self-confidence in the clergy as they are called upon to promote, not values, but moral judgments which they increasingly do not share with the hierarchy...

...Priests, who remain celibate today when the religious and cultural context of sexuality is so different from what it was up into the 1960s, have a unique burden to bear because they know far more about the conditions which make their celibacy paradoxical and graced...

...Jesus stresses these outcomes when he embraces the children (19:13-15), when he invites the rich man to sell all his possessions and become a disciple (16-22), when he shocks his disciples again by declaring wealth a hindrance for entrance into the kingdom (23-30), and his economically revolutionary parable of the generous vine grower and the jealous workers (20:1-16...

...If being celibate for the sake of the kingdom stems from the paradox of grace, legislating it as a requirement of priestly service amounts to institutional self-establishment, a refusal to live by the grace which we are confident God bestows...

...It has not been hard for them to do this, along with religious fundamentalists of all stripes, because society in general seems stuck at an adolescent level of "acting out" its newfound freedom in matters sexual...

...As "gift," it wrenches nature beyond its entropic self and carries it through to its end, not negating nature but expanding its capacities...

...Making oneself a eunuch for the sake of the kingdom corresponds to this divine reversal or paradox in the natural order...

...It develops as one possible result of the psychical inhibitions which occur in the course of maturation...

...But, consequently, grace does not elevate or perfect human nature...

...The one is a tragedy of nature...

...They also know that objecting to the official teaching violates the male clerical stereotype, for whom celibacy must always be at least valued, if not a joy...

...He came to call sinners to the table of God's mercy, not the righteous who presume they have a reservation waiting for them (9:12-13...

...Though I risk being misunderstood, I think it is possible to characterize the basis for this change by citing a fundamental psychoanalytic insight...

...For him, celibacy meant cutting himself off from sexual desire and worldly affairs, themselves the result of Adam's freely committed sin from which humanity still suffered, chiefly via concupiscence {Confessions, VIII, 6-10...

...But turning devastating injuries like divorce, physical coercion or violence, racial or group animosity, or even persecution from liabilities into virtues has to be "given" to one, as Jesus said...

...But formerly whispered-about problems are increasingly in the headlines today and they are negatively affecting the whole Catholic body, not just the clergy...

...But, seeking to present celibacy without the paradox of how it seeks to transform sexual weakness, incapacity, or unwillingness into spiritual ability or strength, our theology has had to assume that the spiritual strength necessary to live a celibate life came from outside of our human condition through an "infused" grace of office or state in life...

...Two decades ago, when I undertook the commitment to celibacy, I presumed I knew what it entailed and I sincerely aimed to do it right-to be intimate yet chaste, available but not overinvolved, vulnerable without wearing my heart on my clerical shirt-sleeve...

...The growing hierarchical refusal to tolerate, not theological, but policy dissent, and the stifling of legitimate plurality only narrows the ranks of those chosen to exercise pastoral leadership...

...Fortunately, many of the laity I have worked with have valued their own autonomy and led me to a deeper sense of my capacity for leadership in spite of any mutual transferring of needs we may have engaged in...

...that is, they were like alcoholics in a recovery program...

...Those who do not retaliate and who widen their love of neighbor to love of enemy (5:38-48), and those who make themselves as lowly and abused as defenseless children are the ones Jesus calls great (18:4...

...This is necessary, first, in order to appreciate that, unlike Paul, Jesus did not express an opinion, or give a teaching, expressly preferring lifetime celibacy to marriage for his followers...

...Today, we have overwhelming evidence that divorce, marital infidelity, incest, pedophilia, and other less severe difficulties in achieving appropriate interpersonal and sexual functioning result from "vicissitudes," such as sexual or other forms of narcissistic abuse which have been sustained in early development...

...No one in the original audience could have misunderstood the plain sense of the first two examples, sexual defect at birth or castration...

...Clerical celibacy can be an occasion for such a journey, but neither celibacy nor the priesthood, nor even the two combined as the clerical caste attempts to do, can supply an adequate sense of identity if nature and nurture have not adequately installed it in the personality...

...When we eliminate the paradox of the cross and replace it with the heroics of suffering as good in itself, we eliminate the need for ongoing discernment and reflection on the roots of an individual's vocation and we risk creating a self-satisfied bureaucracy of bachelors in charge of a diminished spiritual community...

...Secondly, this has been accompanied by a loss of their credibility as counselors and confessors in this complex area of people's lives...

...To understand the force of Jesus' paradoxical identification of celibacy with disability, it is necessary-at least for a time-to suspend judgments "for" or "against" clerical celibacy...

...Let the one who can receive this, receive it...