Correspondence
CORRESPONDENCE 'DISABLED FOR THE KINGDOM': Readers Respond Brilliant, but wrong Irvington-on-Hudson, N.Y. To the Editors: Paul Dinter's article, "Disabled for the Kingdom" [October 12], was...
...The priesthood is at the core of the Catholic tradition because of the centrality of the Eucharist...
...However, I do not agree with the author because that same Holy Spirit has the church legislating to the contrary of his thesis...
...Without contradiction, both can be ways of perfection...
...MARTIN J. BURNE, O.S.B...
...Did Jesus envision that all those who followed him in a certain way would be labeled disabled in the sense in which Dinter has employed that term...
...Sadly, I find Father Mazziotta's mockery of modern love marriages to be misogynist (because women never are treated as full human beings in arranged marriages) and his disparaging of personal happiness as a goal for priests to be misanthropic (because a lot of clerical illness has been cloaked in the guise of sacrificing personal happiness for "duty" or even "faithfulness"-to the detriment of the members of Christ's body being abused by sick priests...
...In the boarding house/office building rectory, a celibate's own frustrations become magnified by close, unrelieved association with others serving the same life sentence of house arrest...
...This expression of celibate life has long standing in the tradition...
...Though it is anathema even to breathe it, I wonder if arranged marriages of the past were so objectionable after all...
...Dupont [1959], Q. Quesnell [1968]) argued that the text did not originally refer to a call to virginity or nonmarital celibacy...
...To the Editors: As a religious of fifty-four years and a priest of forty-eight years, I can identify with Paul Dinter's scholarly analysis of celibacy...
...1617) dressed in a Dominican habit, she was not a nun...
...Freud as villain North Easton, Mass...
...This can also happen by attracting to the seminary deeply flawed young men who could not make it in lay life...
...Today, since families that manage to remain families are usually nuclear, the burdens can seem overwhelming...
...4. If celibacy for diocesan priests is a pitiable state, the cause perhaps is not as much celibacy as it is depressing rectory culture...
...I offer three reasons: (1) Very shortly after the first married priest is minted, the first divorced priest will be negotiating an alimony agreement through his attorney...
...Given our society's obsession with sexual fulfillment, perhaps this independent expression of the charism-a charism still, so to speak, on the books- might well be revitalized...
...With the cultural revolution of the late 1960s and moving into the university area, where priests are simply treated as men on an equal footing with women, I came to a realization that religious life and priesthood had programmed me to live an unexamined, unhealthy life where human development is fixated at an adolescent level...
...DENNIS J. GEANEY, O.S.A...
...I have pushed for that all my life...
...Or may one recognize that there are special invitations in the Gospel that prompt believers in any age to follow the Lord in a certain way...
...The first signifies an honest effort to interpret a word, phrase, or literary passage...
...whenever there is a choice, the private realm is to be enhanced over the common realm...
...Ultimately, the question involves the kingdom: Is God's revelation a reality, and does the invitation of the Lord Jesus in the kingdom continue to exist in the twentieth century...
...To the Editors: Paul Dinter's article, "Disabled for the Kingdom" [October 12], was brilliantly written and offered insights into Scripture that must have been inspired...
...Freud who, for all his theoretical exaggerations and personal failures, taught us something about personal motivation, a lesson our cleric-ridden church has yet to internalize...
...If we are determined to propose a measure for all things, I ask, must that measure be personal happiness...
...While living at home, Rosa sold the beautiful roses of Lima to support herself and her many beautiful penances...
...Discussions on the matter of celibacy are certainly welcome, but not when the words of the Gospel are distorted...
...While reading Dinter, I felt as I did while watching Waugh's Brideshead Revisited...
...However essential his analysis of Matthew, Dinter risks suggesting that revelation ends with New Testament understanding...
...Too often the diocesan priest lives for the day each week when the ubiquitous white plastic tab at his neck can be laid aside, for the house on the shore, for the t ski vacation...
...Maybe waiting for the modern world to blow over, the church is reluctant to discard a feature of ordained ministry which has been so stabilizing to it because of a (momentary...
...I weep not for myself but for the church I love and to which I have dedicated my life...
...Accused of"eisegesis" and accommodating a passage of Scripture [Burne], I can only point out that Catholic exegetes long before me (J...
...To the Editors: Paul Dinter's article on the real meaning of celibacy puts the case beautifully and meaningfully...
...Our culture that sees sexuality as a positive force in human development is not going to reverse itself while the church is adamantly fixed in the dead past...
...Though Santa Rosa de Lima (d...
...Dogma Two: Priests, like married people, are entitled to be happy in their ministry and in their personal lives...
...5. Just for the record: Not every person called to celibacy is required to be a priest or religious...
...If we are afraid, we can use the tradition as a barricade against the modern world...
...Faithfulness...
...Thus, it seems to me counter to both the truth of celibacy and the will of God to refuse priesthood to women who see themselves as called to accept that state...
...If the word of God in Matt...
...As such, Ephrem witnessed to Christ, the only-begotten or "solitary" one of God...
...Any expectation that revelation through the words of Scripture somehow rides above the tide of history and escapes cultural or ecclesiastical conditioning is a fundamentalist, not a Catholic, perspective...
...Neither do I suggest "that revelation ends with New Testament understanding," nor that the tradition [small "t"] which "exalted virginity and celibacy" [Mazziotta] is anything but fallible...
...REV...
...They are not going to feign conformity to a church that is not credible in society...
...2) the restoration of high numbers of priests that a married clergy would accomplish would replicate the aberration of times past in which ordained priesthood became an omnivore, devouring every ministry in sight...
...Through the tradition's suppleness and strength, we can enter the future, if we are courageous...
...3) if women who serve full-time in positions of pastoral ministry are rightly frustrated when part-time deacons, because of ordination, enjoy definition to their ministry which women are denied, a caste of married part-time priests alongside a full-time ministry of unordained women would be an injustice far more aggravating...
...Whether they can actually pull off this double role successfully is another...
...Not monk or cleric, St...
...With the help of friends I was able to see my disabilities and turn my life and ministry around to become a committed wounded healer...
...Its honest assessment of the real heroism of a life against nature could, I should think, recruit more valid aspirants to the priesthood than any attempt to present celibacy as its own reward could possibly do...
...Missing factors Fruita, Colo...
...No room for heroines...
...Isn't his essay a social history of decline...
...lull...
...Ephrem the Syrian (d...
...Agreed: It is a tragedy of the tradition that no spirituality comparable to the one which served vowed chastity developed for vowed marriage...
...Imagine nurses living off hospital wards, teachers near classrooms, troopers in state police barracks, or judges in the warrens of a courthouse...
...PAUL E. DINTER...
...One wonders if any words of the Gospel have prompted Christians to follow the Lord Jesus in a very special way more than the words of Matthew 19:12: "There are eunuchs born so from their mother's womb, there are eunuchs made so by human agency, and there are eunuchs who have made themselves so for the sake of the kingdom of heaven...
...What must be realized is that those who are called to practice celibacy are guaranteed supernatural assistance...
...The tragedy will be that the lay people will have no theological education or wide pastoral experience because the leadership refuses to invest even modest sums in their education, even a small fraction of the subsidy to seminaries...
...But the Holy Ghost is not confined to the recitals of geometry...
...To uphold, as the tradition has, that chastity is the way of perfection is not to exclude other ways of perfection as well...
...Two objects- chastity and marriage-can occupy the same space...
...Is one now to believe that priests and consecrated virgins who have gone before us were dupes, and that the Lord Jesus meant his words only for certain centuries...
...His strident notice of splinters in the eyes of diocesan priests occurs at the price of overlooking beam-like offenses among his own vowed brethren...
...Diocesan priests would have more effective ministries and more faithful celibate lives, I believe, if they could live in their own t homes, or, if they so chose, in some challenging supportive community...
...The theologically uneducated lay people who will replace us as pastors could make our local churches fundamentalist, bringing us back to the pre-Tridentine church...
...JOHN KIERNAN The author replies: Whatever the value of celibacy in itself, "Disabled for the Kingdom" cited how problematic it has become as mandatory for those in ordained ministry...
...The challenge for the church is to be imaginative in supporting forms celibacy might assume today...
...MARIAN BURKHART A forced reading Morristown, N.J...
...To the Editors: Though it makes some incisive and accurate points, Paul Dinter's article omits several considerations that might have made a more balanced presentation, among them: The figure of Christ as initial motivator to imitation and sustaining example in moments of nail-biting crisis...
...Can a compromise be struck with the pope...
...But his work is, after all, an avocation...
...This is clearly the case with our understanding of John 3:3 ("Amen, Amen, I say to you, no one can see the kingdom of God without being born from above," cf...
...it also describes the tragedy of the latter...
...He has never been asked, as is a priest, to be all things to all men-and women, too...
...The history of abstention from sexual activity by liturgical representatives of both Old and New Testaments, and the consequent influence of this upon the emerging practice of celibacy in our fifth century...
...To me the article is also the most persuasive argument for the ordination of women I have thus far read...
...2. Contrary to Dinter, I believe the church is thinking about celibacy...
...That they are quite as likely to transcend this disability, no one who has been well served by nuns can deny...
...RICHARD MAZZIOTTA, C.S.C...
...If we all agree to celibacy, will he agree to blow up all rectories...
...Two benighted modern dogmas ensue...
...It is the same with people involved in a sacramental marriage...
...As candidates, the church contemplates those called to celibacy but not to membership in a religious congregation...
...I doubt that marriage has ever been an easy vocation, but at least at one time it was the expected vocation, and social mores supported this acceptance...
...373) was ayhydy, the Syriac word for "solitary...
...That priests should be able to marry is one thing...
...Essential to the Catholic tradition's "suppleness and strength" is its ability to correct itself and understand the content of revelation less inadequately...
...3. At this time, the church is unwilling to ordain married men to the priesthood...
...6. Though Dinter wrote on celibacy, all he said could well have been applied to marriage, too...
...Healthy young men are not going to enter a seminary that does not allow them to develop...
...If the tradition has facility at anything, it is at welcoming new views and then sustaining them in a fruitful balance against differing ones...
...Blessed Julian of Norwich (d...
...Some reflection on these factors might have helped Dinter bring added vision and balance to his worthwhile and very necessary effort...
...v 5) by which we no longer consign the unbap-tized to hell when they die, as we once did...
...It is a literal reading of Matt...
...We do not need a celibate male clergy...
...Dinter's article holds the promise of the former...
...These examples illustrate the flexibility regarding the living out of celibacy within the tradition...
...Perseverance...
...Lay people will become our successors...
...In sum, there are more grievous "culprits" than Dr...
...Of course, from almost any point of view, waiting for the modern world to blow over is like a disheartened 1940s radio announcer waiting for TV to blow over...
...WILLIAM E. REISIG The unexamined life Calumet City, 111...
...New York, N.Y...
...Persons who are deprived, of their own free will, have to use that will to pray daily...
...Prayer is so easy to put aside or postpone, always for apparently good reasons...
...And the general laws of psychology as these apply to choice...
...Dogma One: We are first to seek for marriage someone with whom we are in love, not first someone to whom we are suited in the long haul...
...The villainy that Freud and his revolution effected includes these persuasions: Our ultimate goal is personal happiness rather than duty...
...The culprit who began this process-and Dinter invokes his name at one point-is Freud...
...Without a life of which prayer is an important daily feature, neither priest nor married can be faithful...
...A person can have a vocation to the priesthood, as to any other calling, at a very early age, but one is not able to make a commitment to a life style until reaching an adult stage of psychosexual development, which I would place at a minimum of twenty-five...
...The Roman Ritual includes a little-used Rite for the Consecration of Virgins Living in the World...
...It is rectory living, not celibacy, that dehumanizes and causes havoc...
...1413) is only the most famous of an untold number of anchoresses who within the happy seclusion of church walls lived lives of devotion and prayer, freed of the constraints of family and religious community...
...To the Editors: Literary people, and especially literary people skilled in the interpretation of Scripture, often distinguish "exegesis" and "eisegesis...
...Let anyone accept this who can" (The New Jerusalem Bible...
...19:12 has been accommodated, it has been done by the hierarchy, not by this author...
...the individual is more important than the community...
...If we would be honest, we would not be so rash to condemn "our society's obsession with sexual fulfillment" without confessing our church's equally obsessive denial that sexual fulfillment represents a healthy natural "end" of a unique human capacity, i.e., nonreproductive sexual love...
...As is its wont, however, it keeps its own counsel...
...To the Editors: With respect to the article by Paul Dinter, I offer these observations: 1. Is Dinter advocating that Catholics now dismiss as inappropriate for modem times that counsel of the tradition which from Christian time immemorial has exalted virginity and celibacy...
...What about duty...
...Many times my husband has had to balance the obligations of the profession he loves against the obligations of the family he also loves, and, often, one or the other has had to give...
...19:12 that uncovers how distorted the text is when interpreted as exalting celibacy or virginity...
...Paul E. Dinter, I fear, is guilty of eisegesis in his article...
...Understood otherwise, I wish to offer some clarifications and response on Scripture, tradition, and the presumed "villainy" of Sigmund Freud...
...the second (Continued on page 734) CORRESPONDENCE (Continued from page 706) implies that the interpreter has accommodated things pretty much to her/his own wishes...
...it can trivialize the commitment to celibacy...
Vol. 117 • December 1990 • No. 21
