AND ANOTHER THING
The real rights and wrongs of sacerdotal celibacy
PAUL JOHNSON
The transgressions of Bishop Wright of Argyll have been exploited by the enemies of the Catholic Church — mainly, it must be said, garrulous journalists and television pundits not remarkable for their celibacy, sobriety and disinterestedness — to bad- mouth the entire priesthood and to predict that the rule of sacerdotal celibacy will soon have to be scrapped. Nothing could be further from the truth. The Catholic Church is likely to accept women priests, not within the lifetime of the present Pope though probably soon afterwards, but these fortunate ladies will have to be unmarried and celibate. The rule against women priests will go simply because there is now nothing to be said for it and a great deal to be said against it. But a celibate priesthood will remain the rule because it makes eccle- siastical and spiritual sense.
The truth is, having an unmarried clergy able to devote its entire physical, emotional and social energies to the service of God and His people has been an enormous asset to Catholicism. It helps to explain why the Church has lasted nearly 2,000 years, has spread to every part of the world and is the largest religious organisation in existence, with over a billion members, and growing fast. On the eve of its third millennium it is in pretty good heart and, except in coun- tries like Britain with a sex-mad media, there is no widespread demand for this highly successful rule to be changed.
No one supposes creating and maintain- ing a celibate priesthood has been easy. The Orthodox Church gave up the struggle and allowed its lower clergy to marry one reason why it has failed to carry its faith much beyond its original area of set- tlement. But Rome insisted on celibacy from early times and persisted in enforcing it until the rule was generally kept. It finally stamped out clerical marriage and concubi- nage in the 11th-12th centuries and the results were well worth it. I doubt if the great mediaeval cathedrals, for instance, would ever have been built had there been married canons and deans and bishops crowding the closes and thinking chiefly of building comfortable quarters for their spouses and broods. Naturally priests and even bishops were occasionally incontinent. In the late Middle Ages there was a numer- ous category of bastards born to furtive unions of priests and monks with meretri- cious women, occasionally even nuns — the great Erasmus was the fruit of one such encounter — and this evidence of clerical frailty was one of the scandals which led to the Reformation. But Rome rightly refused to drop the celibacy rule. On the contrary: a prime object of the Counter-Reformation was to reinforce it. The work of that great bishop, St Charles Borromeo, in founding the earliest seminaries and devising train- ing programmes for a celibate priesthood was successful in producing a less corrupt, more learned and (for the first time) pro- fessional clergy.
Not that the mediaeval clergy — priests, monks and nuns — were particularly unchaste. When Henry VIII determined to loot the Church in the 1530s, Thomas Cromwell and his unscrupulous agents did their best to come up with unsavoury sto- ries and statistics to justify the King's rapacity, but they did not produce much evidence which was not suspect. It was, and is, easy for men to accuse cloistered nuns of being frustrated and lubricious, but the evi- dence showed otherwise. Of the thousands of nuns professing castimony, Cromwell's inquisitors found only 38 who had borne children; 27 of them were accused of incon- tinence, but the fact that all but ten of these were subsequently given crown pensions suggests that the charges were found to be unfounded. Ten out of so many! All Cromwell found was a mare's nest, and in the north, where people were more outspo- ken and courageous, many nuns protested that Cromwell's agents had attempted both to seduce them and to force them to com- mit perjury in testimony against their sis- ters.
Lifting the celibacy rule would not, in any case, guarantee a more continent clergy. The infant Anglican Church sold the pass on celibacy in the mid-16th century much to the disgust of that wise virgin Queen Elizabeth I — but the surrender has not spared that weak and now visibly failing Church from an endless succession of sex scandals, what might be called its Rector of Stiffkey syndrome. And now, increasingly, Anglican parsons are getting divorced and `So is that "no comment" or a dramatic pause?' even seeking to remarry, while remaining in orders and enjoying their benefices. A lot of the failings of the Anglican episcopate spring from the demands — and vetoes of prelatical wives. The unfortunate deci- sion to send David Jenkins to Durham was made only after three other clerics had turned the job down, allegedly because their wives refused to live up there.
It is a myth that sacerdotal celibacy imposed impossible demands. That is true, as events showed, of syneisactism, the prac- tice of celibate men and women living together in unisex convents, which was accordingly abandoned. But on the whole surprisingly large numbers of men and women find it possible to live dedicated lives without marriage or any form of sex. I have known many members of religious orders, and talked to them about their vows. They have all told me that vows of chastity and poverty were fairly easy to keep, and became easier; after a time they ceased to think of such things. What was much more difficult were vows of obedi- ence — to obey without protest foolish orders from superiors who were manifestly not their intellectual equals. That, if any- thing, became more oppressive as they got older.
Old and wise priests, both regular and secular, say that the only things which make celibacy really difficult, and disturb young and middle-aged priests, are the constant rumours that the rule is to be abandoned, especially when such rumours are bolstered by speculations from senior clergy. It is a wicked thing for a Catholic bishop to say that priests will eventually be allowed to marry. What made Roderick Wright a bad bishop was not so much his affairs, or his illegitimate child — for the sins of the flesh are comparatively minor compared to cleri- cal pride, rebelliousness and the teaching of false doctrine, and an adulterous bishop may still do good work, as many historical examples testify. Bishop Wright's real sin was to state publicly, on more than one occasion, that the Church would be forced to change its mind and allow priests to marry. That was false and mischievous. All of us, except the people he directly wronged, will soon have forgotten all about Bishop Wright, but if one thing is reason- ably sure it is that the Catholic clergy will still be unmarried at the end of the third millennium, as they have been throughout the first two.
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