No one is more intellectually dishonest - and dishonest in other ways as well - than the bitter old men in dresses at the Vatican. Rather than allow married priests, over time the Church hierarchy has been willing to scrap the bottom of the barrel to find men willing to live the bizarre life of a Catholic priest that is devoid (at least in theory) of sexual intimacy. And we all know what the result of that policy has been: psychologically and emotionally disturbed clergy and a worldwide sex abuse scandal. Now with so-called vocations in the Church plummeting in the western world and reactionary Neanderthal Anglican and Episcopal parishes breaking off from their denominations over the issue of - gasp, gay clergy in committed relationships - the Vatican is willing to throw the celibacy requirement down the toilet for these renegade Anglicans/Episcopalians and allow married priests to join the ranks of the Catholic priesthood. Obviously, if celibacy were truly Christ ordained (i) it would not have taken 1000 years for the practice to emerge and (ii) the requirement would not be something to be waived under any circumstance. The New York Times has an editorial that looks at what will be the strange - and likely degrading - situation of the wives of Anglican/Episcopal priests who join the ranks of a Church that basically deems women as dirty and evil. Here are some highlights:[T]he Roman Catholic Church is prepared to house married priests in numbers perhaps not seen since the years before 1123, when the First Lateran Council adopted canon 21, prohibiting clerical marriage.
Now as then, the church’s critics and defenders are rehashing arguments about the implications of having married priests in an institution that is otherwise wary of them. But in the midst of these debates, we should pause to ponder the environment that the priests’ wives might expect to encounter. After all, the status of the priest’s wife is perhaps even more strange and unsettling than that of her ordained Catholic husband.
While the early Christian church praised priestly chastity, it did not promulgate decisive legislation mandating priestly celibacy until the reform movement of the 11th century. At that point, the foremost purpose of priestly celibacy was to clearly distinguish and separate the priests from the laity, to elevate the status of the clergy. In this scheme, the mere presence of the priest’s wife confounded that goal, and thus she incurred the suspicion, and quite often the loathing, of parishioners and church reformers. You can’t help wondering what feelings she will inspire today.
By the time of the First Lateran Council, the priest’s wife had become a symbol of wantonness and defilement. . . . . The priest’s wife was an obvious danger. Her wanton desire, suggested the 11th-century monk Peter Damian, threatened the efficacy of consecration. He chastised priests’ wives as “furious vipers who out of ardor of impatient lust decapitate Christ, the head of clerics,” with their lovers. According to the historian Dyan Elliott, priests’ wives were perceived as raping the altar, a perpetration not only of the priest but also of the whole Christian community.
The priest’s nuclear family was also seen as a risk to the stability of the church. His children represented a threat to laypersons, who feared that their endowments might be absorbed into the hands of the priest’s offspring to create a rival clerical dynasty. A celibate priest would thus ensure donations from the neighboring landed aristocracy. Furthermore, the priest’s wife was often accused, along with her children, of draining the church’s resources with her extravagance and frivolity.
[P]riests’ wives should beware a religious tradition that views them, in the words of Damian, as “the clerics’ charmers, devil’s choice tidbits, expellers from paradise, virus of minds, sword of soul, wolfbane to drinkers, poison to companions, material of sinning, occasion of death ... the female chambers of the ancient enemy, of hoopoes, of screech owls, of night owls, of she-wolves, of blood suckers.”
I cannot help but wonder about the mental state of women willing to assume such a detested role. They must be as psychologically damaged and filled with self-loathing as the twisted gay men who inhabit the ranks of the Catholic clergy.
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