The earth-shaking humiliation of the sex scandals must have made fighting the Crusades, carrying out the Inquisition, and surviving the decline of spirituality in the modern world seem like easier propositions for the Church to deal with compared to the sex scandals. The scandals are creating serious doubt about the Church’s ability to achieve what it has always set out to accomplish, which is to spread the Word of Christ so as to gain more converts.
Many Catholics and non-Catholics believe that the only way for the Catholic Church to rescue its declining preeminence in the face of these sex scandals is for the Vatican to rescind its time-honored rule of celibacy for priests. The rule of celibacy is one of the defining themes of the Church, one that has been beyond public dispute among its most devoted members, that is, until the last few decades or so. The enactment of the rule among Catholic priests had proven so efficacious over the centuries that it reached the point where it was inconceivable in churchgoers’ minds that priests could ever be guilty of sexual abuse.
But who and what orchestrated the celibacy rule for priests in the first place? On what moral or philosophic grounds does the Catholic Church try to stand it on? To understand what orchestrated the rule, one has to go back to the time of Classical Greece when the great philosopher Plato was expounding his famous ideas on the Theory of Forms and the Theory of Knowledge. Plato also expressed his belief that the body acted as a mortal prison for the soul and that it sidetracks the soul from attaining truth and knowledge.
Eight centuries later, Platonic philosophy would take on a Christian form as Saint Augustine, one of the Fathers of the Church, “Christianized” Platonic teachings, particularly the teaching about the body being the prison of the soul. In the depths of his conversion to the Christian faith, Augustine longed for the soul to be free from the sinfulness of bodily desires so that it could ascend upwards towards the spiritual province. Hence, Augustine became what Nietzsche would later call one of the “despisers of the body,” an ascetic being who saw what were innate bodily desires as morally corrupt. For Augustine, sexual desires, however natural to a human being they were, were an anathema. Incidentally, this call for rigid sexual abstention by Augustine came in the wake of his religious conversion, which was preceded by lengthy addictions to prostitutes, gambling, and alcohol consumption.
Augustinian philosophy would become a key pillar of Christian thought as the power and influence of the Church developed through the Middle Ages to the advent of the Renaissance period. But there was an economic dimension to the rule of celibacy that is rarely mentioned. Prior to the start of the Middle Ages, the Church accumulated a great deal of property. The Church though, was concerned that priests, who were still permitted to have wives at the time, would allow their children to inherit church lands belonging to them as individual priests. The obvious potential for a major income shortfall here was not lost on the Church. As the Church was confronted with this looming crisis, Pope Benedict VIII intervened in the 11th century by prohibiting priests from passing down property rights to their children. He went one step farther by declaring that priests could no longer cohabit with women.
Catholics may be tempted to ask how could such an inviolate rule be buttressed by something as petty as financial concerns. For centuries, it has been widely assumed among the general Catholic laity that the Holy Church is, and has always been, above and beyond the realm of material ambitions. After all, did not Jesus Christ himself renounce a life of material wealth?
Critics of the Holy Church are determined to appropriate the truth out of some of the institution’s mythologically-structured histories, histories that they claim the Church has put forth as the truth in the spirit of employing a suspension of disbelief in the minds of its followers. This goes to the heart of the problem of what historically inspired the rule of celibacy. Contemporary Church leaders are not likely to admit up front that financial reasons were also behind the introduction of the celibacy rule, a rule that has no obligatory justification in the Holy Scriptures. Hence, the necessity of what is the Church’s selective history, the ultimate credulity of which was its own vindication as it instilled a sense of spiritual legitimacy among the Catholic faithful.
It was probably hard to predict in the 11th century that the celibacy rule would centuries later secure an unsavory place in the Catholic Church’s history. This observation follows from the mounting assertion that the sex abuse scandals in the Church are the result of the perpetrators being denied sexual relations and gratification, two things that are as natural to human beings as eating and sleeping.
If critics of the Church’s handling of the sex abuse scandals had it their way, they would resort to abolishing, or least amending, the rule of celibacy altogether. The rule is said to be a major reason why the Church is experiencing trouble in recruiting new priests. Furthermore, it is the rule, they say, that has had the effect of sexually-repressing priests, thereby turning them into sexual deviants, a Freudian interpretation to be sure, but one that deserves further examination.
The Vatican maintains that the rule of celibacy is not responsible for any sexual perversion whatsoever within the priesthood and that each case was a matter of the individual priest’s moral character. This defense, which is full of contradictions, has been coupled to Pope Benedict XVI whose alleged culpability in helping cover up the scandals has come under increased scrutiny. Indeed, the Pope and the rest of the Vatican leadership have left much to be desired in how they have responded to the scandals. Consequently, the Church has suffered a torrent of serious damage. What Church leaders still do not seem to realize is that they are spawning a perilous representation of the Church that supersedes the institution’s sanctified themes, narratives, and symbols that have been served up over the millennia.
ALLEN GABORRO
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