Celibacy – What’s to be said?

Some years ago, an op-ed piece appeared in the New York Times by Frank Bruni, entitled The Wages of Celibacy. The column, while provocative, was fair. Mostly he asked a lot of hard, necessary questions. Looking at the various sexual scandals that have plagued the Roman Catholic priesthood in the past years, Bruni suggested that it was time to re-examine celibacy with an honest and courageous eye and ask whether its downside outweighs its potential benefits. Bruni, himself, didn’t weigh-in definitively on the question. He only pointed out that celibacy, as a vowed lifestyle, runs more risks than are normally admitted. Near the end of his column he wrote, “Celibate culture runs the risk of stunting [sexual] development and turning sexual impulses into furtive, tortured gestures. It downplays a fundamental and maybe irresistible human connection. Is it any wonder that some priests try to make that connection nonetheless, in surreptitious, imprudent and occasionally destructive ways?”

Necessary

That’s not an irreverent question. It’s a necessary one. We need the courage to face the question, Is celibacy, in fact, abnormal to the human condition? Does it run the risk of stunting sexual development?

Thomas Merton was once asked by a journalist what celibacy was like. I suspect his answer will come as a surprise to pious ears because he virtually endorses Bruni’s position. His response, “Celibacy is hell! You live in a loneliness that God himself condemned when he said: ‘It is not good to be alone!’” However, that being admitted, Merton immediately went on to say that just because celibacy is not the normal human condition doesn’t mean it cannot be wonderfully generative and fruitful, and that perhaps its unique fruitfulness is tied to how extraordinary and abnormal it is.

I have been deeply nurtured, as a Christian and as a human being, by the lives of vowed celibates”

What Merton is saying, in essence, is that celibacy is abnormal and dooms you to live in a state not willed by the Creator. But, despite and perhaps because of that abnormality, it can be particularly generative, both for the one living it and for those around him or her.

I know this to be true, as do countless others, because I have been deeply nurtured, as a Christian and as a human being, by the lives of vowed celibates, by numerous priests, sisters, and brothers whose lives have touched my own and whose ‘abnormality’ served precisely to make them wonderfully fruitful.

Attraction

Moreover, this particular abnormality can have its own attraction. I once served as a spiritual director to a young man who was discerning whether to join our order, the Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate or to propose marriage to a young woman. It was an agonising decision for him. He wanted both. And his discernment, while perhaps somewhat overly romantic in terms of his fantasy of both options, was at the same time uncommonly mature.  Here (in words to this effect) is how he described his dilemma:

My dad died before we reached the hospital. As tragic as this was, there was an element of beauty in it. My dad died in my mother’s arms”

“I grew up in a rural area and was the oldest in my family. When I was fifteen years old, one evening just before supper, my dad, still a young man, had a heart attack. There were no ambulances to call. We bundled him up in the car and my mother sat in the back seat with him and held him, while I, a scared teenager, drove the car on route to the hospital some 15 miles away. My dad died before we reached the hospital. As tragic as this was, there was an element of beauty in it. My dad died in my mother’s arms. That tragic beauty branded my soul. In my mind, in my fantasy, that’s how I want to die – in the arms of my wife. Given the grip of that fantasy, my major hesitation about entering the Oblates and moving towards priesthood is celibacy. If I become a priest, I won’t die in human arms. I’ll die as celibates do – held in faith but not held in human arms.”

But one day in trying to discern all of this, I saw another picture: Jesus didn’t die in the arms of a spouse; he died lonely and alone. I’ve always had a thing about the loneliness of celibates and have always been drawn to people like Soren Kierkegaard, Mother Theresa, Dorothy Day, Thomas Merton, and Daniel Berrigan, who didn’t die in the arms of a spouse. There’s a real beauty in their way of dying too!

Dangers

Bruni is right in warning that celibacy is abnormal and fraught with dangers. It does run the risk of stunting sexual development and especially of downplaying a biblically mandated fundamental human connection, namely, the fundamental anthropological dogma contained in the story of God creating our first parents and his pronouncement that it is not good (and dangerous) to be alone!

Celibacy does consign one to live in a loneliness that God himself condemned, but it is also the loneliness within which Jesus gave himself over to us in a death that is perhaps the most generative expression of love in human history.