Once upon a time there was a man of God called Jesus. He announced to the oppressed of his land the good news of the establishment of a revolutionary new order for men and human society. He spoke of this in terms of the establishment of the reign of God in the lives of individuals and among men. He proclaimed this news in his personal style of life and behavior as well as in his conversation, and he practiced what he preached. He was so consistent that he died rather than compromise his commitment of obedience and openness to the will of God and loving service and responsiveness to his fellow men.
Jesus not only provided us with insight, vision, and truth; he not only taught us and displayed a way of life leading to full liberation, maturity, and self-realization as a son of God, but shared with us his own spirit and vitalized our human efforts so as to bring us to a new quality and intensity of life.
During his life, Jesus’ magnetic personality, attractive style of life, and clear, strong teaching won him many friends and admirers (and enemies, too). Gradually he won many disciples; he gave them much attention and concern and asked them to commit themselves to allowing God to reign in their lives and to share with others what they had received from him. In effect, he was promoting a total restructuring and renewal of the whole of human society; the implications of his teaching were gradually appreciated in later years.
In the land where Jesus lived, some of his coreligionists were prompted to live quiet and peaceful lives in community at the edge of the desert. Even though they sprang from a tradition of esteem for virility and family, some of them were inclined to seek their fulfillment and creative self-expression in a special commitment to God and community service. Perhaps their motives were partly rooted in quirks of personality, in the pressures of their troubled times, as well as in the insistent demands of the Lord himself. Who can say, whether in this or in similar situations?
In the culture of the ancient Eastern lands many traditions had been developing, particular to and distinctly of those times and places. For example, in some societies the castration of men was accepted for certain reasons, and eunuchs had special and distinctive roles. One practical task was that of harem attendant; for a man jealous of his many wives a reliable eunuch was a useful collaborator. Eunuchs often held the most prominent administrative and military positions in governments; for a king jealous of his authority and fearful for his throne, a man necessarily without dynastic ambitions was a great help. In the East the curious concept developed of some men becoming eunuchs for the sake of the service of the kingdom.
Jesus himself, of course, was no court official or eunuch; as a matter of fact he never married, although he certainly was a man who loved and was deeply loved. He spoke of an ideal of men committing themselves, as though they were eunuchs, to the service of the kingdom of God, and his life displayed this kind of generosity and strength of purpose.
The disciples of Jesus certainly esteemed a life rooted so deeply in God that it found no time or inclination to marry and raise a family. Not only had they been challenged to this ideal by the teaching and example of Jesus, but their own Jewish and Eastern traditions supported the ideal in some measure. Another influence in their attitude towards marriage and the family was a peculiar and aberrant view of sexuality. Although the Hebrew traditions were reasonable and integral in their concept of man, the Greco-Roman world and culture in which the followers of Jesus multiplied was deeply affected by a philosophy of man overly emphasizing the spiritual, at the price of a gradual disparagement of the corporeal, quality of his nature. Some idealistic men tended to contemn sexuality just as, curiously, others from similar reasons tended to distort and overindulge it.
At any rate, over the years certain distinctive life-styles began to develop among the followers of Jesus, involving a commitment to the single, celibate life. Whether out of an attitude of escapism, a psychological inability to bear with the urban society of the day, a literal acceptance of the Gospel’s counsels, or a deep hunger for uninterrupted attention to God, his designs, and his creation, some men went to the deserts and lonely places to be solitaries.
As their fame grew, they attracted attention, admirers, and followers, and for a while this pattern of solitary life grew and deeply touched the feelings of those who saw in such a style a strength and commitment to God that they were incapable of. Curiously enough, then, these hermits who put themselves on the margin of human society ended with a real social function after all!
Over the years this eremitical style gradually expanded into another: small fraternities or communities of celibates sharing some aspects of their life and work together. This development apparently became consolidated into what came to be known as the “monastic life’. But, in this style several new notions and tendencies were at play. The monastery was first a stable community, and it saw itself at the service of the Lord by the quality of its life and prayer, and at the service of men by witnessing to the possibilities of human association in the Spirit, and by providing an oasis of spiritual refreshment in an increasingly arid world.
Perhaps it was this latter awareness that led to monasteries growing closer to civilized centers; the desert is not so much the wasteland as the wasted human society without the light and life of Christ. At any rate, the monastery soon became a center of civilization, and the community of celibates saw themselves more and more with a responsibility and service to others outside.
Jesus’ original followers saw themselves not only as his disciples and spiritual heirs but as collaborators in his mission. This view sprang not only from the contagious enthusiasm for the kind of life they lived but from the Lord’s own mandate. He had commissioned them all, and particularly his twelve special disciples, to witness to his teaching by word and example and so to spread the kingdom of God among men.
One of the distinctive qualities of the life of Jesus was service. He constantly displayed a disposition to place himself at the service of others, and he held forth to his followers the ideal of total service as the greatest stature of a man. His teaching was that loving service of God and men knows no limits of quality or of quantity; he offered the example of even menial attention to others and of total self-divestment, even to the gift of his own life. In a day when the Messiah was being sought as the King, Jesus revealed him as the Suffering Servant and called on his followers to serve in the same way.
This sense of mandated service and of mission sparked and drove his followers. Not only did they place themselves at the direct service of the Word by their teaching and preaching, but the quality of their lives gave testimony to God’s reign as well. They counseled and consoled one another, prayed and suffered together, shared their possessions and waited upon one another. Loving service became the identifying mark of the early Christian community.
Although all Christians shared the one responsibility for the spreading of the kingdom, each could not do all things. Jesus himself had picked certain men to have a special share of responsibility for the common mission and a particular role of service. Gradually a variety of specialized services or ministries developed in the early Christian community. Some were outward-directed in the sense they involved an approach to Jews and Gentiles who did not know Christ; others were inward-directed and were services of administration, coordination, and organization of the Christian community itself, ranging from presiding at the Eucharist to managing its monies.
From an unconscious blending of several roles and functions—the Old Testament offerer of sacrifice, the proclaimer of God’s will to men, the disciple of Jesus, the apostolic servant, the presbyter-bishop, the presider over the Eucharist—gradually emerged the figure we know as a priest. At first he was a married man or single, and he worked at this priestcraft only sometimes or constantly. But, within a short time, as stable Christian communities flourished, the need for permanent and fully committed persons with public responsibility became felt. Soon the priests and other ministers, married or single, became a kind of class within the Church.
With the establishment of the Christian way as the state religion in the fourth century, Christian communities became legitimate, multiplied, and were a visible presence in the larger society. Their committed workers and leaders took on a certain civil status and authority. In a world whose tradition identified authority civil and sacred, priests and other ministers became public functionaries of a new, Christian society. As the affluence and influence of the Church developed, the inward-directed dimensions of ministry loomed ever more important. Also, as society at large became more Christian, the parameters of civil and ecclesiastical society blended as one, and the outward-directed, apostolic functions of ministry, became more rare. The result of all these changes was the gradual bureaucratization of the ministerial class into a kind of ecclesiastical civil service, a corps of churchmen known as the “clergy”.
A necessary concomitant of this evolution was that the role of the priest gradually merged with that of the priest-cleric; the demands of being churchman pressed upon the root vocation to be a man of God. The Church, of course, is the assemblage of servants of the Lord, but inevitably the Church needs to be served as well. Whether out of a confusion of the Kingdom with the Church, the instrument for its promotion, or whether out of the decay of classical society and the stratification of roles in the Dark Ages, the concept of the clerical priest became a familiar and comfortable one, and he gradually assumed more and more of the responsibilities that once were the prerogative of every Christian.
In spite of this institutionalization of the priest’s role, the functions of the ministry were never conceived of as separate from the person of the minister. Demands were made upon the priest to live a certain quality of life and display a certain degree of holiness appropriate to the dignity and sacredness of his calling and functions. If he held most of the Christian responsibilities in a preeminent way, then he preeminently should be a disciple of Christ. Especially, he should be celibate.
The ideal of celibacy for the priest had a variety of roots. Jesus the one Priest of the new dispensation, never married. Also, the Lord himself counseled celibacy for the sake of the kingdom, and the example of so many religious communities testified to the permanence of this ideal. Beside lesser considerations of a socio-political or economic nature, a major influence on the development of the ideal was the Old Testament concept of a ritual, priestly purity whose spirit was not entirely unrelated to the strange and distorted notions of sexuality and sexual morality that had developed in the West. Celibacy was seen above all else as continence, and continence as an abstention from a necessarily polluting and profoundly worldly desire and behavior. The Hebrew priest, the pagan priest, and preeminently the Christian priest, needed to be a man of God,a man apart, a purified man; accordingly he had to renounce or abstain from sexual behavior.
Another current of influence was the development of the religious order priests. Monasteries had their priests—were they not Christian communities, too? As time went on, because of the esteem for the dignity of the offerer of the Eucharist and the administrator of the sacraments, more and more monks became priests. Another style of priest was developing, closer to its roots as disciple and apostle, and deeply tied to another ideal of celibacy as it had developed in turn from a variety of perceptions and situations—the priest-monk.
The monastic priest paradoxically enough was a layman; that is to say, he first rooted his vocation in the general discipleship of Christ and was not a publicly commissioned leader and civil servant of the ecclesiastical community. But as the monasteries corporately became the prime institutions of the Church, as the roles of service of the monks to the outside community flourished, and as the quality of clerical priests declined, the monastic priests gradually slipped into new roles and a new consciousness. Soon they too were taking on the character of official representatives of the Church, and imperceptibly the ideals of the monastic priest were projected upon the clerical priest. Not only did he need to be continent, but he was expected to have the ideal of religious consecration as well.
From all of this, a still more complex style began to become dominant: the apostolic-clerical-celibate priest that is basically still with us today. In later centuries,. the notions. of religious life took on more apostolic and active dimensions, and common life and a seminary experience of religious community became ideals for the clergy. So, our contemporary inheritance is a blend of many diverse styles, purposes, and institutions with their necessary confusions, tensions, and contradictions. The canonical distinctions between secular and religious clergy and definition of the religious state offer little assistance to separate the tangle.
Today the celibacy of the Catholic priesthood is being widely questioned, yet often enough the questions are posed in semantically meaningless terms. To ask if the “priest” should be celibate is contradictory in itself, since celibacy is part of our very notion of “priest”; what needs to be asked is whether the blending of several institutions over the centuries—each in turn complex and highly evolved—ministry, priesthood, clergy, and religious life, into the present canonical institution of the clerical, celibate minister is necessary or necessarily wise.
The commitment to celibacy for the sake of the kingdom of God in its dimension of service and witness is a great and precious gift for the whole church community. Individuals prompted by the Spirit and endowed with this charism may well be selected to preside at the Eucharist and provide other sacramental and magisterial services. But the institutionalized charism of evangelical celibacy is now coming to be more clearly seen as the distinguishing characteristic of religious life, not priesthood as such. The notion of celibacy associated historically with priesthood was more that of cultic purity. In today’s post-Freudian world, such a notion has lost much of its meaning.
In the personal development of his vocation, the religious priest first vows to live by the evangelical counsels and then later receives official ministry from the Church. Curiously, the secular priest first is tonsured and received into the clergy, and then, after several minor ministries are given him, he is asked to pledge celibacy as a condition for being ordained for the service of the diocese. The celibacy asked of him is really a defining condition for permanent entrance into the clerical state, and is more for the service of the Church than of the kingdom.
One of the richnesses of the early Church was the great variety of ministries and gifts of the Spirit so widely distributed in the Christian community. However, the increasing concentration of
Christian responsibility over the centuries in the hands of the clergy necessarily limited the development of the apostolate and produced a distorted and truncated style of Christian lay life. One of the aspects of the renewal of the Church in this century has been the rediscovery of the involvement of every one of its members in the one mission. The growing awareness of the common priesthood of all believers forces the ordained priest more and more to seek the meaning of his particular ministry in the service of the many ecclesiastical institutions to which he may be assigned as staff.
There is a considerable difference between the Lord’s own institution of a special ministry in the Church in the apostles and the much later development of a clergy. The influence of pagan notions of the sacredness of sacerdotal persons and of the authority of priests in society has very much affected the development of structures of ministry in the Church. Perhaps the real challenge today is not so much to explore the relationships between ministry and celibacy as to liberate both these institutions from the constrictions placed on them by the clerical state. What is at stake is a disestablishment of the Church as a religion, and a reestablishment of its true character and mission as an ordered movement and revolutionary ferment within the larger human society.
There is necessarily a tension in the Church between the demands of the Spirit and the maintenance of the human and institutional forms in which the Church subsists at any moment of history. Certainly this tension exists in the life of the priest. From the moment of his first inclination to priesthood he must assess the requisites of the Church and the promptings of the Spirit, and through the whole of his life this dynamic must inevitably persist. The perennial challenge to the whole Church, to the priesthood, and to the individual priest is to maintain a correct balance. There is a need to develop an ideal of priests primarily as men responsive to the Spirit, freely seeking their own fulfillment in loving service. This implies that they will gradually be given the opportunity not only to pursue the kind of ministry that they can best offer but also to choose the style of life—married or celibate for the sake of the kingdom—most suited to their individual personalities, their needs, and their vocations.
(Published in
CONCILIUM, Theology in the Age of Renewal,
8:8, October 1972.
Also published in translation in
the Dutch, French, German, Italian,
Portuguese, and Spanish editions.)