Priestly celibacy: being one with Christ and His mission

Father John O'Neill PP

Contents - Mar 2013 - Buy a copy now Homily: Benedict XVI's 2012 Annunciation homily - Pope Benedict XVI STOP PRESS: Vale, Pope Benedict! - Peter Westmore News: The Church Around The World The bitter harvest of induced abortion - Babette Francis 1000 UK priests sign joint letter against same-sex 'marriage' - AD2000 Report Religious persecution occurs in democracies - Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò Women priests and bishops: Anglicanism's crisis of identity - David Wetherell True reform in the Church: Yves Congar's golden mean - Andrew Kania Medieval parish life: influential roles of religious orders - Frank Mobbs New African-American pro-life movement Obituary: Creos Roman: may he rest in peace - Bishop Anthony Fisher OP Priestly celibacy: being one with Christ and His mission - Father John O'Neill PP Books: CONTEMPLATING CHRIST WITH LUKE by Cardinal George Pell - Brother Barry Coldrey (reviewer) Books: BECOME WHAT YOU ARE: Growing in Christian Character, by Bishop Julian Porteous - Brother Barry Coldrey (reviewer) Books: HOLY MEN AND WOMEN OF THE MIDDLE AGES AND BEYOND, by Pope Benedict XVI - Michael Daniel (reviewer) Books: Order books from www.freedompublishing.com.au Reflection: Icon for the Year of Grace: 'Sir, we wish to see Jesus' - Anne Lastman

The Catholic priest's motivation for celibacy lies in his fascination for his privileged call, expressed perhaps in the following attempt at poetry:

Among the Apostles

Ah! to be in that sturdy boat at the edge of that rippling sea:
Among those blessed fishermen, to be part of their destiny!
To hear His invitation: 'If you come and follow me
You will catch much more than fish, my friends, 'round these shores of Galilee'.

Ah! To stride with Him those countless miles and with Him to be truly free
To thrill in those shining moments when He smiled - and smiled at me!
Oh chosen twelve! In Heaven you were as you walked in His company:
Would I could race through the centuries and His choice could fall on me!

Ah! Grace indeed! His choice did fall, and I trembled in the Spirit's love
As 'Da quaesumus' rang through the hallowed stones of the arches high above.
And the centuries since that day by the shore to Him matter not the least:
All is 'now' to Him: so among the Twelve I stand, for I am now His priest!

Some elements in the widespread discussion of the celibacy of the Catholic priesthood clearly show a failure to relate this beautiful charism to the nature of God as Three Persons loving each other infinitely, and to the nature and purpose of the Incarnation of God the Son in the person of our God and Saviour, Our Lord, Jesus Christ.

Faith through Baptism

They also show the thinking of some Catholics - and there are many with us still whose media friends make sure their shallow thoughts are widely diffused - their kind going back in a very long line to the gnostic, Cerinthus, a contemporary of the Apostle and Evangelist, Johanan Bar Zebedee, familiar to us as Saint John, the Beloved Disciple.

This thinking is victim to a lack of true faith, the gift given to the human mind in Baptism. By this theological virtue, the human mind is empowered by God to be able to receive from Him an ever-growing knowledge of Him and the experience of what His goodness is like. This lack of faith commits the mind to a vain search among the unelevated thoughts of man as the source of religious truth, and among the uncontrolled desires of man for a religious morality. Those whose minds are thus suffocated from lack of the Divine action to which faith opens the mind, will never understand Jesus Christ as He really is or the celibacy which He recommended.

From all eternity, God the Father, by His nature, loved. The English word is a bit weak; Latin is better: Velle bonum, to will goodness for the person loved. God the Father's love had to have someone to receive it, because love, by its nature, has to go to someone outside the one loving.

Lovers of Latin will understand the ancient metaphysical principle: Bonum est diffusivum sui - goodness of its nature, spreads. So there has to be another Divine Person to receive and, in justice, return the Father's love. Finally, because everything in God has to be person and infinite, love between Father and Son is the Holy Spirit. All things in the Catholic Faith have their source in the Blessed Trinity. There is no religious truth independent of God as its source.

Now, since the nature of God is love, and is infinite, we can only stand in compelled wonder at the person of Jesus Christ, God and man, the infinite eternal Son of the infinitely loving Father, actually bringing the infinite love to earth. For those who read His words and His activity with what only must be a desire from humility for total satisfaction, there is only one conclusion to be made about Jesus Christ: He has to be God.

The truly human Augustine certainly discovered all this: "�... our hearts shall never rest until they rest in thee!" The thoughtful reader of the Last Supper chapters in John (14-17) will join the Bishop of Hippo in his eager race into Christ.

There is a law of celibacy, but it is more a fruit than a law. In a good marriage, made good by their love for each other, they do not have to tell each other on the wedding day that they need a rule to make them love each other. So with the priest. If he truly knows Jesus of Nazareth and His mission, then he will want to be one with Him and take up that mission.

He should be so taken up with Our Lord that his totally fulfilled and missioned heart will not be attracted to any other love for his own fulfilment, even to the Divinely-created noble love of marriage. Jesus Christ is enough for his heart, and immeasurably more than enough, for he has taken into his soul those extraordinary words which only God on earth could have given us: "I have told you this that my joy may be in you, and your joy be made full."

Another Christ

No wonder young John had to be by His cross, with His Mother. The sheer wonder of the priesthood is that, by the miracle of his ordination, the priest is made into a nother Christ, and thereby continues the holiest and highest thing that was ever on the earth: God the Son's sacrificial love for God the Father, and this truly awesome reality is what is protected by celibacy

A man does not become a priest because he has some talent or other, or because he likes liturgy, or because he wants to study the Scriptures, or win a doctorate in theology, or any other reason: he becomes a priest because he cannot resist the Person, Jesus Christ, and losing himself in Him. He loves His work, and all those people who are searching, and the glorious gifts the Master has left us in His Church, all of which lead us to Him.

A priest's life might be expressed like this:

To allow all the sadnesses and griefs of mankind to seep into one's being,
and there to understand them by the power of Christ's mind working
and to turn the sadnesses and the griefs to hope and the joys of man to foretastes of heaven -
and then to hand it all back to man to show him how to long for God -
this is life's pinnacle and the place where the priest stands.

And when all this is done, to meet Him, whose cross we shared so intimately.

Fr John O'Neill is parish priest of Doonside in the Parramatta Diocese, NSW.

Reprinted from AD2000 Vol 26 No 2 (March 2013), p. 16