The reform-minded Pope Francis tackles sexual abuse, and we give a longer perspective on it.
A few news outlets reported a week ago that in an interview to mark the tenth anniversary of his papacy, Francis said, “There is no contradiction for a priest to marry, celibacy in the western church is a temporary prescription,” and he noted that the eastern church (Greek Orthodox), has always allowed its clergy to marry. This very obvious solution to much of the Catholic Church’s long-standing difficulties with clergy sexual abuse has now, at long last, been put out there as at least something to consider.
Many people today would say that Pope Francis and his predecessors should have thought of this a long time ago, but of course, there were two related issues that made this difficult. First there would be the opposition to such a move from the more conservative, traditionalist part of their church. Yet, if in the 1960’s Pope John XXIII and the Vatican Council managed to begin a number of reforms, including overturning the use of Latin (which most people didn’t understand anyhow) and also relaxing the traditional clothing rules for monks and nuns, then maybe Francis may also be able to successfully tackle this hugely scandalous matter of clergy sexual abuse. And the second issue involved in such a change (but maybe not understood in a secular society) concerns the whole idea of the priesthood.
When I was a teenager, hitchhiking back home from a visit to friends a long distance away, I and another hitchhiker was picked up by a car that had a young Catholic couple in the front seat and a priest crowding the back seat with us. We had not gone far when he began, quite openly, to tell us he had a sexual problem of being attracted to young males, and before we had traveled much further, he clearly let us know, in a direct and frank way, that though he had been “healed” from this condition, he was still very interested in young men such as the ones seated in the back with him. I said almost nothing at all, showing him I was not comfortable with his conversation. Not long thereafter, he ordered the car to stop so that he could change places and sit beside the other hitchhiker. I escaped his clutches, and later wondered if I should contact his superior about this, but decided that it wasn’t likely a bishop would welcome a report by a non-Catholic kid.
I also wondered why the young heterosexual couple in the front seat had offered no comment on the openly suggestive talk of the priest. The reason would likely have involved their acceptance of the authority of the clergy as not only congregational leaders but as men bound by oath to the doctrine concerning priesthood. In their church’s teaching, the man in the backseat had been given the awesome power to turn wafers and wine into the actual body and blood of Christ during the mass, though not visibly — Transubstantiation is the name of the doctrine. Whether the young couple fully understood this teaching or not, having been raised in the church they would have absorbed the importance of the priest’s unique position, and so they may have been unlikely to question his conduct.
It is clear that most of the apostles in the first century church did each have a wife, but it appears that the rule of clerical celibacy became an official teaching from the fifth century and beyond (beginning in a Synod at Elvira in Spain), although there is no way to document how consistently it was practiced. In the New Testament, the apostle Paul remained single and urged celibacy on others only if they could stand it — “I wish that all men were as I am, but each has his own gift from God, one has this gift, another that” (1 Cor. 7:7). He preferred that Christians who are unmarried or widowed remain single, thinking that their lives would be happier and more focused that way, but also that “if they cannot control themselves, they should marry (1 Cor. 7:9).” He also said that for a man who has a girlfriend already and feels they ought to marry, “he should do as he wants, he is not sinning; they should get married” (1 Cor. 7:36).
However, Paul warned his co-worker Timothy that in times to come, some will abandon the faith of the apostles and will “forbid people to marry and order them to abstain from certain foods which God created to be received with thanksgiving” (1 Tim. 4:3). Those words certainly came true for the western church with its strict rules of celibacy, food and fasting. In the 1500’s, the Reformation’s leaders, knowing how much sexual abuse was happening close to home, left enforced celibacy behind and each of them got married (i.e. Martin Luther, Ulrich Zwingli, John Calvin, and others), teaching that the Bible and a personal faith had precedence over church tradition. Think of how much damage might have been avoided, how many young lives spared, if people had been more knowledgeable of these matters, and if the Biblical injunctions rather than the church’s additions, had been followed.
My aim in this article is NOT to set one church denomination against another (that kind of religious competition has led to much trouble over the centuries) — no one is perfect. Instead, the post is part of the usual approach of this blog on various different subjects, namely: to take “the long view on the high road” — especially in today’s society where historical understanding and spiritual knowledge is so limited that people often have no defense against harmful ideas or the influence of polarization on many issues.
Photo above: A panel of priests investigate sexual abuse in France (LaPresse)
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