The Celibate Spirit of Vatican II

Presbyterorum Ordinis 16 simply does not compromise the discipline of priestly celibacy in the Latin Church, but the very reverse. Nothing could be more appropriate theologically and pastorally in the present age than the preservation of that discipline, while those who blame it for the shortage of priests in the tiny number of countries where there is such a thing need to be asked in exactly which of the last 50 years they imagine sex to have been invented, and exactly when they expect the rest of the world to become aware of it. Never mind what use they think marriage would be in controlling a man whose sexual interest was in teenage boys.

As for the exceptions, mostly for convert Protestant clergymen, they make perfect sense, and if embittered priests and other teachers of a certain generation either do not know that and how they do, or else refuse to teach it, then the fault is most emphatically in them, and even more so if they are passing on what they must know to be entirely baseless claims about celibacy and “pollution”, about celibacy as a Medieval innovation, about celibacy as concerned with questions of property, and so on.

However, having mentioned endowments, it must be said that the Church of England, in particular, has married bishops and married presbyters because it can afford them. Where do the proponents of such a change among us imagine that widows’ pensions and the rest are supposed to come from? Or would they have our priests adopt the Eastern discipline and work the land? Furthermore, as the Church of England has discovered, the benefits of spouses cannot legally be denied to civil partners. And then there is divorce. In any case, the mass laicisations of the Paul VI years, at least ostensibly on the celibacy issue, now belong to a distant age, even if some people are still living in it in their own minds.

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