Sex and the Single Priest
By BILL KELLER
AMONG the teaching nuns at St. Matthew’s Catholic School, Sister Mary
Robert was my favorite. She was young, not yet 30, with a gentle face
framed by the starched white wimple. She tamed a classroom of
hormone-dizzy eighth graders by making us want to please her. We offered
up our compositions and our ventures in iambic pentameter, and were
rewarded with encouragement that, at least in my case, never wore off.
Not many years after I left St. Matthew’s, I left the church. Leaving
your church is not so much like quitting a club as emigrating from the
country where you grew up. You forfeit citizenship and no longer
consider yourself subject to its laws, but you follow the news from the
Old Country and wish its people well, because they are still in some
sense your people. And if you write for a living you may sometimes write
about that world, from a distance.
Last year, 50 years after eighth-grade graduation, Sister Mary Robert
saw something I wrote on this subject and sent me a letter. Only she was
no longer Sister Mary Robert. She had met a priest, Father John Hydar.
They fell in love and, after extricating themselves from their
respective religious vows, they married. At the time of her letter the
marriage of Roberta (her reclaimed birth name) and John Hydar was in its
41st year, and it seemed to be a happy one.
If I’m an émigré from the country of Catholicism, the Hydars would be
best described as dissidents who stayed. They ended up in one of the
many small communities of disaffected Catholics where women are
ordained, same-sex marriages are blessed, and members of the clergy are
not required to endure the loneliness of celibacy. Eventually John began
ministering to these Catholics on the margins. As one of four married
priests at St. Anthony’s Community in Santa Barbara, Calif., he baptized
children and presided over weddings and funerals. Sometimes he was
invited to fill in at short-handed mainstream Catholic parishes, with a
wink from the archdiocese. In the view of the official church they were
outliers, if not outcasts, but in their own view they were the real
Catholics, waiting for Rome to wise up. “My husband and I may not live
to see the fruits of our labors,” Roberta wrote to me, “but in the
meantime we find new ways to be Catholic, believing that the Spirit is
on the move and there is no stopping Her by the institutional church.”
That “Her” made me smile.
Enter the new pope, Francis, who has heartened many progressive
Catholics and infuriated many Catholic conservatives by suggesting that
Jesus did not intend to establish a legion of scolds. The pope’s efforts
to promote a more tolerant tone and to reorient the church’s priorities
from inquisition to compassion are mostly words. I do not mean that as a
slight. The kindness of his language, his empathy for the least among
us, and the humility of his example are undeniably refreshing. Still, at
some point Francis will, and should, be judged by the substance of his
leadership. What should we look for?
Much of the social agenda that church reformers like the Hydars advocate
— full ordination of women, full equality for gays, an end to the
widely ignored prohibition on birth control — is so entangled in past
papal proclamations and historical precedents that I doubt Francis will
take the issues on. An apostolic exhortation the pope released last week was a heartfelt appeal for inclusiveness — but on the Vatican’s familiar terms.
There is one issue, however, where the internal politics, while
difficult, are less difficult, where the case for reform is pressing,
and where there are hints that Francis may be inclined to change. That
is priestly celibacy.
The arguments for lifting the requirement that priests forswear sex and
marriage are not new, but they have become more urgent. Mandatory
celibacy has driven away many good priests and prospects at a time when
parishes in Europe and the United States are closing for lack of clergy.
It deprives priests of experience that would make them more competent
to counsel the families they minister. Celibacy — by breeding a culture
of sexual exceptionalism and denial — surely played some role in the
church’s shameful record of pedophilia and cover-up.
“Lots of people don’t see [celibacy] as some extraordinary act of
witness,” said Thomas Groome, who heads the department of religious
education and pastoral ministry at Boston College. “They see it as just a
peculiar lifestyle, and one not to be trusted.” Groome was a priest for
17 years but left to be a husband and father. “The loneliness of it, I
think, can drive people crazy,” he told me. “I’ve known hundreds of
priests in my life,” from student days in an Irish seminary through the
priesthood and decades as a theologian. “I don’t know too many diocesan
priests, maybe three or four, who have lived a rich, life-giving,
celibate lifestyle.”
The requirement that priests be celibate is not a doctrine but a
cultural and historical aberration. The first apostles had wives.
Catholic clergy were free to marry for the first millennium, until a
series of church councils in the 12th century changed the rules,
motivated in part by financial disputes. (Priests were trying to pass on
church property to their children; the crude remedy was to deny them
children.)
There are, in fact, many married priests in the Catholic Church, priests
who were ordained in the Eastern traditions of Catholicism as well as
Anglicans and other married priests whose families were grandfathered in
when they converted to the Church of Rome. In parts of Latin America
and Africa, priests marry or have common law wives and the church looks
the other way. Francis knows this well. As archbishop of Buenos Aires,
the future pope befriended a radical and famously noncelibate bishop,
Jeronimo Podesta, ministered to him on his deathbed, and remained close
for years thereafter to Podesta’s widow, who recalls that they often
discussed the issue of celibacy.
Francis’s intentions have been a subject of intense speculation in
church circles since September, when Archbishop Pietro Parolin, a
Francis confidant and second in command at the Vatican, told an
interviewer that celibacy “is not a church dogma and it can be discussed
because it is a church tradition.” Parolin qualified his remarks (“We
cannot simply say that it is part of the past”), but his declaration
that the subject “can be discussed” guaranteed that it would be.
ONE place it has been much discussed is among the married priests in the
dissident parish where John and Roberta Hydar found sanctuary. John
told me that if celibacy had been optional back in the ’60s, “most of us
would have remained in active ministry” (although “most of us would
also have gotten in hot water” over other disagreements with Vatican
policy). He admitted taking a little sinful pleasure in the discomfort
Francis has caused among Catholic hard-liners: “Well, the shoe is on the
other foot now.” And he said he can even imagine that Francis, given 10
or 15 years of good health, might change the church sufficiently — not
to win back lost causes like me, but to make Catholics like my old
teacher and her husband feel at home there again. John Hydar will be
watching, with keen hope, but without his wife. Roberta Hydar died of
cancer on Oct. 18 at the age of 79.
No comments:
Post a Comment