A Czech Moravian Brethren minister was instrumental in keeping several of these small ethnic churchs going; he stayed single and was always popular. Many a widow & divorcee plyed him with home cooking and piles of kolaches. This redirected some of the energy that often divides small Protestant churches into nurturing him & light flirtations. Now that he only preaches as a “fill-in”, at Christmas he entered his first marriage at the age of 85.

Lex wrote:
The Church encourages celibacy for those who have a vocation to it. And I agree that the Church treats human sexuality as a very serious matter, pertaining to the deepest meaning of the persons identiy, to the soul as well as the body, and never detached from procreation. This is in contract to the current politically correct view of intercourse as a pleasant recreation to be enjoyed hygenically and without too much unnecessary emotionalsim. So, I think what you say about celibacy is correct.

Lex, what you write strikes me as a nonsequitur. Areligious libertinism in sexual matters is not the only alternative to clerical celibacy.

An alternative religious approach is the Jewish one, which seeks to control sexuality, particularly for rabbis and scholars, by channeling it into marriage where it is encouraged subject to a few constraints. I don’t think this is far off from much Protestant practice.

The fact that not all Christian sects have celibate clerics, together with the observation that not all groups that instituted celibacy (e.g., janissaries) have been primarily religious in nature, suggests that celibacy may be mainly an organizational response to problems of succession and loyalty rather than a response to human sexuality per se. (How it gets explained is a different issue.)

The Anglosphere, like its Northern European cousins has historically treated women with an exceptional level of personal and legal autonomhy. This is perfectly consistent with Catholicism. St. Paul said wives should be obedient to their husbands, and we are scandalized. But at the time, that was non-controversial; women in the Greco-Roman world were virtually chattels. We do not even pay attention to the next line, which was world-shattering: Men are to love their wives and sacrifice themselves for them. This was an unheard of statement of the value of the women and the equality of the sexes. This occurred in Christianity and nowhere else. Medieval Catholicism saw women running large convents, hostels, etc. Nothing equivalent occurred anywhere else in the world. Still, within this larger picture, the Anglosphere and the German-derived countries of Northern Europe from very early on gave women remarkable levels of freedom.

Ginny, I think the problem here is that you see a tension, producing a (complementary?) paradox, between valuing both celibacy and procreation. Catholicism, however, sees no such tension. The main thrust of your post (and the one by Lex that motivated it) is that we need to, as you say in the last line of your post, “connect with others as well as understand ourselves.”

Procreation is certainly one way to connect with others, but, as you point out, so is religion. Consecrated celibacy is one pathway within Catholicism by which one may connect with others. Parish priests are celibate primarily so that they can dedicate themselves entirely to the spiritual birthing and nurturing of their flocks. Catholics don’t call their priests “Father” for nothing. This is not merely a metaphor; it is a spiritual reality. Through His priests, Christ exercises His headship over the Church. In intent, therefore, there can be no more “other directed” calling than the priesthood (though, of course, as with many biological parents, many individual priests have failed miserably to live up to their high calling.)

Monasteries and convents are, or at least should be, families, with Father Abbot or Mother Superior presiding in love over the brothers or sisters. Again, these terms are not used metaphorically but analogically. They denote a supernatural reality than transcends their analogues in the natural. This supernatural reality can, of course, never be fully realized in the world of space and time. This is, BTW, one reason, I think, that relatively few people are called to a life of consecrated celibacy. While we remain in space and time, we need many more good husbands, wives, fathers, and mothers than we need good priests, brothers, and sisters (though we need more than we presently have of these), and, as Lex points out, Catholicism has always honored the former as well as the latter. Still, the eschatological witness of faithful priests, brothers, and nuns points to and anticipates the supernatural reality in which all that is good in the natural will be completed and fulfilled and in which all the blessed will share.

Remember, God Himself is a family – Father, Son, and the personified love between Them Who is the Holy Spirit. All the blessed will eventually participate in this Divine Family, which is the Model for and the true Consummation of all the natural families of men.

Responses:

Adams isn’t talking about having sex. He’s talking about an attitude toward sexuality. I suspect he would see the sex shops of Amsterdam as quite sexless. And, yes, it is more true of the patrician circle in which he ran, but American women had a late nineteenth century freedom to be sexless in some dialogues.

Well, Catholics did seem to keep the virgin/fecund mythic appreciation – while a different attitude toward women was part of the Protestant distrust of ritual & myth & icons. (One of my old Irish Catholic boyfriends thought a baby carriage was an appropriate gift in the midst of our rather neurotic relationship. His attitude was at first rather wonderful but eventually a bit oppressive to someone who was Protestant – indeed, not very religious. And of course, I could hardly live up to such a myth – as he slowly realized. God knows what his marriage was like. Two of his aunts were nuns and one of his uncles a priest.)

I’ll give you that Catholics did see women somewhat differently, perhaps still do.

Nonetheless, you have argued on earlier threads that you see the Anglosphere culture as not being defined by Protestantism; I’d always felt that an attitude toward women also defines the Anglosphere, which in general has had little of that mythic about it.

I’ll grant you that that particular remark was pretty condescending – a different metaphor would have been less offensive and probably more true. How about, “it keeps believers grounded in the truths of human nature as well as the spiritual ones”? But, of course, it took a different perspective than mine to see the problem.

Nonetheless, your discussion doesn’t acknowledge what appears (at least to outsiders) to be your church’s encouragement of celibacy. Those values seem to heighten the intensity & deepen the meaning of its believers’ perceptions of sex – it is certainly at odds with the hygenic northern European view. And the very importance of celibacy arises from the sense of sex’s importance, the importance of procreation. In modern society (which seems to see any link between sex & procreation as an undue restraint on a woman’s integrity), this attitude toward celibacy nurtures a concomitant appreciation of children, of giving birth, of the life force. I didn’t say the linkage of a religion that values celibacy with reproductive energy was untrue, just that it was a paradox.

“… in America neither Venus nor Virgin ever had value as force—at most as sentiment.” Maybe among Protestants this is true.

“… American language and American education, was as far as possible sexless.” This is not how Tocqueville described things. I wonder if Adams didn’t get out enough. Americans were breeding at the biologically maximum rate for generations as they settled the interior of the continent. Procreative sex doesn’t count for a creature of the Boston Athenaeum and its silent, dusty shelves.

” religious renunciation of the worldly – thus the sexual. Paul argues that celibacy is better; nonetheless, because most remain tempted, marriage can maintain and give appropriate expression to these passions.” Well, this leaves out the dignity of marriage, child-bearing and motherhood which has always been preached in Catholicism.

“Religion can offer a safe place to retreat from the ideas of the modern world.” Can? Otherwise, this is pretty condescending. I would say that materialism and nihilism and hedonism, activism offer “retreats” — party, then die; hustle, then die, struggle to create a worldly Utopia, then die — much more than Christianity which does compels the believer to engage with the world and with others as they actually are, without any this-worldly fantasy scenarios. (I substitute Christianity because I don’t think it makes much sense most of the time to generalize about “Religion”.)

“If we refuse to recognize the power of religion or the power of the life force, we are likely to be blind-sided in the future as well as leading deeply unfulfilling lives.” Worse than a crime, a political fault — the correct quotation. It is one thing to smugly disdain religious faith. It is another thing entirely to falsely imagine that you are thereby exempted from the consequences of this most powerful and unpredictable of forces — personally and collectively.