Deuteronomy 4:1-8
Psalm 15:2-5
James 1:17-27
Mark 7:1-23

Ancient Tradition & Priesthood

To enter the Land of Promise and have life. In this, we see the fulfillment of the two great commandments, union with God and a universal love shared among the human creatures whom He mysteriously loves so well. In this, Eden is renewed, and the world is set aright. The Book of Exodus teaches that in order for this culmination of all human history to come about, we must first be purged and cleansed signified by a whole people passing through the Red Sea. Those who are unworthy, who have rejected God, will drown in this ordeal, as Pharaoh and his army do. Next, we must be illuminated, taken out into the wilderness, leaving behind the flesh pots of Egypt, and encounter the fiery holiness of God, a Pillar of Fire. Finally, we enter the Land of Promise signifying union with God and salvation: as Moses declares, life.

This three-fold path — purgation, illumination, and union — has been the spiritual journey for Christians since the appearance of Sacred Scripture. First, the solitary rids himself of whatever is unworthy separating him from God. St. James commands in our Epistle lesson this morning, "put away all filthiness and rank growth of wickedness ... to save your souls" (James 1:21) ... a vivid sentence. Next, he leaves the fleshly world behind and goes into the desert to encounter God, "the Father of lights," to borrow from our Epistle lesson again, and receive the fire of holiness as Moses did in Midian. Finally, being duly prepared, he ascends to the summit of God's holy mountain and union, "the desire of the everlasting hills."

I can still recall my feeling of dis-ease and surprise when a spiritual guide in seminary, a well-published Benedictine monk, told me in mocking laughter, "The three-fold path?! No one does that any more! Today we just go straight to the unitive path. Union is all that matters!" In the years that followed, as I took my own journey through the Roman Catholic Church, eventually becoming an insider at several Roman Catholic dioceses both in the U.S. and abroad, I discovered the truth of this monk's words. The ideal today — I have often heard the phrase, "the vision of the Church" — is an ideal of love and radical forgiveness so radical that no sin is ever to be mentioned, much less a path through purgation.

My general confession at a well-known Trappist monastery would be a jarring conflict of expectations for me. In preparation, I had bought a book of blank pages from a stationery store and spent three months filling it out. I ordered each era of my life to the Ten Commandments searching out my offenses. I ordered my life to the Seven Deadly Sins considering my share in each one. I attempted to replay my whole personal history in terms of relationships, responsibilities, and sacred trusts. I looked forward to being freed from the burden I had carried. The weight of this little book, recording all my sins, had become intolerable.

When the time came for this much-anticipated moment of tears and blessed absolution, the Trappist monk and priest assigned to me simply asked me at each turn in my long and winding story, "Do you love God? Are you confident of God's love for you? Yes? Then there is no sin. There can never be sin where love is present." I had read about the Fundamental Option before arriving to the monastery — the Jesuit Karl Rahner's theological dictum that the radical love of God and for God is a kind of consuming fire that burns away all traces of sin. The vision of the Church that proceeds from it — a Church in which you discard the commandments and "follow your heart" to borrow S. Francois de Sales' phrase — is a world in which sin is never mentioned, but only love.

Later in my studies, during a four-year tutorial led by the rector of a pontifical college in Rome, I had the privilege of working under a great prelate who, along with others, had composed and compiled the Catechism of the Catholic Church (by order of John Paul II, whom this man knew very well). This man told me of the firestorm of protest from the U.S. Bishops, who demanded that the section on the Ten Commandments be removed. The Church, they said, had transcended these long ago. The Church had a new vision, a higher vision, far above the Ten Commandments.

As one humble example of this new vision, I offer as Exhibit One our Epistle reading this morning. I have listed it (as I always do) in its entirety: James 1:1-27. But the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops has carefully edited this lesson as "James 1:17-18, 21B-22, 27" deleting the words which I cited above: "put away all filthiness and rank growth of wickedness ... to save your souls." For such language is anathema to them, running counter to the new Church they have been trying to birth now for two generations: the Church of love but not the Church that honestly confronts human sin.

Many years ago, my bishop assigned me to what is known as a cluster in the Roman Catholic Church: three former parish churches joined under a single name. In none of these buildings could I find a crucifix. And when Good Friday came and I drove to church having prepared myself for an evening of quiet tears, instead I walked into a brightly lit space hearing jaunty, upbeat music. Finally the priest took up his microphone and announced triumphantly, "Ours is not a a crucified Christ, but a risen Christ!" (on Good Friday). And knowing this priest personally, a man who never genuflected, I also knew that he bridled at any mention of sin, condemning this as "Jansenism."

Finally, I began to understand. I understood (though I did not condone) the Jesuit priest who had attempted to molest me in high school along with all the young men in my group. I understood the many, many priests who had touched me below the belt line casually and without apology during my service to the Roman Church. I understood the priests of the Archdiocese of Boston who made no apology for their many encounters with boys. For in their minds, there was no sin but simply a universal love that hews to a higher vision of the Church. Those who objected simply had not achieved this higher plane of spiritual journey. The boys who had become the victims of these men had been carefully shepherded to this dark place. They had become initiated into this anti-spirituality and had, tragically, become a part of it.

It is impossible to understand pedophilia in the Roman Church without understanding the theology that has brought it about. For only then will you understand the astonishing lack of apology or contrition. For contrition over sin, indeed sin itself, has been banished from the inner mind of this world long ago. In the mind of these men, it had been replaced, indeed anticipated and prevented, by radical forgiveness and divine love, which they identify as being God's true Church in their dark and confused minds. How could this happen? Well, do we not know that humans lie to themselves? Are we not familiar with the process of rationalization that enables us to look in the mirror and see only what we want to see? For the most deadly lies we tell, we tell to ourselves.

To characterize the present state of Roman Catholic priestly culture as being a scandal of sexual sin is to picture men who have entertained a particularly vile temptation and then consented to it. But nothing could be further from the truth. It is not an aberration. It is not a falling away. It is a whole lifeworld, or rather anti-life world. And this explains the shocking insolence of Fr. Paul Shanley of the Archdiocese of Boston, who was not bowed, or even embarrassed, at being discovered in a vast web of pedophilia in that diocese. His demeanor, rather, was one of condescension. Shanley and his party would say, the rest of the Church is stuck in the past with its rote prayers and Latin Mass parts. You see, we just don't get it, for we faithful are further behind these men on the great arc of liberation! By their lights, they are in the vanguard of evolution, and the rest of us are throwbacks, isolated Neanderthals.

In an eight-page letter written February 12, 1979 (and posted on the web years ago), the Cardinal of the Archdiocese of Boston, Humberto Medeiros, wrote to the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith upon the election of a new pope, John Paul II. He painted a dire picture of the American Church hoping the new regime might grasp it and help to heal it. The proximate occasion for the letter was the Rev. Paul Shanley, but Cardinal Medeiros urged the pope to understand the larger problem, which he said was to be found in all large urban areas of the United States. "There is a widespread homosexual culture," he wrote. These men "band together to assert the open fact of their homosexuality" and are clear that "this is of no consequence," morally speaking. They insist "that they be admitted to seminaries and novitiates" bringing their vision of the Church into both dioceses and religious orders. In his own diocese, the Cardinal reports, "a few priests are beginning to proclaim their own homosexuality, and an even larger number is beginning to foster the assertions that ... homosexual acts and behavior constitute a morally acceptable way of life .... In addition, some priests are said to assert that homosexual acts under certain conditions are not sinful." The Cardinal went on to predict that the Roman Catholic Church was unintentionally engineering a culture of homosexual life within its priesthood and male religious orders. To borrow Cardinal Medeiros' words, "The danger, your Eminence, is obvious. Where large numbers of homosexuals are present in seminary, other homosexuals are quickly attracted." By contrast, "Healthier men tend to be repelled." You see, the perfect recipe for an homosexual priesthood.

Two generations later, the Rector and President of St. Mary Seminary (Wickliffe, Ohio), Fr. Donald B. Cozzens, described the fulfillment of Cardinal Medeiros' prophecy. In his widely respected and much-praised book, The Changing Face of the Priesthood (2000), Fr. Cozzens pointed to polls that describe the Roman Catholic priesthood within the United States as being 60% practicing homosexual. In an anecdote presented within his book, Fr. Cozzens having lunch with the Abbot of the Trappist Monaster at Gethsemane asked about the situation there. "Still getting the best and brightest?" he said. "Oh no," the Abbot replied. "Those days are long gone." And he believed that 100% of the monks under his charge were active in their homosexual lifestyle.

The founder of the most distinguished journal First Things, Fr. Richard John Neuhaus, was challenged when he drew a connection between the pervasive homosexual culture of the Roman Catholic priesthood with the prevalence of pedophilia. One has nothing to do with the other, his opponents claimed. Fr. Neuhaus, in his characteristic terseness, replied that if you removed homosexuality from the equation, then there would be no pedophilia, for nearly all the cases are priests grooming and molesting boys.

Fr. Neuhaus confined himself to this statistical truth. But surely we can admit that if the Church should construct a culture, both theologically and spiritually, in which the purgative and illuminative paths have been dropped and only the unitive path remains, that the outcome is obvious. Here we have a culture proclaiming a vision of universal love. Moral scruples are banned as being "old school" and "benighted." Only love counts in this new vision of the Church. Combine this with the powerful sexual drive of young men, removing all impediments of conscience, and you have mixed a strange and potent brew of sexual mania that has intoxicated the Church.

Is this not the culture we see outside of the Church, as well? Certainly, this was culture I saw living in Greenwich Village during the 1980s. So-called "gay bars" had devolved into scenes of nearly public, group sex. The police were raiding these establishments as the AIDS epidemic soared out of control. Doctors I knew in New York confided that when they interviewed men coming in with STDs, they learned that the average number of different sex partners within the past year (an obligatory question in the medical interview) was often greater than 300. More recently, an article in the New England Journal of Medicine reported that the average number of partners per year for gay men (I believe the age group was 18-35) was greater than 100. Does not a widespread, public sexuality, combined with a unitive ethos, no longer constrained by conscience and purgation, result in mania? Is this to be disputed?

Notice that the people Israel enter the Land of Promise, which is union with God, as families. This is not circumstance, for they are gathered from the beginning of this three-fold journey as tribes, which is to say, families, each grouped by its family name. It is insisted upon.

Catholic theology and Catholic spirituality both teach that marriage is the ordinary state of life. Marriage is the proto-Church — in Eden, one man and one woman, opposites reconciled in perfect communion with God. Daily communion with God joined in perfect love. Marriage would also be God's building block for all life on earth — His perfect atom from which all things human would be constructed and His ideal for perfecting men and women, otherwise lacking their other half. The marriage of one man to one woman is God's safe place for rearing healthy, wholesome, and balanced children. Today, marriage retains its noble lineage from Eden, being styled the "domestic Church." (Please see the Catechism of the Catholic Church, 1656, 1658).

Marriage is the highest state of Catholic life, and motherhood and fatherhood are manifestly the holiest vocations. Many years ago, I was able to listen-in on a talk given by Thomas Merton, OCSO to the Trappist monastery novices at Gethsemane (thanks to a young man who recorded it). They were flabbergasted when Merton told them that marriage is the highest state of Christian life. Were not Trappist monks, Cistercians of the Strict Observance, following a higher path? Merton, being obviously piqued by such egoism was curt (as he often could be). Marriage, he told them, is the basket in which God has placed all his eggs. If everyone became Trappists, humanity would die in one generation.

In the Lord's first miracle, the Son of God turned water into wine gracing marriage, the gateway through which all sacred human life proceeds into the Creation (by God's command). And in His final miracle, He turned that same wine into His blood opening that gate to Paradise, that these same sacred lives might enter into eternal friendship with Him.

If this is so, if marriage is the holiest of paths, then why shouldn't it be open to Catholic priests? Why should Catholic priests be denied the holiest path toward God? The answer to this question is no less basic and sensible: It is. And always has been. Married men have been called to be bishops, priests, and deacons from the beginnings of the Church and through nearly all its history. Indeed, St. Paul, requiring sober, reliable, and tested men for the episcopate, insisted that "a bishop must be above reproach, the husband of one wife" (1 Timothy 3:2). Divorced men are out. (Polygamists too!) What is more, you would search in vain for a never-married bachelor in first-century Judea. They just did not exist.

This would be the model for priests, who were understood to be representatives of the bishop. Indeed, the Eastern Church has ordained married men to the priesthood for two thousand years. The Western Church (which is dominantly the Roman Catholic Church) did the same until the Council of Trent (1563), when for the final time the decrees of an ecumenical council required celibacy of all priests. But wait a minute! This means that for fifteen hundred years, for the first three-quarters of the Church's existence, married men were ordained to the priesthood in the West! This means that celibacy is not the rule for priests, but the exception — a recent innovation, not an ancient tradition. Yes. That is right. What is more, among the twenty-four Churches in full communion with the Bishop of Rome, today only the Roman Catholic Church is the conspicuous outlier. That is, the ordination of married men is the norm today within the Roman Communion. To put a finer point on it, celibacy is a spiritual cult peculiar to the Roman Catholic priesthood. And the Roman Catholic priests who practice it are nearly unique among Catholic priests in the world.

We do well to listen to our Gospel lesson this morning bearing all this in mind:

Celibacy and chastity are spiritual disciplines, which are right and proper among those who have been called to them, whether they be Trappist monks or religious sisters. But marriage is the ordinary state of Catholic life, which is to say, an aspect of the ordo, which is God's ordering of the world.

And the new vision for the Church? There are those who will say, "But it still can succeed! It must succeed!" But these people look in the mirror and do not see the truth: this vision has failed. It was an experiment begun 500 years ago, and it has failed. It will always fail, no matter how much hope and forgiveness and radical forgiveness are poured out upon it.

In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.