An English scholar
wrote, puzzled by the statements of Cardinal Francis Stafford on the
Eucharistic meaning of priesthood and the necessity for a priest to
be celibate. She wrote:
Please help! I have read Stafford’s paper (one delivered at the
1993 Vatican International Conference on Celibacy) and I don't fully
understand his theses. He repeats it many times and yet it remains
mysterious.
(The Agenzia
Della Congregatione Per L’Evangelizzazione Dei Populi has
re-issued a large part of the some and substance of papers from that
conference in a Dossier dated 11 March 2006 under the title:
La
Chiesa Cattolica E
L’Importanza Del Celibato.
Stafford’s paper is absent.)
QUESTIONS: I would like to understand in plain English what this man
is trying to say. This is what I understand him to be saying:
 |
Priesthood is a sacrament. Marriage is a sacrament. A
priest’s body is involved totally in his ordination. Priesthood is
like a marriage, particularly in his celebration of the Eucharist,
which is an act of marital commitment and union of the priest.
Stafford’s conclusion: having married priests celebrate Mass would
be adulterous. |
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The marriage of the priest to the Church and Christ
is consummated in his Eucharistic Sacrifice. He acts in persona
Christi. The union of Christ with his people is Nuptial.
The priest is bound to Christ and the Church beyond words and
symbols where the priest’s sexuality becomes Christ, body and blood,
joined to the Church |
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The Eucharistic Sacrifice reenacts the death on the
cross. The priest pays again in his life sacrifice (singleness) and
at Mass (Eucharist) the debt of the crucifixion memorialized in the
Last Supper. Since the Eucharist is nuptial the priest is married to
the people as Christ is to his church. |
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He says " in the identification with Christ that is
explicit and effective in the words of consecration "This is my
body, this is my blood" suggest the High Priest (and all priests)
have now become Christ and are offering their own bodies!
|
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The priest
'the second Adam' forms a union
(nuptial) with the second Eve—the Church. This bond is a sexual and
nuptial union and is the fundamental and exclusive marriage in
theological symbol. |
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The priest’s bride is the Church therefore he is
already married. He says: “The liturgical
and nuptial context is covenantal: it is the office of the husband
acting in his proper person in matrimony, and of the priest acting
in Person of the second Adam in the Eucharist.”
|
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The priest must be "pure" (No sex). Because of the
priest’s person acting in replacement of Adam and in the person of
Christ he must be sexually pure and unattached by any human sexual
bond. St. Jerome calls “incontinent priests adulterers.”
|
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Stafford’s claim is: “The priest in celebrating the
Eucharist is the Head of the Church like the Father-God.” He becomes
the second Adam “The Word made Flesh'” transformed into a
"living Spirit" mediated to the priest by participation in the
Eucharist. |
|
Only a man can be a priest or celebrate the Eucharist
because “The priest is the head of the nuptial body.”
His
gender as well as his sexuality are necessary for his sacramental
service: "It is because of the priest's own
personal nuptial integration into the Sacrifice he offers, that only
a man is capable of acting in the person of the head, and can be a
priest.” |
|
Stafford claims: “The
priest’s nuptial meaning, i.e. his sacramental masculinity,
exercised in persona Christi, has its plenary historical expression
in the offering of the One Sacrifice, in the institution of the New
Covenant.” |
|
Is he really saying what I understand? The
'sacrifice on the cross' and ‘the last supper' become
'spiritual sex’ between Adam & Eve?
|
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Like all the clerical scholars trying to defend the
universality of the apostolic celibate heritage Stafford appeals to
the early fathers of the church: " The
Fathers required further that the sacramental marriage of the man
ordained into the Catholic priesthood be transcended, that his flesh
be spiritualized...” |
|
His final claim is that married priests would be
“liturgically indecent.” |
RESPONSES: The main
and startling distortion in Stafford’s thinking is the confluence of
sex and the Eucharist. The Eucharist is certainly a love feast, but
not a sexual event. There is a long Pagan tradition of mixing the
spiritual and sexual. Christianity rejected that tendency and the
temple prostitutes. (By the way there remains in certain New Age
movements a tendency still to co-mingle ecstasies.)
The Eucharist is a
family love feast that is both familial and unbounded by time and
space. It is a Mass of the Universe as Tailard wrote of so
brilliantly, and a realization of the gospel message, ““Wherever 2
or 3 are gathered” there is the essence of the Presence.
The priest does have
a special role at the Eucharist—to make the presence of the saving
sacrifice of Jesus reincarnate in a certain way, available to all,
because it can be participated in and memorialized as in the Last
Supper.
The role of the
priest is unique, but he is not special beyond any other Christian.
The idea that ordination confers on him an “ontological” change—he
exists in a different and higher realm of existence—is sheer
philosophical poppy cock. And I think heresy if one adheres to the
authentic Pauline example and teaching. Tradition and
authoritarianism in the church has exalted and aggrandized the
priest beyond reality. He is not “higher than the angels” (Trent)
nor is he the exclusive “Steward of God’s Mysteries,” as some
theologians hold.
He has a role in the
Christian community. That is as servant. Those who give themselves
without reserve in that service fulfill their duties well and live
up to their public promise. That takes a deep spiritual awareness of
their Christian service.
Priest-servant also
means that the priest must still grapple honestly with his god-given
nature—sex and all, and in every aspect of its basic biological,
psychological, moral, and spiritual dimensions. There are no
shortcuts.
What Stafford and
his ilk of theologians try to do is solve their sexual identity in
their proclaimed allegiance with Christ and dependence on the
authoritarian power and control of an institutionalized social
development.
Catholic practice is
closer to folk religions and magic than clergy care to admit. It is
nonetheless. This does not diminish the beauty, the artistic and
monumental achievements and genuinely comforting pageantry so
prominent in history and daily life—and the spiritual inspiration,
strength, and grace that flow from sacramental practice.
The figment is that
that “celibate transformation” will take place if priests deny
themselves all sexual activity. As if that metamorphosis would make
a man “one with Christ” and catapult him into the mythopoetic role
of the “bridegroom” of the Church—the bride of Christ—and
transmogrifying religious symbol and metaphor into a reality. And
the grand irony of it is that in the process these theologians
sexualize the spiritual and set up a dualistic identity: ritually
kissing the altar is “kissing” Christ; celebrating Mass is the
“marriage union” with Christ. (To review a clear explanation of the
homosexual component in clergy identity Cf. Jamie Glazov in Dialogue
#6).
Many bishops and
priests who celebrate Mass do have sexual lives, many on an ongoing
basis. I am not talking about failings or sins, but hypocrisy of the
most devious kind—whitened sepulchers.
The church’s
teaching on sex and celibacy is wrong and off base. It is postulated
on a theological figment (that sex is fundamentally sin related—only
legitimized within a church approved union), perpetuating scientific
ignorance and error, and psychological distortion of the crassest
kind. It simply does not correspond to reality any more than the
Biblical protestations that the earth is the center of the universe
with the sun and the stars revolving around it. Stafford’s ideas are
but a mystification of a simple, enduring reality—Christ is with us,
in reality and sacramentally.
For further
discussion Cf:
