CELEBACY VS. POPULAR CULTURE

I don’t particularly want celibacy for myself, mind you, but I would like to speak up for it as a workable concept.  I don’t do this to endorse Catholic priestly celibacy, but simply to counter what I sense to be a biased opinion in the larger culture, namely, that humans are incapable of willfully limiting certain pleasures without  incurring some psychological harm.  So pervasive and important is sex in the culture, that to give it up willingly is almost unthinkable and presumed to be doomed to failure.

When I say “certain pleasures”, I mean of course, the fashionable ones. The culture will applaud and understand you if you vow to give up eating meat, an unfashionable pleasure, but is apt to find you merely perverse if you willingly forego sexual fulfillment.  Granted, retiring one’s canine teeth imposes a rather different level of self denial than retiring one’s genitals.  But I don’t think the difference in importance entirely accounts for the difference in attitude.

The culture’s unwillingness to countenance willed celibacy flows from its tendency to   view consensual sex clinically, rather than ethically or morally.  The risk of pregnancy used to give sex an inevitable ethical dimension, even for those with no religious scruples.  To the extent that this risk is gone (and bracketing for now the risk of STD’s) sex’s moral baggage is much reduced, its sacredness necessarily (and many would say blessedly) diminished.  True, it retains its unique intimacy, and all the emotional benefits and dangers there attached, but as a pleasurable act, it is now, post Pill, of no more social consequence than a session of private mutual sneezing.

I mean very intense sneezing, of course.

Sexual fulfillment thus takes on a role now much like exercise and hygiene, i.e. as a necessary component of the well adjusted individual.  Disinclined to imagine that sex might be attached to some moral end, the culture sees only a drive so elemental that its suppression, willed or not, must needs be harmful.   So when a full sex life is relinquished with equanimity, when for example a spouse tolerates a sexless marriage, or when a homosexual enters into a heterosexual marriage, the clinical community and the culture at large do not  see an admirable exercise of free will for some higher vocational goal, they see perversity.

These examples are very strange by today’s thinking, but they are neither implausible nor necessarily pathological.  They are not strictly speaking the same as a vow to celibacy, but they make the same essential demands, a loving giving up of some imagined sexual ideal.

The problem with priestly celibacy, I suspect, is that, unlike the rare examples above, few parish priests find any intrinsic moral meaning or nobility in it.  A friend of mine who works for the Church recently remarked that of the many priests he knows, few, if any, feel a vocation to celibacy.  They feel a vocation to the priesthood and put up with celibacy (or perhaps not) as an annoying entry regulation.  Most priests, like most people, have no moral reason to be celibate, and the Church’s limpid rationales, neither Scriptural nor theological, probably don’t persuade. (Those cloistered monastic priests whose very vocation is to an ascetic celibate life are an exception here).  

But however alien in popular secular culture, celibacy lies within the capacity of dedicated humans.  That priestly celibacy is now under fire, correctly in my view, does not mean that celibacy is, in itself, impossible, harmful or perverse.  Neither the popular nor the clinical culture sees its double standard here. Both cultures admire and trust the power of human self discipline when it is put in charge of quitting smoking or going to the gym, but lose confidence in it very quickly and view it more facetiously when put in the service of ends they find unfashionable.