For the Sake of the Kingdom of Heaven…

            A young college seminarian recently spoke to me concerning his experience of telling members of his family and family friends about his decision to discern a vocation to the priesthood.  After the polite – and so very brief – reactions of muted admiration, comes the inevitable attack against celibacy undergone by almost every priest and seminarian I have ever met.  The irony of the emotion and, yes, even rage concerning this issue, Peter Seewald brought out well in his interview with Cardinal Ratzinger, the future Pope Benedict XVI, published in the Cardinal’s book Salt of the Earth:  “Curiously, nothing enrages people more than the question of celibacy.  Even though it concerns directly only a tiny fraction of the people in the Church.  Why is there celibacy?”

            Cardinal Ratzinger’s answer would surprise many people, especially those who disparage celibacy from the perspective of being non-Catholic “Bible” Christians; their presumption being that celibacy is unscriptural, unnatural, something foisted upon the Latin priesthood by a controlling, medieval hierarchy with dubious motives, usually connected to worldly concerns about Church property, etc.  Many a Catholic these days echoes these views, having imbibed at some workshop or seminar this inadequate, not to say truncated, history of celibacy.  The Cardinal’s answer to Seewald’s question, “Why is there celibacy?” is simple:  “It arises from a saying of Christ.”  The Cardinal continued, “There are, Christ says [Matthew 19:12], those who give up marriage for the sake of the kingdom of heaven and bear testimony to the kingdom of heaven with their whole existence.  Very early on the Church came to the conviction that to be a priest means to give this testimony to the kingdom of heaven.”

            The Catholic Church takes the Holy Scriptures very seriously, and, as the future Pope Benedict pointed out, sees in the Old Testament a “parallel” that by analogy points to the future Christian priesthood – that is, the special role given to the Jewish tribe of Levi, the priestly tribe, who, unlike the other eleven tribes, was to inherit no land in Canaan, whose inheritance was to be God alone.  Ratzinger explained further: 

            This means in practical terms that [the tribe of Levi’s] members live on the cult offerings and not, like the other tribes, from the cultivation of land.  The essential point is that they have no property.  In Psalm 16 we read, You [God] are my assigned portion; I have drawn you as my lot; God is my land.  This figure, that is, the fact that in the Old Testament the priestly tribe is landless and, as it were, lives on God – and thereby also really bears witness to him – was later translated, on the basis of Jesus’ words, to this:  The land where the priest lives is God.

            We have such difficulty understanding this renunciation today because the relationship to marriage and children has clearly shifted.  To have to die without children was once synonymous with a useless life:  the echoes of my own life die away, and I am completely dead.  If I have children, then I continue to live in them; it’s a sort of immortality through posterity and thereby to remain in the land of the living.

            The renunciation of marriage and family is thus to be understood in terms of this vision:  I renounce what, humanly speaking, is not only the most normal but also the most important thing.  I forego bringing forth further life on the tree of life, and I live in the faith that my land is really God – and so I make it easier for others, also, to believe that there is a kingdom of heaven.  I bear witness to Jesus Christ, to the Gospel, not only with words, but also with this specific mode of existence, and I place my life in this form at his disposal…. The point is really an existence that stakes everything on God and leaves out precisely the one thing that normally makes a human existence fulfilled with a promising future.

            Cardinal Ratzinger goes on in this interview to address a number of the practical issues that revolve around celibacy and the opposition to it.  He reminds us that celibacy in priestly life – as practiced as what was expected of a priest (a kind of ideal that all priests should emulate) – goes all the way back to the second century.  The argument that the allowance of marriage would “solve” the problem of the priest shortage he counters with the obvious fact that the institution of marriage itself has become quite fragile in those very regions of the world – for the most part the affluent West – where there are not enough priests.  “People need to get straight in their minds that times of crisis for celibacy are always times of crisis for marriage as well…. Put in practical terms, after the abolition of celibacy we would only have a different kind of problem with divorced priests.”

            “The conclusion that I would draw from this, however,” the Cardinal continued, “is not that we should now say, ‘We can’t do it anymore,’ but that we must learn again to believe.”

And that we must also be even more careful in the selection of candidates for the priesthood.  The point is that someone ought really to accept it freely and not say, well now, I would like to become a priest, so I’ll put up with this.  Or:  Well, then, I’m not interested in girls anyway, so I’ll go along with celibacy.  That is not a basis to start from.  The candidate for the priesthood has to recognize the faith as a force in his life, and he must know that he can live celibacy only in faith.  Then celibacy can also become again a testimony that says something to people and that also gives them the courage to marry.  The two institutions are interconnected.  If fidelity in the one is no longer possible, the other no longer exists:  one fidelity sustains the other.