Whatever happened to celibacy?

by The Rev. Drew Foisie

Curate for Christian Formation, Old Donation, Virginia Beach

People today don’t have to look far for reasons to dislike celibacy and distance themselves from any endorsement of it. The tragic and appalling, wide-spread abuse perpetrated by an alarming and disturbing number of Roman Catholic priests is enough to make anybody want to cut celibacy from any equation of faithful living. In addition, the wider culture exudes a deep distaste and distrust for myriad forms of faithful living involving self-denial, abstinence and celibacy chief among them. The cultural subtext being that any ordering of one’s life that resembles self-denial is a form of “repression.” And yet despite its difficult and sometimes unpopular reputation, celibacy has been and remains a valuable and transformative source of life within the Christian tradition. It is a gift from God that the Apostle Paul and countless other saints have known. But many feel this gift to be far outside their sense of call or Christian vocation. And indeed, celibacy is not for everyone. Regarding celibacy Jesus said, “Not everyone can accept this teaching, but only those to whom it is given.” It must then be granted that some are not given this gift, but also that some are indeed given this gift, and given the grace to live it out.

As a permanent state, celibacy touches all aspects of one’s life. In many respects it has more in common with marriage than it does with mere “abstinence,” and yet it remains distinctly unique from either. It is the ordering of one’s lifelong sexual fidelity toward God, rather than a spouse. Abstinence, on the other hand, may be understood as a decision to abstain from sexual activity for an indefinite period of time so that one’s physical, moral and spiritual self is set apart, or made “holy,” for the purpose of faithfully receiving God’s gift of a relationship. All Christians are called to be chaste, or rightly ordered in all things, some in celibacy and some in marriage.

Scripture speaks most explicitly of ordering our sexual lives in the context of celibacy or heterosexual marriage. A thoughtful, contextual read of Scripture, however, will rightly yield a place for gay and lesbian people in the life of the Christian community. And yet it can also be difficult to draw out from Scripture examples or language that place same-gender unions in the same or similar sacramental context as heterosexual marriage. To be faithful to the witness of scripture, as well as a growing understanding of human sexuality, it seems important to keep both marriage and celibacy on the table as theological reference points. As we pray and discern what it means to bless, and maybe eventually ‘sacramentalize’ same-gender unions within the life of the Church we owe it to ourselves not to conflate one state into another and thereby potentially lose the unique spiritual gifts of both.