Celestine the Last?

It’s hard to get off this topic, especially in the present season. The waves of the pedophile crisis are lapping against the doors of the Vatican itself, and right during the peak activity of Holy Week and Easter. Pictures of the Bavarian pope carrying the symbols of Christ’s passion make great copy, suggesting a delicious irony (or malicious, depending on how you see it) against the roiled background of suspicions about how much he knew and how much he covered up. And now even the inconceivable has been suggested: that he resign.

Only one other pope has ever resigned on his own personal account, it was Celestine V back at the end of the 13th century. (There was another resignation to end the crisis of three rival popes early in the fifteenth century, but that was to resolve an ecclesiatical power struggle and really someone had to go.) According to tradition Celestine is the nameless figure Dante placed in the antechamber of hell because of “his great refusal.” However, Celestine was really a mystic and actually a canonized saint: he simply couldn’t stand the job. The nature of Benedict’s departure would be immensely different: a pope resigning under pressure from a secular society because it had gained the moral high ground and made the pope’s position untenable. Who would Dante send to hell here and for what reasons?

In an article in the New York Times Maureen Dowd suggested that the R.C. church needs a ‘nope’ not a pope, meaning a nun should fill its top post. I am sure this is tongue-in-cheek. Ms. Dowd is a shrewd commentator and must have some inkling of the geological resistance to a shift of that order. The Vatican would prefer to let the pope resign precisely to forestall something like that, putting in his place ‘a good man’ to restore the reputation of the papacy.

But even so I think she is onto something. The very meaning of celibacy is in crisis and mention of a woman in the papal seat does by its flight of fancy throw a light on something very disturbing about the character of the male R.C. priesthood. I have recently been writing some of my own recollections of my priesthood days, and so it is on my mind, and as is the way with what is written the matter can suddenly show itself in an entirely new light.

The pedophile crisis is not simply a crisis of crime and punishment, as it is often understood. The way that offending priests were systematically protected (something I witnessed at first hand) speaks to clerical celibate culture as such. Priests because of their special sexual situation are bonded to each other as a single caste of males, seamless from the pope to the lowliest parish curate. The analogous institution in the past was the band of male warriors around their chieftain and I think this is the correct sociological model for the priesthood over centuries. In past times, perhaps up to the 2nd World War, the caste of priests experienced themselves in militant opposition to the world, including political forces, and so, I believe, the dominant tone among them was one of a military brotherhood, the feeling tone of a professional officer class.

But in the middle of the century and especially from the Vatican Council onward the militant character waned and what took its place was a much warmer, more positive energy toward human society and culture. The latent eroticism in the band of brothers, focused aggressively against a common enemy, became confused, reflexive, awakened in and for itself. Hundreds of thousands of men left to get married, but those who stayed found themselves swimming in a much more powerful current of desire. In this situation infantilized members of the caste turned to children as their sexual prey. But the whole brotherhood protected its members in a kind of vast erotic conspiracy. The hushing-up and moving ever onward of offending priests were explained as attempts to avoid scandal but really what was at stake was the collective self-desire of the priestly caste. How else account for the actions of otherwise intelligent men who knew the cyclical behaviors of those in their charge, the criminal acts, the trauma to children, the permanent spiritual damage to those affected?

I know this is a sweeping, broad-brush description which does not take into consideration the variety of circumstance, the possibility that the division of periods is not exact (what was the incidence of sexual abuse of children by clergy before the 2nd World War?), and the presence of mature and genuine men among it all. But I believe I speak from something of a vantage point and the time to name the real malaise of priestly celibacy is now. If the scandal has touched the pope surely it is not accidental or passing? Priestly celibacy is an institutional misuse of human eros for the sake of power and control and it corrupts the consciences of men.

What we are talking about eventually is the gospel of Jesus Christ, its clarity and truth, and a world that so desperately needs it. Those who read the signs of the times are obliged to think through the situation and prepare and act for something different, something new. Pope Benedict and those around him have tried to return the Roman church to a sense of militancy, hoping that it might save the day at this desperate hour. I think they have a sense of how far we’ve come. But the genie cannot be put back in the bottle because, as I argue elsewhere, it is the gospel itself which has sprung it loose: chaotic desire can and must find only love as its solution. What is needed is a style of Christian community marked by the four essential characteristics as I see them: a scale that does not exceed the face-to-face; understanding the work of Christ as remaking the human from violence to love; resurrection as the true afterlife; sacraments arising spontaneously in and from the community.

And we cannot worry about the huge numbers of Roman Catholics who perhaps will stop going to church, or will turn to a mega-church etc. They probably already have in the West, and early Christians did not stop meeting in each other’s houses just because there was such a huge crowd last night at the Coliseum! Today we can seek only the authenticity and faithfulness of the face-to-face group to which we become committed in Christ.

Meanwhile it’s interesting to note that to mark the 800th anniversary of Celestine's birth, Pope Benedict has proclaimed a ‘Celestine year’ from 28 August 2009 through 29 August 2010. Does that mean we are to expect some announcement before the end of August?

Tony