Infinite Denial: Religious Celibacy and Priestly Repression (article)

Celibacy is hardly a religious pursuit unique to the Catholic priesthood. It is an ascetic sacrifice akin to fasting, hair shirts, and other self-disciplinary techniques meant to rein in the worldly comforts and desires of the flesh and to open the individual up to greater pleasures, higher knowledge, or even a direct experience of the divine. While the slightest psychoanalytic glance reveals the severe instinctual renunciation inherent in these actions, it also recognizes that such renunciation can take two forms: repression, which, over an extended period of time, will erupt in socially disruptive forms ranging from slips of the tongue to neuroses, and sublimation, where the instinctual gratification is displaced into socially acceptable, even beneficial, activities. Celibacy as a religious virtue or duty clearly is meant to be an act of sublimation (hence its role in achieving the “sublime”), a sacrifice of the satisfaction of bodily pleasure in exchange for peace of mind, clarity of purpose, and purity of spirit.

Religious ideals such as these, however, must be experienced within certain psychosocial frameworks. Self-denial requires boundaries to be personally beneficial: celibacy, like fasting, must have some restrictions on it. Sometimes it is confined to a certain length of time before an encounter with the sacred—for example, when God had the Israelite men abstain from sex for three days before giving the Law at Mt. Sinai. (Exodus 19:15) In other cases, celibates remove themselves from the normal order and temptations of everyday life, staying in a monastery, a convent, or the wilderness. Other traditions limit such asceticism to the end of one’s life, as with the Hindu sannyasin, who has already fulfilled his duty to raise a family. Or, most remarkably, one may find religious ideals absolutely embodied in some saints, gurus, and adepts of all traditions, such as the Dalai Lama or Mother Theresa. These exemplars seem able to master any challenge, sacrifice all selfish desires, in exchange for their and the world’s ongoing spiritual improvement. They are as unique in their capacity for ascetic denial as they are rare.

Sadly, it seems that with Catholic priests, celibacy is too often a forced repression of sexuality disguised by the veneer of sublimation. I have more than once heard Church officials argue that priests need to forgo the distractions of physical relationships, especially family demands, or their parish, their family in Christ, will suffer from neglect. Worse, there are no limits set on this sacrifice—it is a lifelong commitment, essentially from adolescence to death. There is no cloister. The priest is in the world, mediating between the demands of the sacred and the profane for his congregation. There is, of course, a superb legacy of extraordinary, even saintly, priests in the life of the Church. So, too, are there likely always moments, even prolonged periods, of true sublimation, where the yearnings of a priest’s sexual being are channeled into astonishing insight, imparting peace and wisdom not just to himself but to those around him.

Inevitably, these men and these moments are rare. The rest of the priesthood, the rest of the time, must grapple with desires they literally are not allowed to express, let alone satisfy. Any doubts or failure, the Church governing body says, requires only more fervent prayer and, where necessary, confession—that is to say, more sublimation, transforming real needs and true conflicts into non-threatening, theologically approved solutions. The grace of God will in due course comfort the supplicant and grant him the peace that celibacy promised in the first place. Yet, many find, the peace never comes, the priest feels the shame of failure again, and the avenues of communication between priest and God, and priest and priest, become closed off as well. The repression of the

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body and mind is now doubly reinforced, contributing to, if not directly creating, the whole range of pathologies that have plagued the modern priesthood, from depression to alcoholism to—as we know all too well—pedophilia. Astonishingly, it seems that Church leaders have been just as ignorant about the potential for spiritual damage from this perversion of celibacy’s spiritual potential as they have been about its continued psychological damage, both on its most vulnerable priests and their young victims.

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