Psyche’s Mystery: A Reply to Dervin and Massimini on Celibacy

The Roman Catholic discipline of clerical celibacy has long invited both admiration and abhorrence. In the wake of recent disclosures about the sexual abuse of minors by priests it is understandable that its supporters and detractors alike have been vocal. Some conservatives argue that the problem lies not in celibacy but in its breach, and are quick to blame liberals, homosexual priests, and a too ready and facile accommodation of the Church to secular culture in the years after the Second Vatican Council. Liberals view obligatory celibacy as pathogenic and as one aspect of a broader abuse of clerical power and a distorted understanding of human sexuality. Although research suggests that there is no credible evidence that sexual abuse of minors by priests has increased in recent years, that homosexuals abuse minors more often than do heterosexuals, or that there is a correlation between celibacy and the abuse of minors, legitimate questions remain about the nature and exercise of priestly celibacy. I submit that answers to these questions will require an appreciation for mystery in its truest sense.

In his article entitled “Father Joseph Bosetti: Pioneer Priest in the Rockies,” Dan Dervin highlights the hidden and putatively unknowable aspects of a successful sublimation. He rightly contrasts the mystery of Fr. Bosetti’s character with the transparency of that of Fr. Tom, a protégé of Fr. Bosetti. Whereas Fr. Tom’s attempt at celibacy suffered from defenses against and temporizing of his sexuality, Fr. Bosetti’s celibacy was marked not only by the complexity of his person but by a seemingly genuine and expansive delight in and generosity toward innumerable people. It is altogether easier to understand why Fr. Tom chose to leave the priesthood and marry than to understand how Fr. Bosetti came to be and remain the celibate that he was.

This is true to my experience as a priest and a psychologist. Having assessed applicants to the seminary and religious life, and having provided psychotherapy to a fair number of priests and seminarians, I think that a successful sublimation as a celibate is rather more over-determined than is a failed attempt at celibacy. To be sure, both successful and failed attempts at celibacy may be defensive in part and have elements of narcissism, obsessiveness, and the precipitates of trauma. Yet it remains harder to explain why this works for some than why it does not for many. This may be because so few successful celibates have been the subject of psychoanalytic study, a study that the late Stephen A. Mitchell described as attending to the “fine grained texture of individual human lives, in all their complexity and intensity.” (Can Love Last? The Fate of Romance Over Time, 2002, p. 29) I expect that such a study would find that the path a man takes to celibacy is determined by the resources available to him—temperamental, interpersonal, historical, and religious—and the unique configurations and identifications of himself and others, including God, that he is able to confect because of them. Indeed, if there is a missing piece in the puzzle of Fr. Bosetti’s success, it is his relationship with God, a relationship which might help explain and certainly would reflect his particular complexity. [Editor’s Note: See the reply by Dervin at the conclusion of this article.]

A different kind of mystery is addressed in the article by Anthony T. Massimini. Although I think he oversimplifies a history of celibacy that Peter Brown, The Body and Society: Men, Women and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity, 1988, and Elizabeth Abbott, A History of Celibacy, 2000, find complex and varied, I think he makes an

Page 109

important distinction between grace, or gift, and obligation in the practice of celibacy. Theologically, he means that God freely bestows on some men the capacity to be celibate, something that from a psychoanalytic frame of reference we might render in terms of the congruence between the ego ideal and, depending on theoretical orientation, available ego resources, internalizations, or transitional phenomena. In this sense grace may be a mystery but a necessary condition if the celibate life is to be lived well. Accordingly, it is not surprising that a man who did not think he had the gift of celibacy would suffer from the obligation to be celibate and that many would fulfill such an obligation only imperfectly. Yet it is interesting that many who to outward appearances have failed at celibacy remain priests, and that among those who have left the active priesthood and married, some have brought to their marriages and parenting the narcissism and immaturity that formerly marred their ministry.

In my experience, the reasons why a man first becomes celibate are rarely those which can sustain him as such and the celibate life, like the married life, entails a progressive invitation to divest oneself of narcissism and to acquire the capacity for true love of others. This is not easy or automatic for either celibates or married people, and few achieve it perfectly in either state of life. But it is possible, and its possibility invites us to consider whether the grace that is necessary is a grace that is given if not in the beginning then in the course of the life chosen. One might well choose the celibate life poorly, defensively, and with little recognition of its implications beyond the pragmatic, and certainly one can suffer as a result of such a choice, but this does not mean that the celibate life cannot serve as the crucible of reality that Freud found necessary for the transition from narcissism to object love. Here as elsewhere, one must be wary of falling prey to the fallacy of origins, that is, to assuming that the discovery of the defensive origins of behavior implicates the integrity of the behavior itself, the truth that it portends, or the possibility of its development.

In his First Letter to the Corinthians (15:51), the Apostle Paul uses the Greek word mysterion in the sense both of something hidden as if buried in the ground and as something to be revealed. From a psychoanalytic point of view, clerical celibacy can be understood from both perspectives. When it succeeds it invites consideration of how complex and particular is the course of human sexuality as an element of an individual’s psychic economy. When it stumbles and apparently fails it suggests that even in unwelcome circumstances there may be yet a grace, heretofore unsuspected, to impel us to the growth and maturity that will be required in any circumstance.

Page 110