It's impossible for me to summarize the brilliant lecture on "Celibacy in the Early Church," delivered by Father Joseph Leinhard, a Jesuit priest and Fordham University professor of patristic theology. Father Leinhard has spent the last 35 years working with the theological texts of the early church Fathers, teaching, researching and publishing. He is also an adjunct professor at St Joseph Seminary (Dunwoodie). Let me say that after reviewing what the literature had say about celibacy in Scripture, theology, ascetics and with some legal texts thrown in for good measure (making necessary distinctions and clarifications), Leinhard drew the audience's attention to the required interpretative keys for celibacy: the needed aspects of the eschatological, ecclesiological and the Christological to make any sense for the requirement of priestly celibacy. Without these three marks, celibacy would remain on the pragmatic and rationalistic levels which are clearly unconvincing. That is, if one argues that celibacy allows a man to do more work because he has no wife and family, then the entire point of celibacy is missed.
There are some Catholics who have forgotten that the Church is not merely a sociology, an institution understood in secular terms. There is a supernatural element of the Church, namely God's revelation that all believers are called too share in and conform their lives to. Likewise we profess in the Creed of a "life of the world to come" and we state what we believe about the Church, that is, the 4 marks of the Church (one, holy, catholic and apostolic), all of which contributes to our fruitful living in the Kingdom of God now which is
preparing us to live with the Blessed Trinity in the Kingdom to come. The Church is oriented to this world so as to be in communion with God in the next. How this is accomplished is often a mystery of the Divine Plan. The connection, however, is with the Christian reality we have in the one high priest, Jesus Christ, and his offering of the perfect sacrifice that is known to us in the efficaciousness of the Mass. Since Paschal Mystery, the Church relies on the necessary work of the priest who, in persona Christi capitis, offers Mass as Christ did, though not in the same ritual form but in substance, the effects salvation. Hence, the priesthood, particularly the celibate priesthood, imitates Christ. How does this happen? The man at ordination to the priesthood is conformed to Christ himself (ipse Christus) by the laying on hands and the prayer of consecration by the bishop.
Saint Gregory of Nyssa (d. 385), in his letter "On Virginity," concludes: Wherefore we would that you too should become crucified with Christ, a holy priest standing before God, a pure offering in all chastity, preparing yourself by your own holiness for God's coming; that you also may have a pure heart in which to see God, according to the promise of God, and of our Savior Jesus Christ, to Whom be glory for ever and ever. Amen.
Father Leinhard's lecture will be published in the next Dunwoodie Review.
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