Celibacy to the Rescue  

When I was a small child, singer Don Cornell had a huge radio hit (1955) with a tune called “The Bible Tells Me So”:

Have faith, hope and charity
That’s the way to live successfully
How do I know, the Bible tells me so

I seriously doubt that our younger generation can even imagine living in a culture where such a song could become a national radio hit. Cornel’s song, often sung by my mom, came to mind as I was contemplating Pope Benedict XVI’s encyclical Deus Caritas Est, which is often translated God Is Love, but is perhaps better understood as God Is Charity.

It may seem that the choice of wording in Cornell’s song was primarily to serve meter and rhyme, but I don’t think that to be the case. In the catechesis of the day, reference was always made to faith, hope, and charity rather than faith, hope, and love (as is now the norm).

Our secular use of the word love often reduces it to affection—that which affects us—a passive emotion. Charity, on the other hand, can hardly be construed as simply a base emotion or of being passive in any sense. The notion that all love is good love just doesn’t have the same feel when you change it to all charity is good charity. It is a word that has all but disappeared from common usage. Benedict writes:

Here it might be helpful to allude to the earliest legal structures associated with the service of charity in the Church. Towards the middle of the fourth century we see the development in Egypt of the “diaconia”: the institution within each monastery responsible for all works of relief, that is to say, for the service of charity. By the sixth century this institution had evolved into a corporation with full juridical standing, which the civil authorities themselves entrusted with part of the grain for public distribution.

Benedict then discusses Julian the Apostate who, upon becoming emperor, chose to restore paganism—with one exception. Citing charitable work as the outstanding characteristic of Christianity, he sought to foster a pagan renewal that would outdo Christianity’s charitability. I don’t think I need to elaborate on the eventual fate of that effort.

Clearly, Julian did not have a handle on what exactly it is that drives this uniquely Christian charism. To grasp it, one first needs to have a grasp of human nature bereft of the influence of the Holy Spirit.

Concupiscence, our inherent tendency to see pleasures as conquests rather than gifts, is deeply embedded in the human psyche. Left to this influence, the exertion of power brings a thrill to the ego. When life’s common pleasures are the result of conquest, the conqueror perceives some vile, egoistic zing—natural pleasure magnified by the intoxication of proud acquisition.

There is only one thing that stands to compete well with such pleasure: joy.

Joy is foreign to one with a conqueror’s mindset; something, in fact, that such a one would be at odds to define.

 Christian joy is nuclear. A breeder reactor is a nuclear reactor that generates more fissile material than it consumes. Joy is both the fuel and the product of charitable work and is the unfailing sustenance of holiness.

In our times, the monastic life is dying, fading into oblivion. How on earth can it rescue anything when it’s dying on the vine?

The answer to that question can only be found in a reality check. For example, look at the recent storm of interest in St. Padre Pio and Shia LeBeouf’s conversion. Celibacy, monasteries, and hermitages have a strange, visceral yet cerebral mystique about them. That mystique is perhaps the allure of unabashed joy.

Of joy, Webster says: the emotion evoked by well-being, success, or good fortune or by the prospect of possessing what one desires: delight. St. Thomas writes:

There can be spiritual joy about God in two ways. First, when we rejoice in the Divine good considered in itself; secondly, when we rejoice in the Divine good as participated by us. The former joy is the better, and proceeds from charity chiefly: while the latter joy proceeds from hope also, whereby we look forward to enjoy the Divine good, although this enjoyment itself, whether perfect or imperfect, is obtained according to the measure of one’s charity.

According to the measure of one’s charity. Indeed. When many consider the hardships of the monastery and celibacy, they wonder how one can live such a life, all while, perhaps subconsciously, intuiting the answer deep within their hearts. (To be clear, LeBeouf did not become a monk, but his conversion was deeply connected to the influence of the friars with whom he interacted during the making of the film).

Martin Luther labeled the medieval Church antinatalistic, that is, opposed to procreation. He arrived at this erroneous conclusion by noting that nearly one-third of all adults in Christian medieval Europe were celibates, living mostly in monasteries and convents (At its height, the Benedictine order boasted 37,000 monasteries throughout Europe).

Could it be that, as one of those celibates, the former Augustinian abbot’s theological thinking was influenced by the difficulty of the life he had chosen? Against St. Paul’s teaching that celibacy was the better way—in as much as one is able to devote more time to the work of God when not strapped by the burden of a family—Luther, a father of six, taught that procreation was a huge priority.

(The irony of this lies in the exaltation, on the part of some of today’s Protestants, of the homosexual union, in part, because it is a sterile lifestyle. How appalling this notion would be to Luther!)

In a previous article, I wrote of Elon Musk’s concern that civilization stands at great risk from an impending population collapse. I lamented that Christians have bought into a cookie-cutter mentality that mandates that we all follow the same intelligentsia-designed lifestyle to lead us to utopia; specifically, to a world with a stable, manageable population level—a non-organic, top-down utopian goal that Musk finds flawed and dangerous. It was the only article that I’ve written to date that earned me a request from a reader to be removed from my email list, so I knew that I had struck a nerve.

How does monastic life fit into the plans of the intelligentsia? Does it have the same honored position as the other population-reducing lifestyles? For example, same-sex marriage? Of course not. Unconstrained sexual activity is a right. Right?

Can we even imagine one-third of all adults living monastically? What would that look like? And would it be a good thing? Perhaps the first thing that comes to mind is that there would be corruption. Of course. There would be—there is corruption wherever human beings are found (and certainly plenty of it within modern marriage). But the possibility of corruption is the reason for magnified fortitude and diligence, not spiritual paralysis.

Christian celibacy is so much more than just living without sex; it is the placing of sex within the proper spirit/body context for a single person devoted to service to God and community. In today’s secular culture, sex seems to have but a single context: consensual vs. non-consensual. This, for many, frames the totality of any moral debate on the subject. And if sexual morality is pushed to that line, that line will not hold any better than any other arbitrarily drawn line.

Most notably missing from discussions of sexuality in our times is its undeniably innate connection to life. In the realm of orthodox thought, just as Christian marriage puts life front and center, so does Christian celibacy.

Who is served by the celibate? —The body of Christ, the Church. And who makes up the Church? Families. Families have children and foster Christian vocations. Celibacy serves families; families support celibates—they are our extended family and need to be treated as nothing less.

It will be argued that seeing a monastic movement as the correction of our current licentious sexuality and dwindling faith is reactionary, extreme, and delusional, and even if accomplished, would be but fodder for a future cultural reactionary swing—a vicious backlash.

However, that suggests that the reactionary cycles—the swings of the pendulum—of human social interaction are something that can be totally avoided. In a previous article, I quoted the work of novelist G. M. Hopf, “Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. And, weak men create hard times.” Only our holiness and that of those touched by our holiness can prevent the swing of the pendulum.

A flourishing monastic community is, like everything else worth pursuing, fraught with difficulty, but abounding with beautiful possibilities. The monastic life of the middle ages produced the likes of Saints Thomas Aquinas, Catherine of Siena, Dominic, and Teresa of Avila, achieving the greatest heights of Christian scholarship, thought, and holiness. Monastic scholasticism was civilization’s means of final recovery from the Dark Ages.

We are in a new Dark Age, one far more sinister than the first. The first was ushered in by warring, uneducated barbarians; this one, by something much more sinister: academic barbarism. The first was characterized by uncalculated, ignorant brutality; this one by scientifically-calculated, sophistry-mandated brutality.

The common denominators of satanic manifestation are reductionism (dumbing-down) and brutality. Many elements of the so-called eighteenth-century enlightenment were, from a Catholic perspective, a spiritual/philosophical dumbing-down all dressed up as academia. It became the springboard for the enlightened insanity of the nineteenth century which fed the murderous brutality of the twentieth century.

With the priest scandal and broken celibacy vows everywhere we turn, how can one, with a straight face, suggest that celibacy is the answer to anything? The answer to that question is demanding, but it’s not complex.

The answer to broken vows is kept vows, whether it be the vow of purity within celibacy or of marital purity and fidelity. The means of keeping vows is a return to basics; a return to holiness and an abandonment of our false hope in panaceas—in politico-social engineering.

Holiness and purity are inseparable and always lead to justice.

How and why did the monastic system come to its demise? We can spend a lot of time looking at history and cultural trends, but in the end, monasticism is headed down the slippery slope of irrelevance the same way that anything does: one sin at a time.

Nations don’t sin; the Church doesn’t sin; people sin—persons. The human person—and therefore the culture we produce—seems perpetually doomed to bouncing between bling and modesty, instant gratification and austerity, avarice, and detachment. Modesty, austerity, and detachment are hard; bling, instant gratification, and avarice are empty. The pendulum swings from the difficult and rewarding to the easy and empty and back again.

The cultural pendulum exists solely because the search for a panacea continues.

That search is always reinvigorated by evil in the name of some supposed good. Just as surely as hope springs eternal, delusion will always be there to compete.

Can the monastic community be rebuilt? Yes. It can be rebuilt in the homes of the faithful and rebuilt it will be.

Having our children educated by the state creates a huge hurdle. There was a time when many, perhaps most, Catholic children were educated by celibates who were faithful to their vows. I remember, with no small fondness, the love of the sisters and priests who taught me. Yes, they were flawed—we all are—but they were beautiful.

A monastic community will emanate organically from families whose communal substance involves spiritual reflection. No Church top-down promotion of the monastic life will do.

Children have to experience joy, discovered in charity fostered by silence, reflection, modesty, austerity, and abandonment—things they can only come to appreciate via example; things that they may be driven toward, as was Shia LeBeouf, by the noisy, pointless emptiness of the culture around them.