Celibacy

DESPITE MORE THAN 17 CENTURIES of requiring sexual abstinence from its priests and priests-in-training, the Roman Catholic Church has long fallen short in enforcing celibacy. Between A.D. 310, when a group of Spanish bishops called the Council of Elvira mandated that priests be celibate, and A.D. 989, 10 popes were born to priests. In 1522, a Catholic bishop in Switzerland collected fines from an unspecified number of clerics who, that year, had fathered about 1,875 children.

Today, celibacy remains the rule in the Catholic Church, and it is broken with remarkable frequency. A. W. Richard Sipe, a priest who has spent more than 30 years researching clerical celibacy, estimates that at any given time half of American priests are sexually active. (A spokesman for the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops contends that there are “no solidly researched numbers on celibacy in the priesthood.”) Uribe became a priest in 1995 but made a promise of celibacy in 1985, six years before he met Sean’s mother and the year he entered a Catholic order called the Redemptorists.

Uribe is still a priest, but many priests and priests-in-training who take lovers quit and marry them. So many priests have followed this route that, over the past few decades, more than 30 support groups for married former priests have emerged around the world. The largest in the United States is CORPUS, which estimates that 25,000 priests are married in the United States, which prevents them from performing in Roman Catholic services.

THE CATHOLIC CHURCH REQUIRES PRIESTS and other servants of God to be celibate so that they will be more like Jesus Christ, who is assumed to have been celibate and unmarried. But liberal theologians and members of the clergy have argued that celibacy is unrealistic and impractical, serving mainly to dissuade men from the priesthood. In 1967, Pope Paul VI ended public debate over the issue with an encyclical—a letter to bishops stating church doctrine—that described “the golden law of sacred celibacy” as a “brilliant jewel.”

Church law prescribes a process for investigating and punishing violations of all kinds, including of this golden law, but it is generally followed only in serious cases involving offenders who resist reform. Priests and others who breach the vow of celibacy are far more likely to undergo an informal process of rehabilitation with their religious superiors, a response that church law strongly encourages. “The entire Code of Canon Law, the entire theology, is based on man’s redemption,” explained Joseph Maher, the president and co-founder of Opus Bono Sacerdotii, an organization that represents priests in trouble. “The church looks at canon law in terms of helping the priest to increase his desire to grow in Holiness and thus be saved and enter Heaven.”

The church delegates much of the power to enforce the law to dioceses and orders. Orders are particularly independent, having their own rules tailored to their missions. When someone in the order breaks the vow of celibacy, his religious superior considers factors like whether the violation was a first-time offense, whether it caused a public scandal, and whether the relationship was consensual. The superior can refer the case for punishment, but more commonly he asks the offender to confess his sins, speak with his spiritual advisers, and think and pray upon what he has done. When the offender is not yet a priest, the superior may ask him to take a leave from the order and contemplate whether he has truly been called to God. He may also be dismissed as having a character flaw that makes him unsuited to the priesthood.

Bernice Yeung is a freelance writer based in New York.