Affective Maturity and Priestly Celibacy: When Love Is Rightly Ordered (Part Two)

At the close of Part One, we noted that to form men capable of a radical gift of self requires a brotherhood of men seeking personal holiness in the context of profound friendship. 

The First Seminary

“And when you have turned again, strengthen your brethren,” Jesus tells Peter (Lk 22:32), which can be interpreted to mean both fortify them as individual disciples (and priests) and in their common bond of love for each other in Christ. Having recognized the safeguard against self-promotion, then we consider how men, within a healthy brotherhood, can encourage and bolster each other in virtue, by their example and fraternal solicitude for each other. At the Last Supper, Jesus told His first priests, “By this all men will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another” (Jn 13:35). We recall the example of Basil and Gregory (Office of Readings for their feast on January 2) and this familiar verse from Proverbs: “Iron sharpens iron, and one man sharpens another” (27:17).

Per the wisdom of the Book of Proverbs, a man will benefit in the growth of his character by the right amount of competition, and even testing, with other men. In this way, he will be prepared to protect and promote what is good, true and beautiful, and prove himself, in the words of Cardinal Newman, a “true son of the Church militant.” From the Lord’s own teaching, we know He was fortifying the Apostles for the trials that lay ahead: 

…all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh and the lust of the eyes and the pride of life. (I Jn 2:16)

If you were of the world, the world would love its own; but because you are not of the world, but I chose you out of the world, therefore the world hates you. (Jn 15:19) 

I have said this to you, that in me you may have peace. In the world you have tribulation; but be of good cheer, I have overcome the world. (Jn 16:33)

“Simon, Simon, behold, Satan demanded to have you, that he might sift you like wheat, but I have prayed for you that your faith may not fail. (Lk 22:31–32)

Peter must first allow the Lord to form him—as must the other Apostles—which he eventually does, in humility, contrition, and love for the Master, after his threefold denial. Our Lord allows Peter to fail so that He can raise him to a higher level of virtue, and so that he can serve as a model of conversion for his brother apostles and for us. Peter overestimated himself: “Though they all fall away because of you, I will never fall away” (Mt 26:33). Whether it is the “I” of Peter, or of James and John, or any of us, Jesus purifies self-assurance and self-love from the heart, if we will but “give Him permission,” in the words of Mother Teresa. 

St. John the Baptist’s golden phrase, “He must increase and I must decrease” (Jn 3:30), clarifies the heart of the mission of every seminary (cf. Gal 2:20). The strengthening of the presence of Christ in the soul through the Holy Spirit serves two purposes, both intended by Our Lord for His first priests and their successors: 1. the personal sanctity of the man and 2. his readiness to further the Kingdom, which he will accomplish, in some measure and in the name of Christ, by forming other men, who in turn, will share the Gospel in their families, places of work, community, parishes, etc. 

Let’s consider something Jesus tells men that suggests He understood well the psychology of those He was forming. Our Lord knows that concupiscence inclines men to softness, self-indulgence, and luxuria (ST II-II, 153 and 154) and that a direct challenge inspires them to rise above this tendency. As He prepares the seventy-two for the sacred mission He has entrusted to them, He commands:

Carry no purse, no bag, no sandals…remain in the same house, eating and drinking what they provide…do not go from house to house. (Lk 10:4,7)

Our Lord always perfectly tailors His pedagogy to the occasion. In the case of the seventy-two, Jesus does not explicitly confront a weakness in fallen nature that “wish[es] earnestly,” in Newman’s words, “the comforts and luxuries of life,” rather than their “moderate and thankful enjoyment…when they actually come our way.” Jesus knows that when “this life’s goods” become “dangerous, inexpedient, or unsuitable,” as Newman writes, they should be excluded “from the company of mature, manly Christians.” 

Celibacy means more than not being married and avoiding all sins against the Sixth Commandment. In the mind of the Church, priestly celibacy is a sacrifice—one that forms the basis for many other sacrifices in the life of the priest—and not just notionally or hypothetically, but in a personal way for the man who values the goods of marriage and family life.

Rather, Jesus puts before them a rousing challenge, confident that these men can rise to it if they remain faithful to Him. When St. Paul exhorts the Corinthians to grow in charity, he employs a similar engaging style: “You are restricted in your own affections. In return—I speak as to children—widen your hearts also” (II Cor 6:12–13).

Diocesan priests do not take a vow of poverty, but Holy Orders configures their souls to the High Priest who was poor, chaste and obedient. By the grace of ordination, the heart of a priest is supernaturally fitted for simplicity of life—as it is for celibacy and obedience—and the foregoing episode from Luke 10 urges him not to work against the grace given by yielding to ease and comfort, but to embrace Our Lord’s challenge so that he can climb the ladder of charity, unimpeded or untethered by disordered attachment to the here and now.

If we translate this for priestly life today, do Christ’s words say something practical about food, drink, attire, housing, and even vacations? Are not simplicity of life and trust in God’s providence, like chastity and obedience, signs of Christian manhood? The newest Doctor of the Church thought so, which is why he warned against the love of the comforts and pleasures of life. Like the Master and Cardinal Newman, St. Paul also urged detachment: “Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth” (Col 3:2).

One further point here which unites identity (GS 22) and self-gift (GS 24) to the fulfillment of the heart Our Lord promises to the first priests in the farewell discourse of John’s gospel. “These things I have spoken to you, that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be full” (15:11). The joy Our Lord experiences and expresses does not come in spite of His poverty, chastity and obedience, but because of them. As a result, “Christ proposes the evangelical counsels, in their great variety, to every disciple,” in the words of the Catechism (CCC 915), because the counsels are directed to growth in self-giving and so in Christian freedom, and in turn, to growth in charity. Charity is the presence of the divine indwelling in the soul, and joy arises from charity as a fruit of the Holy Spirit. To be a Christian is to pattern one’s heart after the Sacred Heart, and a fortiori, to be a priest is to pattern the heart after the heart of the High Priest. The fruit, in both cases, joy, will be in proportion to the self-gift. 

Always Distinguish

Let us return for a moment to a distinction between men and women in the Gospel. Jesus did not establish a corresponding group of women in the same way He established the Apostles. The Gospel does testify that a group of women formed around Christ, out of love for and personal service to Him. Clearly, in the history of the Church, many faithful women’s religious communities have served the Mystical Body with great generosity and richness, but this is a different point, it seems to me.

Following St. Thomas Aquinas in distinguishing nature and grace, we observe that the Apostles are first a group of men before they become the apostolic college. Formation in discipleship precedes ministry, and formation in discipleship rests on human formation, the “basis of all priestly formation,” in the words of St. John Paul. Men are not formed merely as humans, but as men, who—please, God—act in a human way! Let’s return to where we started, to what may seem like a distinction without a difference, though I wonder if this is really so. St. Paul wrote about himself, “when I became a man” (vir), not “when I became an adult” (adultus). Men know they need other men to model masculine virtue, and when they are being humble and honest, they know they occasionally need a “slap on the back” from another man to call them higher.

Women certainly need encouragement too, though in different forms. One reason for this is that nature fits every woman internally with a certain path to understand that her femininity finds its fulfillment in motherhood. Nature does not equip men in quite the same way, and so they must look outside themselves—in some important measure—to understand their masculinity and to bring it to fruition in fatherhood. To make the point concisely, we might employ a rich phrase from John Paul’s Theology of the Body: “The body expresses the person.”  

Further Defining Affective Maturity

In the manner of Pastores, the current edition of the USCCB’s Program for Priestly Formation (PPF), describes the traits of “a person of affective maturity” this way: 

Someone whose life of feelings is in balance and integrated into thought and values; in other words, a man of feelings who is not driven by them but who freely lives his life enriched by them. This might be especially evident in his ability to live well with authority, in his ability to take direction from another, and in his ability to exercise authority well among his peers, as well as an ability to deal productively with conflict and stress. (par 183)

 Signs of affective maturity in the seminarian are prudence, vigilance over body and spirit, compassion and care for others, an ability to express and acknowledge emotions, and a capacity to esteem and respect interpersonal relationships between men and women. Therefore, true friendship is an education in affective maturity. (par 211)

Since “the tree is known by its fruit,” these words greatly assist formators and seminarians by highlighting how emotions and relationships will look in a mature man preparing for priesthood. 

However, may I propose a further sign, perhaps the central sign, of affective maturity for a man: his evident capacity and disposition for fatherhood, since mature masculinity is naturally ordered toward fatherhood and, in the priest, finds its fulfillment in spiritual fatherhood. Returning to what St. Paul wrote to the Corinthians, a boy truly becomes a man in charity, i.e. in the virtue to give himself, in fatherhood, for the love of God and for the love of His image in others. As St. Thomas teaches, love is diffusive of itself, and so the mature manhood of the seminarian, with the grace of ordination, will express itself in the loving and wise spiritual fatherhood of the priest, and in all three munera: teaching, sanctifying and governing. 

Are we better, or more systematic, at identifying the qualities of a teacher (e.g. doctrinally sound; having some pedagogical skill) and a man prepared to administer the sacraments (through training in the rites), than in validating that a seminarian has the mind, the heart, and the virtues to serve and to lead as a father, in whatever circumstance the Church will ask of him? A man whose charity is expressed in his zeal for the salvation of souls, a man who will “stand firm” (cf. Ex 14:13; I Cor 16:13) in the face of the counterfeit that Cardinal Newman called the “religion of the day”? A man at ease with both the “sword” to defend the faith and the “trowel” to build up the Kingdom of God on earth, the Church (cf. Neh 4:17–18)?

Under the heading of charity, I recommend it be clear to both formators and seminarians that, inter alia, the goal for which a future priest strives is the virtue of chastity, and not simply continence, as a result of human formation—to include the work of grace, of course—and as one important sign of affective maturity. As the Catechism confirms, chastity is a human virtue that integrates the desire for sexual union within the person, but with specific reference to the complementarity of the sexes and in view of “the complete and lifelong mutual gift of a man and a woman” (CCC 2337; cf. CCC 2333 quoted above). 

In the thought of St. Thomas continence is an imperfect virtue because it refers only to what is not happening, but not to the reason why. For example, a man who predominately experiences same-sex attraction can certainly be continent while he strives for chastity. The Catechism states that the homosexual inclination is “objectively disordered” (CCC 2358), which is not a moral judgment, but an anthropological one. Such a tendency can never be fulfilled in a manner consistent with the natural law (CCC 2357), and thus it cannot be integrated into properly ordered masculinity.  

Because homosexuality has become widely accepted as a normal variant of human nature since the time John Paul wrote Pastores, even among many Christians, it seems prudent to consider this topic more fully, in specific relationship to the priesthood. Earlier, I mentioned that a man with deep-seated SSA experiences a discordance within himself. His nature tells him something is not as it should be. He feels an erotic and/or romantic draw, not to women, but to men. This produces an ambivalence in him about his masculinity, which in turn will affect his relationships with both men and women. In the words of the 2005 document, a seminarian’s affective maturity—understood, I would suggest, in the way this essay proposes—is essential to “allow him to relate correctly to both men and women, developing in him a true sense of spiritual fatherhood towards the Church community that will be entrusted to him” (Instruction, par 1).

Again, SSA is not first a moral problem, but one of capacity, of the interior architecture of a man’s masculine character and so of his self-perception, and this requires attention before anything about state-in-life can be decided. In this regard, the Catechism valuably offers the phrase “psychological genesis” (CCC 2357) to confirm that homosexuality is not ontological, but is related to a person’s self-understanding. While this experience of self is certainly real, it is not exhaustive of one’s identity. Further, the word “genesis” confirms a cause-and-effect exists, i.e. that SSA is a symptom of a something else, likely a painful problem that has given rise to a wound of some kind. Since “bad fruit” (here, an objective disorder) can only come from a “bad tree” (cf. Mt 7:17–20), the source of the wound, probably in childhood or adolescence, was either that something happened that should not have happened (e.g. sexual abuse), or that something that should have happened but did not happen (e.g. the development of a sound and stable relationship between parent and child). The social sciences can clarify patterns without establishing a straight-line cause and effect (i.e., x always produces y), which will be indispensable for pastoral care, fuller self-understanding, and healing.       

Celibacy means more than not being married and avoiding all sins against the Sixth Commandment. In the mind of the Church, priestly celibacy is a sacrifice—one that forms the basis for many other sacrifices in the life of the priest—and not just notionally or hypothetically, but in a personal way for the man who values the goods of marriage and family life yet believes that Christ invites him to offer these goods in loving generosity and trust as a priest. Since grace elevates nature, then it is reasonable and fitting that a seminarian be suited in virtue for natural fatherhood, since as a priest he will serve married couples, families, and others in his parish as a spiritual father. 

We know that many newly ordained priests will quickly be assigned as pastors, given the shortage of laborers for the harvest. When I was ordained in 1997, I recall being told that it would be ten years before I would be named a pastor. We can no longer expect either the passage of so many years or the additional preparation, or seasoning, in ordained ministry that a priest will receive before a bishop appoints him to his first pastorate. This is yet another challenging sign of the times. 

Servant and shepherd are certainly appropriate, essential identities for one mature in Christian manhood, because they reflect identities of Christ, and they both express something fundamental about the nature of masculine charity. Yet we call priests “Father” because that is who they are in the mind of the Church and of the people who will be under their spiritual care. While the priest as father teaches and sanctifies, he also governs, leads and protects individual souls and the common good of the parish, because he strives to love those souls with the heart of a father. 

Sadly, and sometimes tragically, many souls have been hurt or wounded by bad fatherhood, while many others have not experienced the love of a good father. The “father wound” is a phrase widely and aptly employed to describe the hearts of many. We have also briefly considered the consequences of today’s false anthropology, and that problems will arise when power displaces virtuous authority in governance. Finally, many priests know fine and faithful young women who do not seem to be able to find mature, virtuous men to whom they can entrust their heart in marriage, and the hearts of the children they desire to have. 

To borrow a phrase from my patron, “now is the acceptable time” (II Cor 6:2) to address, prudently and courageously, the root cause of these problems, by forming men after the Heart of Christ to be His faithful disciples, and so to be good fathers, according to their vocation. 

The Fatherhood of God    

To conclude, we return to St. Paul who tells us that all earthly fatherhood comes from the Fatherhood of God (cf. Eph 3:15). This principle refers preeminently to God the Son, because, as St. Thomas Aquinas teaches, the “Father communicates His whole nature to His Son.” Looked at from our perspective—the perspective of St. Philip who asked Jesus to “show us the Father”—it lies within our God-given nature to want to know our origin, to know where we came from. This is because this knowledge helps us to understand ourselves, to understand our true God-given identity and so to know how to live, in keeping with that identity. Furthermore, it helps us to grasp for what God has made us—the purpose of our lives—and thus to find meaning, fulfillment and happiness. Action follows being or identity, rightly understood, i.e., in the way corresponding to our origin and telos. 

Thus, Jesus showed us the Father and astonishingly, taught us to call God “Father,” and admonished us to love Him and to allow His love to take hold of our hearts, as His beloved sons and daughters. Might not we reverently recast Our Lord’s proclamation of the Kingdom this way: “Your Father in Heaven is good. He loves you and will provide for you, beginning with His abundant mercy. You can trust Him, and I, His Son, am proof of this Myself.” 

We recall that Original Sin was the effect of Satan’s malicious desire to separate us from our origin, from our Father in Heaven, or said another way, to throw off the Fatherhood of God. Jesus, the perfect child and Son of God, comes into the world to reestablish that severed bond of love. The current unrelenting attack on “patriarchy” reminds us of the devil’s scheme, and the Father’s wise and loving remedy for our salvation: the Son reveals God to us as Father, and the cure for sin is the self-giving love of the Son at Calvary. Through the Paschal Mystery, we become adopted children of God. This grace is our patrimony, “the gift of the father” (pater + munus, in the Latin). 

Our Lord’s love for His Father is cruciform, and so the Cross re-united heaven and earth. Further, it unites what we considered previously from Gaudium et spes 22 and 24, i.e., man’s identity with his fulfillment. Therefore, the Cross unites Christian manhood, brotherhood, spousal love, fatherhood and priesthood with the virtuous exercise of authority, in charitable service and sacrifice, for the love of God and His people. 

When earthly fatherhood—with all of its limits, weakness, and imperfection—serves as an icon of divine fatherhood, then an earthly father fulfills the sacred task of showing us the Father. When a man fails through human weakness or sin, he forfeits, in some measure and for those occasions, the title, i.e. he cannot claim the mantle of fatherhood when he acts selfishly. God is love, and so a man’s fatherhood—familial or spiritual—and whatever type of authority he exercises, must be ordered to self-giving love, to the charity St. Paul praises.

Strong, Loving and Wise

St. Paul described the qualities of spiritual fatherhood to one of his spiritual sons in these words from the Vulgate: virtutis, dilectionis, sobrietatis…sometimes rendered “strong, loving and wise” (II Tim 1:7). St. Paul urges St. Timothy, as he preaches the Gospel and exercises his priestly ministry, to be bold and courageous in a fallen and confused world, with the truth and power of the Holy Spirit. He implores Timothy to order his loves according to charity, which bids us love God above all. Finally, Paul counsels his son to be sober, i.e. to be wise with the goods of this world, to exercise self-control, lest attachment to them become intemperate and so distract him from his heavenly home. Then, St. Paul tells St. Timothy why God the Father has blessed him:

Do not be ashamed then of testifying to Our Lord…but take your share of suffering for the Gospel in the power of God, who saved us and called us with a holy calling, not in virtue of our works but in virtue of His own purpose and the grace which He gave us in Christ Jesus ages ago, and now has manifested through the appearing of Our Savior, Christ Jesus, who abolished death and brought life and immortality to light through the Gospel. (vv. 8–10)

Jesus Christ, as Good Shepherd and High Priest, perfectly embodies the masculine expression of the virtues of strength, love and wisdom. For the sake of good leadership or governance, all three qualities must be maintained in harmony or in equal measure. For strength, we can think in terms of fortitude or courage, discipline, sacrifice, and zeal. Love comprises forgiveness and mercy, compassion and kindness, warmth and tenderness, fidelity and benevolence. Wisdom, which begins with humility, “sees” reality and judges things in light of our goal, Heaven. Wisdom means more than knowledge or technical competence, and it keeps in view both the temporal and the eternal, the individual and the law, the parts and the whole, the human and the divine. In a subsequent essay, examining these virtues in Christ could provide a practical frame for how men are best formed on their way to the spiritual fatherhood of the priest.

As the Church, the Bride of Christ and His Mystical Body, continues the presence of the Incarnation in the world, and so does the ministerial priesthood continue the saving work of Christ the Bridegroom and High Priest. “As the Father has sent me, even so I send you,” Our Lord explains to the Twelve as their formation nears completion (Jn 20:21). The spousal love of Christ for the Church shines through the priest in his teaching, sanctifying and governing. The Master makes clear the standard of pastoral charity for the priest’s spiritual fatherhood: “Love one another, as I have loved you.”  

To be sure, men preparing for spiritual fatherhood must first become faithful sons in the Son, a key aspect of Pauline theology, to guarantee their hearts are cruciform like the Sacred Heart (cf. Gal 4:4–7; Rom 8:14–17). Through Christ, men in formation learn that they are beloved sons in the Beloved Son. With the indispensable help of grace, they must follow the narrow, sometimes steep upward path of the Master to what may be the ideal summary of Gospel, as given to us by St. Paul, and the goal of priestly formation: “I have been crucified with Christ; it is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me; and the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me” (Gal 2:20).   

Only striving on this path with the grace and mercy of God will ensure the charity that St. Paul commends to us in I Corinthians 13, and to which all Christians all called, but which is of special importance to men preparing today for the spiritual fatherhood of the priest. And to those men, St. John Paul II offers this encouragement and challenge: “Be who you are!”