Really radical.

Franz Klein asserts of the generation of neoconservative priests: "We want to witness to the world the Good News of salvation, and to do this we must be radical--we must be set apart." That sounds impressive at first hearing, but I wonder if, over the long haul, "set apart" does not translate into "isolated, lonely, and somehow irrelevant." At the very least, it smacks of a tendency toward clericalism and its attendant toxicity. "And what is more radical in today's world than to accept freely the charism of celibacy?" he asks. How about the free acceptance of evangelical poverty, which very few of us dare (or even care) to embrace? That would really be radical.

RAYMOND MAHER, O. CARM.

Washington, D.C.

ROBERT BARRON REPLIES:

I'm grateful for the lively responses to my article on celibacy--and for this opportunity to answer some objections and clear up certain ambiguities. It is one of the myths of the postconciliar period that Vatican II "moved away from" a cultic (read Eucharist-centered) understanding of the priesthood and embraced a Word-oriented one. In the Vatican II decree Presbyterorum ordinis we find this telling observation: "Through the hands of priests ... the Lord's sacrifice is offered in the Eucharist .... The ministry of priests is directed toward this work and is perfected in it." In addition, though the council fathers do indeed describe the priests' munus docendi [teaching office] as "first," they add this specification: "their [priests'] ministry, which takes its start from the gospel message, derives its power and force from the sacrifice of Christ." The inability to see the ordered and interdependent relationship between these two essential offices has contributed mightily to confusion in the post-conciliar theology of the priesthood.

Msgr. William Shannon accuses me of denying the fundamental quality of baptismal identity vis-a-vis priestly identity. I do nothing of the sort. What I said is that everything a priest does as priest comes from the unique way that he acts in persona Christi. To be sure, baptismal character is foundational, but to imply that priestly ordination does not add to, focus, and specifically order that identity is rather profoundly to misunderstand the nature of the sacrament of orders. He also thinks that I deny that the Holy Spirit is the principal cause of the Eucharistic presence. Not so. As Aquinas--whom both Shannon and I reverence--observed, an instrumental cause is still a real cause. Just because a priest's power to confect the sacrament is derived from God, it by no means follows that it is not a power that the priest personally possesses.

In regard to Shannon's last observation and to Rev. Charles Niblick's complaint, I can only bemoan the now near total Nietzscheanization of the ecclesial conversation, by which I mean the tendency to read everything through the lens of rivalrous power relationships. Why do so many imagine the church's life as a zero-sum game, according to which anything positively ascribed to the priesthood necessarily involves a denigration of the laity? Of course committed married people do what they do out of love for the Lord. I never said or implied otherwise. Here I'd recommend reading more Dorothy Day and less Michel Foucault.

And perhaps Michon Matthiesen could attend to my article a bit more carefully. I think she'd see that, given my insistence on making only an argument "from fittingness" for priestly celibacy, we actually agree.

FRANZ KLEIN REPLIES:

When Michon Matthiesen postulates that the celibate presbyterate would "sport a sense of spiritual superiority" if married priests were to join its ranks, she points to the tip-of-an-iceberg of problems optional celibacy could cause. Optional celibacy would quickly lose its spiritual efficacy because it would no longer have the compelling force of an ideal. An optional ideal is like extra credit: you do it to get on the teacher's good side. Having a universal discipline prevents such an attitude by keeping favoritism at a minimum. Either priests are celibate or married. We can't have it both ways.

Carmelite Fr. Raymond Maher ought to reflect on his three vows, only one of which is poverty. Though I am not a religious, I have the feeling that each vow gives significance to the others. For the diocesan priest, celibate chastity allows for a radical evangelical poverty, since we are free "to take nothing for the journey" (Mk 6:8). We will be "lonely" as Christ was lonely, and "irrelevant" only insofar as a heaven where "men and women do not marry" (Mt 22:30) is irrelevant.

Lucy Fuchs commits the same error as Msgr. Harry Byrne, whom I cited in my article: she judges a universal discipline in light of her own unsatisfactory experience. Do Byrne and Fuchs want the church to dismiss so easily the example of saintly priests, such as Vianney, Neumann, and our own pastors? Universal discipline is based on centuries of practice. We are young enough to see through the heady mists of the 1960s and '70s.