Response to a Priest Defending a Married Clergy

Dear Father---

In your letter to my friend …, you stated that “I knew exactly what I was doing when I made my promise but after 31 years I know that I would be a much better priest and person, a holier,
giving being if I had a suitable partner in my life.”

I totally agree with you, so why don’t you get yourself a suitable partner in your life?

You go on to say that” I also know that the presbyteries would be much stronger with a married clergy...” I disagree with you on that one. The Orthodox Church has a married clergy and they have just as many problems as any other married men. Half of the Protestant clergy that is married end up in divorce. Did you read my article entitled “What is celibacy?” I would recommend it to you to understand the true nature of celibacy and marriage.

You go on to say that “so many priests would function better if the promise was lifted.” You do not need a promise to be celibate, but a sane mind and healthy personality. If you cannot live celibacy in the religious life, you cannot live it in the normal life or in marriage. Once again, reading my article on celibacy will show you the difference between celibacy and psycho-mental illnesses and pathologies.
Your following statement is extremely ridiculous: “Because of celibacy the priesthood attracts gays in a greater proportion - in fact I know many fine young men who left the seminary because most of the students were gay, and it attracted men who are afraid of relationships or woman. It is not healthy at all.”

A sick mind will attempt to feed his perverted vice in places where he believes it most to exist. Those addicted to drugs will frequent private parties, those addicted to sex will visit places of prostitution, those addicted to alcohol will be found in bars, etc. If homo-erotics believe that they will find the greatest number of partners in the priesthood and enter it for that very reason, then they commit a horrendous sacrilege against the sacrament. I do not believe that young men who have gay tendencies actually enter the priesthood with the intention of seeking partners in it. They carry and bring their emotional deficiency and weakness with them, but do have sincere intentions to be good priests and overcome their sinfulness.

If, as you say, “fine young men” left the seminary because they found gays in it, then it was good that they did leave, because they themselves are incompetent for the priesthood. If they cannot deal and live with gays during the formation years, how will they work pastorally with them as ordained priests? Such “fine young men” are worthless as priests and do not serve for the reign of God. What would Simon the Zealot say being together with Matthew the Publican? What would Phillip the cultured youth say being together with the rude fisherman Peter? Only the love of Jesus could unite such a motley group together in his charity and love.

The priesthood is not a state of life to flee from relationships or women. It is exactly in the priesthood that one lives the best and most fulfilling relationships and the deepest intimacy with women. When Peter asked Jesus what the Apostles were to get for leaving everything, Jesus answered: “A hundred times more including women too.” Those with the idea that the priesthood represents the most miserable and poorest of all relationships have a really warped concept of it. No one related so profoundly and beautifully with human beings as did Jesus. The Gospels are full of heartwarming tales of Jesus with the children, afflicted women, the simple and poor, sinners and publicans, the abandoned and sick, etc. He filled the hearts of all with real and pure love and recovered their sense of dignity and worth, no matter who they were.

You say that “Finally, I think celibacy is wonderful gift - a great grace from God but it is simply naive to think that every priest has been given it. The fact is few secular priests have it.”

For your information, Father---, not only has every priest been given celibacy-- not only as a grace from God--, but more so as a natural state of our human hood. Babies are not born dressed with the habit of Dominicans or Franciscans from their mother’s wombs, but naked in celibacy. Every human being is naturally celibate from birth.

You said that.”Let pray that the day comes when the pope makes celibacy for the secular priest to be optional.” Of course, why make a promise of something that is so natural to our being?

Dear Father, you are really revealing your ignorance and stupidity by the following statement: “and that when a priest has the promise lifted he can remain an active priest”

Does a baby begin to play, laugh, live, wonder, rest, smile, love, etc only when he takes a vow of marriage???? You seem to believe that only married people are the ones that live and love and that the unmarried cannot function as human beings. In this case, Jesus, Paul the Apostle, St. Louis de Montfort, Mother Theresa, John Paul II and thousands of unmarried saints were all miserable, strange, unhappy, unloving, lonely, unfulfilled, inactive human beings?!?!  Please Father—give me a break!

Father Anthony Mellace