Saving the Priesthood from Post Haste

Hello John Mark,

Thank you for the post. I was just looking to make a response to a couple of your comments.

In regards to your most recent post I would want to clarify that I am not negating the value of spiritual road maps. On the contrary, they are rare insights into ways of application of consciousness, will, mind, what have you, toward spiritual ends. They have great value. My main issue is with exclusivity of thought, and my comments on the limitation of the Creator and stagnation of the path arise, I believe, from adherence to specific writings as the only genuine wisdom and Divine guidance.

I have great regard for the ability to the staying true to the stance of "You commit yourself and then you see." Many, living more in the unease of uncertainty, do not make the commitment to a path, (which is a commitment! :-) ), and so what they see is a result of those choices.

To be committed to a spiritual path and do so like you mean it is often challenging from the get go. One of the greatest challenges to it in today's world is the abundance of choices, even in one branch of the worlds religions. Christianity alone has numerous ways to perceive the teachings of Jesus, and some of them seem worlds apart. Buddhism, Judaism, Deism, Paganism, Islam, New Age balms.... To find what fulfills your heart is fabulous. To stay true to that and follow it through till you "see" is a great exercise of commitment and love. I commend your belief.

In regards to your comment on intellectual rigidity I'd say questioning and an open impressive mind are essential, but if there is a foundational assumption of truth of fact then the intellect sorts input from that postulation. Undoubtably there is no way to get around that tendency, and it supports Napoleons' motto.

As to your x and y example, I understand philosophically that we have preferences. But if it is an equation then x and y are both essential to the end result of the equation. Indeed symbolically x and y are essential to human life if seen as chromosomes. Neither are more correct or true. If the equation is taking in the worlds religions, I am not sure that the same rules apply. Who is to know? We are all here, together, at this time on the planet. If one believes in a Creator as you do and as I do, then there must be a reason for the expansive diversity humans have to God perception. I have my own theories about that, (who doesn't?), but have not yet gotten the memo that I could count on. So, like Napoleons says, best we can do is commit and see.

Regards, Justin

Hello ender2,

"The concept of ethical behavior and morality from those Abrahamic cults is a dead one, a exposed as a lie to the rational world."

I am not so sure that Abrahamic ethics and morality can be so condemned by the actions of American governments or culture. I certainly question and condemn some that have claimed moral superiority and then displayed bloodlust and desire for revenge, for instance. But the moral code of Abraham inspired religions are not adopted by any government. And the adoption of any higher moral code does not preclude the continued activity of a baser moral code. There is not absolutes in conscious choices, but the tug of war between opposites.

Considering the repressive societies of the Middle East for example, or the history of Communist China or Idi Amin Uganda or Pol Pot Cambodia, America's history of openness and fairness and the rule of law is stellar. Near sterling. Yup, needs some polishing to maintain the shine, but rocks next to those forms of oppression and repression.

Just,

Belief that one book (the Bible) is the proper road map does not entail:

1. intellectual rigidity: one can continue to question and be full of wonder

2. the belief that all the other road maps have nothing to contribute. I can think x is best without thinking y is worthless.

Let's all condemn intellectual rigidity, but also be quick to condemn intellectual vacuity. Napoleon was not right about much, but he was right when he said about warfare, "You commit yourself and then you see." I think that also captures religious commitment. You pick your best path, using reason, experience, and gut hunch and then you see.

I believe Christianity is true, Jesus is Lord of the Cosmos, and that the Bible is a reliable guide to God's opinions (read intelligently). Maybe I am wrong, but in trying out this path I have not yet run into a demand to stop being full of intellectual wonder, curiosity, or openness to the fact I might be wrong.

John Mark

Hello mono,

Thank you for the reply.

What one may call "the right ideology" is up to wide interpretation. It is clear that ideology, attitude, moral code, prescence, awareness, compassion, many aspects play an important role in the experience that one may have in life. There is no doubt that our way in life has an essential affect on the body experience as well. One of my points was that the body really needs very little and will take care of itself quite well. Human consciousness may be another animal altogether.

You spoke of the Creator "who sent the pamphelt guidance to the body". I am not convinced of the divine veracity of human written guidance and I an not a believer that any one particular set of writings that are attributed to the Creator are what I should follow, blindly believing, as a roadmap for Paradise. I am convinced of the divine and it's intimate involvement in the human, soul to psyche to body to atom. But following a static Code, (call it the Bible, Gita, Qu'ran, Torah, etc.) not only severely and fatally limits the breadth of God's involvement in Creation but stagnates it, in my view. That stagnation and limitation has allowed a great deal of rigidity and exclusivity to be enshrined as religions calcify, and cultures and governments likewise are affected as a result of the influence that religions hold in society.

As usual J.M.R. has it not just wrong but backwards.

"Most of the rest of the world sees us as more like the Roman Empire in its decayed, immoral decline, comparing decadence to past glories."

Most of the world sees us as a peoples who have let the fundamentalist of the the first two Cults of Abraham turn us into Moral Monsters, barely deserving the title of a Developed Nation and more akin to the violent theocratic nations of the Middle East, than an nation advancing on the European model into a state of higher ethical behavior.

The rest of Western Culture has come to realize that any moral or ethical progress comes from those GrecoRoman concepts of the rule of law built on the growth of ethical behavior through examination and constant improvement of social behavior.

Morality from the Cults of Abraham has only led to unending war, and more represive societies that constantly draw back from concerns of human rights and ethical behavior in favor of the constant excuse of religion to keep the powers most favored by fundamentalist religion excersizing war powers to destabilize the planet, and maintain power through fear of war and terrorism.

The concept of ethical behavior and morality from those Abrahamic cults is a dead one, a exposed as a lie to the rational world.

hello just,

i.m talking about the theological or the ideological lock that is locking or freeing the body .

the most important body requirements is the right ideology ,the command control of the body , what is being feed to the soul and the psych of mankind.

the creator of the body of mankind is the same who sent the pamphelt guidance to the body .

deviating from the creator guidance is a human block ,duck and lock ,the locks are many while the lock smith is one.

Hello mono1,

"why would any man or woman in his/her full manhood lock himself at the parish of priesthood without fullfilling his baisc human requirements ?"

You seem to make the assumption that it is a basic requirement of the body to have sexual union with another. Often the body, if you listen to it, would tell you that it has quite a list of requirements for it's 'survival', if not it's comfort and fulfillment. I believe that there is little that the body does actually need for basic, and even fully satisfactory, livingness.

"or why any man in his full intellectual capacity lock himself at the parish of philosphy or thought without any connection to divine revelation and the book of history?"

Are you implying that Catholicism is not connected to divine revelation?

Lots of interesting comments. First, let me restate that I am not opposed to all ethical change. Particularly in cases where a culture has grown isolated and out of touch with the mainstream of human ethical experience (race-based slavery in the US is one horrific example), change is important. Even then, slow and steady positive change is often better than civil wars and rending change. My ancestors fought to end slavery, but it would have been better if slavery could have been ended without a fight.

Having conceded that some change is good, however, I think we are in greater danger of assuming that all change is good. The spirit of our age says that if we find a moral duty unpopular or uncomfortable that it should go. That is just as dangerous as refusing to ever change.

Becoming a priest (at least in the modern context) is a totally voluntary choice as is leaving . . . in the sense that one can renounce (in public) one's vows. I see no reason that people should not be expected to do what they say they will do . . . though I understand (from personal experience!) when they do not.

People fail, but that does not mean the ideal is a failure. I believe in romance, though I have failed my ideals. (To give just one example . . . ) I don't want to "lower the bar" of my romantic hopes, just because so many of us mess up.

The priesthood in the Roman church is, it seems to me, a romantic institution. I have known more than a few great men who demonstrated this total commitment to God and it was a wonderful thing.

I am not a Catholic, so of course I shan't insist that they keep the rules they make! However, I see nothing particular about the modern world that makes it necessary for those rules to change.

I am more hopeful than "Just" that there is an unchanging moral law (see C.S. Lewis in "Abolition of Man" for a popular level defense), but rules about priests would not be part of this moral law in any case . . . as my Catholic friends would quickly point out.

DR R said,

without history,or divine revelation,we can become isolated in our time and increase our moral errors chronologicaly loneliness may destroy us.

very well said sir

this is exactly what we need not only to save priesthood but the place of worship in general .

why would any man or woman in his/her full manhood lock himself at the parish of priesthood without fullfilling his baisc human requirements ?

or why any man in his full intellectual capacity lock himself at the parish of philosphy or thought without any connection to divine revelation and the book of history?

please work on saveing divine priesthood from human priesthood.

Thank you, Prof. Reynolds, for your very fine piece.

Hello Farnaz1Mansouri1,

I agree with your position on Mr. Reynolds' statement that you quoted. It was one of the outstanding comments that he made, and I appreciate that you made your input on it.

On the other hand, it is an interesting thing that celibacy is looked at "askance" by Western peoples and religions, as you note. Much could be said on that.

Mr. Reynolds writes:
"No ethical position is less likely to be true than the radical, the innovative, and the new. Often ethical "progress" is only an excuse to indulge the particular vices of the age."

A lot of words, little significance, IMHO.

Conservative institutions, ideology, change slowly, unless a revolutionary force impels rapid transformation. So, it has been with rights for African Americans and women in which this nation demanded and got rapid change, historically unprecedented in the history of nations. Equal rights for gay Americans is taking longer. That is unfortunate, reflective of primitive "religionist" thinking, from which some appear to be recovering.

It is true that the RCC is a conservative insitution, which has evidenced the capacity to change far less than either Judaism or Protestantism, both of which, with great unease, do accept plurality of practice, interpretation.

On the other hand, no Jewish denomination I know of would not look askance at a rabbi, male or female, gay or straight, who declared himself/herself "celibate." The same may be said of Protestantism.

That said, in my view, decisions regarding Catholic rites, rituals, practices are for Catholics to decide on, no one else. For this reason, I do not believe this was a suitable question for this blog, which professes to concern itself with "religion and politics."

I believe that human beings are the same now as they have always been. I believe that the lives we lead, and the way we act, as indivicuals, could just as easily be observed in the people of ancient Egypt thousands of years ago. Therefore, this idea that "liberal, lefties" think that modern man is a "new age" man that deserves a "new age" morality is just plain wrong.

You are either naive and misinformed or else you are being deliberately deceitful. I believe that there are many things wrong with the Catholic Church, which are now curretnly, and have always been WRONG!!!

Appealing to the the "Wisdom of the Ages" would lead to a false conclusion if the "Wisdom of the Ages" was always WRONG!

The fact is, the Catholic Church is a mess and twisted up in knots over the issues of human sexuality. Even devout and believing Catholics do not go to confession, because they do not go along with a program that classifies "noramal" acdtivities of life as sinful. I know this is true from discussion with my own Catholic friends and relatives.

Basically, the Catholic layman is becoming more and more disconnected from the Catholic hierarchy, and there no subjects of common controversy that are open for discussion. Therefore, Catholic doctrin and dogma is gradually loosing the respect of the laity.

Priestly celebacy needs to be examined and the "rules" revised. The demand for women clergy needs to be examined and the rules revised. If you believe that rules should be set in concrete for all time, and never changed, even they are not good rules, flies in the face of our democratic heritage and the customs of society under which we were all raised. You have a fundamental problem with America and with Western thought. In this paradigm, who is on the right and who is on the left? I certainly cannot imagine.

It is hard for me ro have respect for someone who repeatedly mischaracterizes the views of others, and then attacks them for it. If everything about the wordl as it is bothres you so much, then go back inside your house with your cloistered home schooled family, and lock the doors.

This is interesting. This paper is essentially a comment on the value of non change or very slow change in traditional morality. I am not certain that there is an absolute moral code that remains pure and unaffected in the created world. Morality, (arguably I am sure), is a product of collective mindset of humanity. Certain things seem permanently enshrined in morality, and certainly in the do's and don'ts of acceptable actions. Child sexual abuse for instance is almost universally a don't, and so one of the reasons for this weeks question.

That is not to say that child sexual abuse is entirely frowned upon, or we would not be reminded of it regularly.

Traditional paths, particularly culturally entrenched ones as the Roman Catholic Church is, or Evangelical Christianity is in America, are rue to let slip in their societies the ideals that they stand for.

Yet how is it that humanity can change and evolve, with the requisite evolution of awareness, intellect and consciousness, without the world around us changing by the demands of the change in human awareness? There is no doubt that human perception is leagues beyond that of our forebears of even one hundred years ago. The medieval brain was more than willing to accept any number of superstitions as well as religious postulations and absolutes that todays modern brain would speedily reject as obsolete and ignorant.

How does morality remain the same? Perhaps more to the root of Mr. Reynolds point, how does modern day Christianity maintain it's potency in the face of the evolving worldwide human civilizations?

Post Haste took a long time coming, but manifested quickly as consciousness did. The evolution of human awareness, science, technology has been lightspeed over the last one hundred years. There is nothing that would suggest that entrenched belief systems like religions would not also go through similar effects and how it comes out of it will speak to it's survivability.

I am a supporter of celibacy in devotion to God, but not so much of a supporter for an across the board requirement that all priests must follow that path and be lifelong representatives of Christ. In todays world there is less and less need for that form of constraint. At the same time, there are few practices that can hone spiritual focus better than celibacy. Among them may be silence, meditation and isolation. But then all of these tools can be destructive to the immature or unprepared practitioner. Or to one whose time for celibacy is over, but who is still bound by the vows.