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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781497663411 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Open Road Media |
| Publication date: | 07/01/2014 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 529 |
| File size: | 3 MB |
About the Author
He has been a widely syndicated foreign correspondent and was a writer and producer for three flagship BBC programs: Man Alive, Tomorrow’s World, and Horizon. He contributes regularly to Facta, a respected monthly Japanese news magazine. Thomas was the lead expert for a twelve-part series on international intelligence for Ian Punnett’s Coast to Coast, the most listened-to overnight radio broadcast in North America, with three million weekly listeners. He has recently appeared on Euronews (available in ten languages and three hundred million households) and Russia Today.
He has received numerous awards for his reporting, including an International Television Award and two Mark Twain Society Awards. Shipwreck won an Edgar Award.
Four of Thomas’s books—Voyage of the Damned, Ruin from the Air, The Day the Bubble Burst, and The Day Their World Ended—have been made into feature films starring such A-listers as Paul Newman, Billy Crystal, Robert Vaughn, and Jacqueline Bisset. The Day Guernica Died is currently under option.
Thomas’s most recent bestseller is Gideon’s Spies: Mossad’s Secret Warriors. Published in sixteen languages and forty countries, Gideon’s Spies is known throughout the world as the leading resource on Israeli intelligence. It was made into a major documentary for Channel 4 in Britain, which Thomas wrote and narrated, called The Spy Machine. The Observer called The Spy Machine a “clear” picture of Israeli intelligence operations, and the Times called it “impressive” and ”chilling.”
A member of the London Speaker Bureau and Macmillan Speakers, Thomas continues to grow his already-impressive platform, lecturing widely on the secret world of intelligence. He also regularly provides expert analysis on intelligence for US and European television and radio programs.
Gordon Thomas is a political and investigative journalist and the author of fifty-three books, published in more than thirty countries and in dozens of languages. The total sales of his works exceed forty-five million copies.
He has been a widely syndicated foreign correspondent and was a writer and producer for three flagship BBC programs: Man Alive, Tomorrow’s World, and Horizon. He contributes regularly to Facta, a respected monthly Japanese news magazine. Thomas was the lead expert for a twelve-part series on international intelligence for Ian Punnett’s Coast to Coast, the most listened-to overnight radio broadcast in North America, with three million weekly listeners. He has recently appeared on Euronews (available in ten languages and three hundred million households) and Russia Today.
He has received numerous awards for his reporting, including an International Television Award and two Mark Twain Society Awards. Shipwreck won an Edgar Award.
Four of Thomas’s books—Voyage of the Damned, Ruin from the Air, The Day the Bubble Burst, and The Day Their World Ended—have been made into feature films starring such A-listers as Paul Newman, Billy Crystal, Robert Vaughn, and Jacqueline Bisset. The Day Guernica Died is currently under option.
Thomas’s most recent bestseller is Gideon’s Spies: Mossad’s Secret Warriors. Published in sixteen languages and forty countries, Gideon’s Spies is known throughout the world as the leading resource on Israeli intelligence. It was made into a major documentary for Channel 4 in Britain, which Thomas wrote and narrated, called The Spy Machine. The Observer called The Spy Machine a “clear” picture of Israeli intelligence operations, and the Times called it “impressive” and ”chilling.”
A member of the London Speaker Bureau and Macmillan Speakers, Thomas continues to grow his already-impressive platform, lecturing widely on the secret world of intelligence. He also regularly provides expert analysis on intelligence for US and European television and radio programs.
Read an Excerpt
Desire and Denial
Celibacy and the Church
By Gordon Thomas
OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA
Copyright © 1986 Gordon ThomasAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4976-6341-1
CHAPTER 1
The Lessons for Today
About remaining celibate, I have no directions from the Lord but give my own opinion.
When the Apostle Paul announced that to the Christians in the promiscuous city of Corinth, he unwittingly sowed the seed for an unprecedented crisis that today permeates the Roman Catholic Church. Beneath the panoply of the papacy, behind the wealth, power, and influence of the Holy See, is a profound struggle, one that is of crucial concern to its million and a half priests and nuns, its 810 million members, and to many beyond its fold. At stake is the future direction of a still powerful, dynamic, yet deeply perturbed and confused institution. The unexpected source of the attack has heightened the dismay and disruption throughout the universal Church.
For centuries successive pontiffs have applied a substantial portion of their energies to confronting their external enemies of atheism, secularism, and nihilism. These traditional bogeymen of Rome remain a threat, surfacing in a number of guises: opposition to the Church's rigid position on abortion and birth control; Third World demands to adapt the Church's rituals and procedures to local rites; a wide range of questions affecting family life and morality. Among them are divorce, remarriage, and the religious education of children in a neopagan world, so that they will never forget that being a good Catholic means accepting the dogma that the Church is the moral conscience of society. These remain substantial, perplexing, and explosive matters.
To them has been added a new, growing, and increasingly powerful challenge from within the Church, one that comes from its priests and nuns. Their confrontation stems from a tumultuous upheaval that began during the Second Vatican Council (1962–1965). The changes wrought by that policy-setting gathering of bishops were the most radical in the history of the Church. Centuries of tradition were reinterpreted. Clergy and sisters who once had obediently submitted their minds and wills to Church-defined faith and morals now rebelled. They demanded to be freed from one of the most profound constraints ever set by Rome. They wanted to be allowed to live full and open sexual lives. Refused, some resigned from religious life; more now continue to do so.
For a Church that has survived persecution, wars, and schism, the challenge was, and remains, stunning in its implications: as Catholicism approaches its third millennium it could find itself so seriously depleted within its ranks that it will no longer be able to function effectively. The worldwide number of candidates for the priesthood in 1985 was 71,000 — a decline of 40 percent from what it had been annually in the pre-Vatican Two era. Undoubtedly more dismaying for Rome is that for every young man who wishes to enter Holy Orders another has applied to leave. All the available evidence points to an ever-widening gulf between a predominantly patriarchal pontificate and its clergy and sisters: many find that while they can continue to live up to their pledge of poverty, they can no longer, in all conscience, promise obedience to vows of celibacy for priests and chastity for nuns. They point out that a celibate is someone who has simply decided not to marry; on the other hand religious chastity, far from being a Catholic innovation, is based upon the Mosaic commandment that forbade adultery and sexual licentiousness. Those nuns and priests insist that this commandment does not exclude them from satisfying their sexual needs; that only the Church, for its own ends, has misinterpreted the original meaning of the Law of Moses.
Many of Pope John Paul II's concerns and actions since coming to office in 1978 have been part of a grand strategy to highlight the distinctions between the clergy and the laity. Fired by his own unquestionably determined belief in the tradition of religious life, he has set out to tighten his authority over his flock and to apply punitive sanctions to those who will not bend to his demand that for them sexual abstinence is a lifelong commitment. The pontiff insists that for a priest celibacy is what distinguishes him from all other men. Sisters, once they have taken their solemn vows, are equally embraced by Catholicism's distinctive nonsexual system. The Pope has repeatedly stressed there can be no argument about a decision originally made at a time when the Catholic Church was a totally dominant institution and had no difficulty in enforcing its holy writ. He insists that celibacy remains nonnegotiable. For nine centuries the Church has maintained its hold over both clergy and sisterhood by commanding that "service in moral leadership" depends on the total sacrifice of all sexual desires.
But modern biblical scholarship and, in the wake of the Second Vatican Council, a growing informed critical attitude among young priests and nuns have meant that the word of Rome, and particularly the view of Pope John Paul, are not accepted with the blind obedience of old.
Twenty years after Vatican Two there has been a significant change in the educational levels among rank-and-file priests and nuns. Surveys in the United States and Europe show that clergymen and sisters are now generally more highly educated than their bishops. One poll of American nuns revealed that 65 percent held master's degrees and 25 percent possessed doctorates. In contrast only 24 percent of U.S. bishops have master's and 10 percent have doctorates. Better equipped to think, young priests and nuns continue to challenge with a skill that leaves their superiors baffled and bewildered — and often forced to fall back on the all-too-true argument that confrontation within the Church is driving the laity away in unprecedented numbers. Gallup polls in 1985 showed that only half of the 70 million Catholics in the United States attended Mass in a typical week, a decline of 74 percent over thirty years. In West Germany the attendance figures have declined by 70 percent over twenty years. In France only two Catholics in every ten regularly attend Mass. The overriding reason given for not attending church is a general dissatisfaction with the way priests conduct themselves; that, in seeking for sexual emancipation, to be no longer denied the freedom to express natural desires, to be released from social constraints, many priests in the eyes of their congregations have lost those unique values and norms that set them apart and have demeaned the office of the priesthood. At the same time these priests have raised doubts about many of the other great ideologies upon which Rome has ruled. The clergy's repeated response is that they have lost patience with the way their personal lives are mismanaged by Rome. Priests often reinforce this claim with the argument that Jesus had no sympathy for the views of the religious aristocracy of His day. For them the Vatican is no different from the Sadducees whom Christ challenged. The priests believe they would have His support in challenging, by word and deed, the existing Roman ecclesiastical establishment's right to deny them sexual freedom.
A growing number find themselves in the unenviable position of being virtually forced to remain in a job that demands control over their sexuality. While nuns who find this intolerable can generally be dispensed from their vows without trouble, priests, on the direct order of the Pope, can be released from their sacred promises only after they have personally petitioned Rome.
In practice the number of priestly dispensations worldwide has dropped from a peak of 15,000 in 1975 to under 500 annually a decade later. Yet the extent of the problem can be partly gauged from the fact that the two Vatican Sacred Congregations responsible for processing petitions admitted in 1986 they had received almost 250,000 submissions since 1980 from nuns and priests. Nine out of ten applicants gave as their reason for wanting to be dispensed an inability to cope with the Church's treatment of their sexuality. A growing number, without waiting to be formally refused, have left Holy Orders, returning themselves to the world without any help from the Church on resettlement, and many have found themselves living off welfare payments. In the United States there are an estimated 5,000 priests in this position — men who have walked out, since Vatican Two, to marry or live openly as homosexuals. There are just as many who have opted out in Europe.
Those who wish to leave the priesthood, yet who remain in the Church, do so for many reasons. Anxiety is one. A survey of Mississippi priests showed that an overwhelming percentage of those asking to be dispensed said they would leave only with Rome's approval; many claimed that a priest who walks out on his vocation in the South is looked upon with the same suspicion as an ex-convict. A desire to remain under the religious umbrella of the Church is another powerful reason to wait for Rome's nod. Surveys in the United States, Spain, France, Holland, and West Germany identify this as a common response. Priests who want to resign hesitate to do so without Vatican approval because they would otherwise be denied the right to marry within the Church or receive Communion. For committed Catholics these are powerful reasons to soldier on, however unhappily. Others admit that having applied for laicization, they have hesitated because the priesthood does offer job security for life, a higher standard of living than most comparable workers enjoy, and fringe benefits that can include vacations, extensive wardrobes, membership in a whole range of clubs, a car, and bank loan facilities — all provided by grateful parishioners.
Priests who have abandoned their vocations without Vatican approval are understandably envious of Catholic clergy in the Philippines. There, a recent study reveals that half the priests have "a lasting relationship with a woman and the communities they serve accept this fact without difficulty." Their cardinal, Archbishop Jaime Sin, has given no indication he would be able, or wish, to change this situation. His office has indicated that while His Eminence does not personally approve, these liaisons have a long tradition and form part of the local culture. The happy position of their Filipino colleagues can only increase the tendency of those who have petitioned Rome to see themselves as victims of a religious demand that is not only capricious and seemingly selective, but outmoded in an age when restraint over sexual activity has been redefined and relaxed in the secular world.
The lobbyists against celibacy claim that the Church has failed to understand why religious men and women have come to see they must interpret their own lives through the experiences of Jesus Christ; they say there must be more attention given to social psychology, not only to philosophy and theology; there must be a greater understanding of the priest and nun in his or her biological and psychological dimensions. The Church, the traditional champion of human rights, must stop suppressing that most basic of all freedoms — the sexual drive. Jesus, they add, would have been appalled over the way they are treated. He had never intended them to be denied the right to love fully. They see it as a Roman decision, maintained as part of the Church's coercive and repressive power.
In the face of such attacks, the order from the Vatican is to close ranks, to fall in behind the Pope's stark reminder that the priesthood is forever. Jesus, the Pope insists, would have expected nothing less.
While the Gospels reveal Jesus as a compassionate, caring, loving, affectionate, demonstrative, exciting, captivating, and warm person — all qualities that make His sexuality human in the best sense of the word — and describe how He repeatedly touched people, either physically, psychologically, or spiritually, none of the Apostles makes any specific reference to the sort of sexual life Jesus expects from those who answer the call to follow Him. While notably Matthew and Luke point to the fact that Jesus was a sexual being — implicit in their recounting of His humanity — it has been left to Paul to set down his own views on celibacy in those words in the Letter to the Corinthians.
Paul points out twice more to the Corinthian Christians that he is merely expressing his personal ideas, and they should not think they are being handed on from Jesus. This careful caveat, one of the few disclaimers the Bible contains, seems unlikely material to have created a contemporary crisis both within and without the celibate community. Yet his handful of words has, close to two thousand years later, unleashed a sexual revolution within the Church, one that not only continues to have a direct effect on the lives of every priest and nun and the laity for whom they are spiritually responsible, but also has reached beyond to become an examination of religion itself in present-day culture.
Just as marriage is challenged — having become more of a social rather than a sacramental institution, a convenience to be disposed of when it has served its purpose — so mandatory celibacy is rejected. Its opponents argue it is rooted in an elitist group of sexually maladjusted men and women who are forcing others to achieve sexual fulfillment by stealth and who live in an unhealthy fantasy world of sublimation created by suppression in the name of sacrifice. The supporters of celibacy reiterate that it is the highest form of Christian perfection; that abstinence is the noblest form of love; that it is the ultimate way to express a life in Christ.
Both sides draw comfort from the words of Paul, claiming in common that while indeed the Apostle insists his views are his own, he was undoubtedly reflecting the thoughts of Christ. While it is a matter for fierce but moot debate on how much Paul might have been influenced by Jesus on this issue, the whole question of celibacy has become a complex interchange between modern culture and medieval religious values developed from mankind's more ancient religions: Hinduism, Buddhism, and Judaism.
Five thousand years before Paul addressed the Corinthian Christians there were celibates in India. Judaic belief is partly focused on the premise of the "impurity" of women: at one time only men who eschewed sex were believed to be exalted enough to serve as rabbis. Like much else that it has absorbed and adapted from other religions, the Roman Catholic Church has embraced and developed the concept of celibacy for its priests and nuns. In the first three hundred years of its existence, the Church placed few restrictions upon its clergy in regard to marriage. Celibacy was, as Paul indicated, a matter of choice. Then, in the year 305, the Council of Elvira in Spain held a lengthy discourse on the theme that continence is a more holy state than marriage, citing in support the words of Jesus as recorded by Matthew: "There are eunuchs who have made themselves that way for the sake of the kingdom of heaven. Let anyone receive it who can."
The Elvira Council, while not forbidding marriage, passed the first decree on celibacy. It required "bishops, priests, and all who serve the altar to live, even if already married, in continence." Twenty years later, at the Council of Nicaea summoned by the Emperor Constantine, the Pope and his bishops considered banning priests from marrying but decided not to do so. It was not until the decretal of Pope Siricius in 385 that the Church first commanded celibacy for bishops, priests, and deacons, and even the separation of those already married. A priest has "always to offer sacrifice for the people, must always pray, and therefore always abstain from marriage." This prohibition coincided with the spread of monasticism, replacing martyrdom as the ultimate witness to Christ. During the fourth and fifth centuries Mary's popular appeal greatly increased, and her virginity became widely accepted, providing a still more secure basis, in the teaching of the Church, for its priests and later its nuns to accept compulsory celibacy. But there still were married clergy, who in theory remained continent. Then the First Lateran Council in 1123 absolutely forbade clergy to marry and again decreed that those who had must dissolve their unions. From then on celibacy has been extolled by Rome as even more perfect than marriage: those who embrace it are exalted as consecrated men and women, living sacrifices, the embodiment of everything that is sacred in His name. It is, nevertheless, a matter of clerical rather than divine law, and as a result to question celibacy has often been seen as a challenge to the Church's authority.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Desire and Denial by Gordon Thomas. Copyright © 1986 Gordon Thomas. Excerpted by permission of OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Contents
THE POPE'S CELIBATES,1. The Lessons for Today,
IMAGES YESTERDAY,
2. A Way of Life,
COMMITMENTS,
3. Once a Priest,
4. Always a Priest,
5. Illusions,
6. Realities,
7. Encounters,
8. Proposals,
9. A State of Perfection,
10. An Attitude of Mind,
11. Recollections,
12. Discoveries,
DECISIONS,
13. Into the Twilight,
14. Beyond the Dawn,
15. Revelations and Responses,
16. Ministering,
17. The Celibate Travelers,
18. The Power to Be,
19. A State of Grace,
IMAGES TODAY,
20. Certainties,
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY,