A reading from the holy gospel according to Saint Matthew. Jesus told the crowds and his disciples, the scribes and the pharisees have succeeded Moses as teachers. Therefore, do everything and observe everything that they tell you, but do not follow their example. Their words are bold, but their deeds are few. They bind up heavy load, loads hard to carry, to lay on other men's shoulders while they themselves will not lift a single finger to budge them.
All their works are performed to be seen. They widen their phylacteries and wear huge tassels. They are fond of places of honor at banquets, in the front seats and synagogues, of marks of respect in public, and of being called rabbi. As to you, avoid the title rabbi or teacher. One among you is your teacher.
The rest are learners. Do not call anyone on earth your father. Only one is your father, the one in heaven. Avoid being called teachers. Only one is your teacher, the messiah.
The greatest among you will be the one who serves the rest. Whoever exalts himself, that man shall be humbled, but whoever humbles himself, that man shall be exalted. And this is the gospel, the good news of the lord. Only one is your teacher, the messiah. The greatest among you will be the one who serves the rest.
Whoever calls himself, whoever exalts himself shall be humbled, but whoever humbles himself shall be exalted. Words taken from today's gospel, in the name of the father and of the son and of the holy spirit. Amen. The last week of October, the eighth ordinary general assembly of bishops closed their month meeting in Rome. About 238 bishops attended.
Now this take this was the eighth one, and it takes place every few years. And not all the bishops of the world come, but all the bishops of the world send their representatives. So the 238 bishops who were there represented all the bishops of the world, the whole Catholic world. And keep to keep in mind that the word Catholic with a small c means exactly what it says. Catholic, universal.
The church of Jesus Christ is universal. It's not a national church. Now this count this meeting of the bishops dealt with a very serious problem today. It's kind of abstract for some people sitting in the pews, but it has to do with the core, the heart of Catholicism, and that's the priesthood of Jesus Christ. The the theme of this meeting of the 238 bishops was how to how to educate, how to form.
The the Latin is formandis, not not the word to educate, but to how to form priests in the contemporary world, In the in today's world, how do you perform priests? Because as some of you probably know, for the last couple of years, there was a a study made of all the seminaries of the world, and that was fed into the holy seed, and it came up wanting. It came up desperately wanting. The situation in our seminaries today. Now this is not an easy topic to talk about, especially since I'm going to try to tack it on to this whole business of celibacy.
Now, the theme of this count of this meeting out they they spent a whole month there. There were 10 bishops from The United States, had to do with the formation of priests in the modern world under modern conditions and circumstances. How do you do it? The very fact that we have a meeting shows that we're not doing a good job. So I do not want to give the impression that this council had to do only with two topics.
But it certainly did come up and had to face the two topics, whether or not it articulated them and made them explicit in neon signs. The first is there has been a severe decline in young men or older men willing to study for the priesthood of Jesus Christ. There's been a very severe drop. And between now and the year 2001, there may be as much as a 60% drop in the number of priests we have. Now this is terribly serious no matter how you look at it.
And even if you allow for the sociological errors because well, I don't know how you feel about these polls and stuff. But even even giving them a 50% margin of error, it's still terribly significant. And the second thing, which was not brought out very clearly according to the accounts I've read I haven't read any documents because they haven't been published. The count the meeting of the bishops did explicitly make a great big open issue of what we in The United States know very well. And I I merely have to mention probably archbishop Marino, and we've said it all.
We are facing a very severe problem of sexual perversions and aberrations on the problem of priests. Now whether or not this existed before or didn't and is now being publicized, the quest the whole thing is it is now a open public fact. And what do you do about it besides paying huge amounts of money, which remember is coming from our from our parishioners in the pews. Now, incidentally, only 51 of the bishops handled Latin out of the 237. And the holy father called that the lack of Latin as sin of the senate.
Holy father said that, and his right. Now you know why his right? Because here you had these men for 02/1938 from all parts of the world, and for the first time, we had bishops from the Eastern Communist countries for the first time. And some of those they were older men. Some of them, when they got up to address the assembly, wept.
Wept. And I wanna call you to right now, right now in in the rep in China, we have a bishop and several priests who have been been jailed because of their allegiance to the holy see and its Catholicism, not to the National Catholic Church of China. Right now, today. But our holy father pointed out to these bishops that language is the core of unity. And if you have six languages being used, you're getting sick at six interpretations.
Every language is an interpretation if it's a translation. And it had there had to be they had to have a very complex system of translators. The holy father, of course, spoke Latin and he presided in silence over the meetings except at the end. Now I want to just read some of the conclusions, not all the conclusions, but some of the conclusions that I think pertinent of the meeting. It was a month long meeting.
The Vatican thinks this came as a shock to me. The Vatican thinks that recruitment crisis is over. It was stated that in the last thirteen years, there's been a 50% rise in vocations, but I think this is the keyword worldwide. That is certainly not true of The United States. But anyway, they said that the crisis is over from a worldwide point of view.
There's been a 50 increase in vocations to the priesthood. Second, they emphasized they emphasized that we need better trained priests. As you all know, it's one thing to say we need them and getting them or or telling you how you do it. But they admitted the fact the formation and the education and selection of candidates for the priesthood need revision so that priests can survive the overwork, the low morale, and the isolation that many are said to suffer. These are the three keen keywords you hear a lot today.
They certainly have been in my not my experience, but you hear it. I heard it down in our retreat. Overwork, low morale, which I don't think is a consequence of overwork, and isolation, loneliness. The church must devise new methods to recruit seminarians, to educate, and to form them to bear the burdens of being a priest in the Holy Roman Catholic Church. Third, they didn't say it, but you see, keep in the back of your head this, that no one has a right to be a priest.
Nobody. Now, thirdly, the count the synod ruled out firmly any changes in the rule of celibacy. It left that rule intact, firmly intact, practically unanimously. It insisted that instead of changing the rule, there should be concentration on culling out, on picking out candidates who can't live up to it. Question, how do you do that?
They said I don't know what's the back of this, but said, if necessary, use even psychological testing. In other words, if can't do anything better, go to the psychologist. God help us. The archbishop of Poland, who was the senior official, had this to say. Of course, he was chastity in the celibate state of life is a precious gift of God.
Notice that. It's a precious gift of God. No priest can do it alone. And here's a man who's speaking from a lot of experience. Chastity in the celibate state of life is a precious gift of God that perfectly suits the image of the priest.
That was true and is today more than ever true, this prelate said. Archbishop Daniel Pilarski of Cincinnati called the synod a ringing he's speaking English a ringing reaffirmation of the ideals of the Catholic priesthood. More than ever, he said, it is needed even though the centuries old rule is under particular attack in The United States. Our holy father, speaking Latin, gave this said this in his concluding remarks. He assured the bishops that he was not about to alter his insistence on celibacy or his basic opposition to married priests.
His position, he said, has not changed. The matter of married priests, he said, is too often evoked in the framework of systematic, notice, systematic, hostile propaganda against priestly celibacy. Celibacy. It finds support, he added, and complicity from some mass media, and he could have added, and especially in The USA. Now there I've given you some idea what the council did and what it didn't do.
Now I want to face up to a much harder question, and I have mulled over this quite a bit to try to say something which is apprehensible and sensible. Because the picture is very cloudy because you're dealing here with archaeology, with scholarship, with research, with languages, and a lot of other issues, and in which I mean a lot of other issues. And that is, what about this rule of celibacy in the holy Roman Catholic church? I have to keep my eye on the clock this morning more than usual. But when you've been working over something for about a week and you get up here, it's hard to keep going.
But anyway, first, let me give you the what I call the traditional view. Well, I don't call it's the traditional view. The what I would say today, the accepted view. But first, before I get into anything, keep in mind this. Celibacy, which means the married state, is not an essential condition for being a priest.
Keep that in mind. We're not talking about the issue is not whether or not celibacy is essential to the priesthood. That is not the issue at all. Everybody admits that. Nobody denies it.
So what is this traditional opinion? And which is why these that's the celestial beef for all priests is relatively a new development. Now I have to make a distinction here. Celibacy means you're not married. Continency means you do not have sexual relations.
These are two very important words in this discussion. Celibacy means marriage. Continence means you're you don't have sexual relations in or outside of marriage. Now, actually, the real issue is not celibacy, it's continence. That's what we should be talking about, as you will see.
So the traditional view is celibacy, meaning continence in marriage, is a new idea, relatively new, that it did not go back to apostolic times, that it came in about the fourth century with sever severius for for practical reasons. Practical reasons. I'm not going to go into them. These are like it's a lot of guesswork. But the the main thing I wanted to bring before you is that the argument for what I call the traditional view of celibacy of the clergy is this, that it doesn't go back to apostolic times, that it's a more or less late development, and that it was brought in by legislation of a pope for very practical reasons, extremely practical reasons.
That's the accepted view today. Against that, since about 1980, there is a mass of scholarship which cannot be denied. Now I haven't gone all over it, but I have read in the past week summaries of it, chiefly by father George Ruffler, who's a very competent scholar, believe me. Now this scholarship, since 1980, is based upon archaeology and upon research in Greek and Latin origins of the church. And it is based upon solid evidence, not absolutely indica not absolutely dogmatic, but it's based on solid archaeology, it's based on solid research, and cannot be denied even if it is not apoptotic.
That is absolutely proven. Remember for the other for what is you say they call the general accepted opinion, that is that's far from being proved by any hard evidence. Most of it is highly hypothetical. But since you couldn't do any better, that was the accepted view. We can do better today.
There have been at least three independent separate studies made which come to the same conclusion. And this is that in the early church you did have a married clergy from the very beginning. That's indisputable. That is not the issue. The point that this research makes and this I can put it very simply now because I had a chance to boil it down in my own mind.
What what the new study shows since 1980 is that while you had a married clergy, they were committed to continence. That in the married state, the priests in the early primitive church did not have sexual relations with their wives. They were continent. Now you've heard plenty and it's true. The apostles, most of them, certainly were married men.
It's not the slightest evidence that they lived in the Mariconsugal State with their wives after they became a priest or apostles. Not a single bit of evidence. So this new study, it it rests upon this very simple dis very simple distinction, but it's a very important one, that the priests of the church in the East as well as in the Latin church, from the very earliest days of the church we're obliged, obligated to continence whether they were married or whether they were married unmarried priests, both in and out of the marriage day. That is the gist of the whole business. And so the day when we are asked to be when if you wanna be a priest, if god chooses you to be a priest and you accept, then you are simply falling in line with the traditional, uninterrupted tradition of the church of continence, whether you get married or you do not get married.
I hope that's clear. It took a little while to get it boiled down to those simple terms, but they are simple. And I hope it's clear to you that the idea of having a married clergy is a different thing from having a clergy that is totally committed to continence. There that is the result of a new study, and it's revolutionary. In other words, this idea of of of unmarried clergy isn't something that a pope in the fourth century concocted for very practical reasons.
There's a there's an infinite background foundation that has nothing to do with utilitarian pragmatic ends that goes back to the very to the earliest days of the church and has come down continuously in at least the Roman church to our present day. There's one this is not apodictic. I mean, it's not argumentative, logically, a demonstration. But when I just this morning, how do you end this thing? And the thought struck me, Newman.
It's not just Newman. But in the Lutheran church, in the Church of England, or the Anglican, or the Episcopal Church, as men have moved from what you call the low and the broad church to the high church, which means becoming much more Catholic, inevitably, inevitably, they have moved from a married clergy to a high regard for the priest. The priest, not the clergyman, a priest. He offers sacrifice person of Christ, that that man should be a celibate, that he should be practicing continence. And you take in the universities of Oxford and Cambridge, even even in Newman's time, and possibly as late as when Lewis went there as a student, although I'm not sure of that.
The dons had to be unmarried. That was the old ecclesiastical tradition. When they got married, they had to had to resign. That's what these men, as they got a clearer insight to what it means to be a priest of Jesus Christ, that it does imply this renunciation of one of life's greatest joys response and responsibilities. Not merely the marriage married state, but also renouncing the privilege of exercising their sexual appetites.
That has been the constant doctrine of the church. It isn't a merely a eureticle thing that has been foisted upon us. Forget it. It rests upon a solid tradition of the church and the evidence for this in these late studies in the last ten years is far more secure, far more scholarly, far more severe in its criticism than anything we've had for the traditional view. And so I say, let us pray to God for men who have the courage to face up to what they think is the or think is the call of Jesus Christ and to pay what they have to pay if they wanna look at it that way.
But with the way they should look at it is that their chastity is a gift of God. In the name of the father, the son, the holy spirit. Amen.