Cristián Sahli, priest and writer: "Marriage and celibacy are paths to happiness".The gift of celibacyPriest Carter Griffin is the rector of St. John Paul II Seminary in Washington. While at Princeton University he converted to Catholicism and, after serving as a naval officer, entered the seminary.
For years he has been speaking on issues of anthropology and theology, aware that currently "there is a lot of confusion", something that of course also reaches celibacy. In order to shed light and theological depth on this aspect, he wrote his book on Theology of Celibacy."Why celibacy?: Reclaiming the Fatherhood of the Priest".
In this interview he develops some of the most important points for understanding spiritual paternity, the meaning of celibacy and its value inside and outside the Catholic Church.
What does supernatural fatherhood exactly mean?
– Supernatural fatherhood is living life in the order of grace, which means that you are a part of souls being nourished in grace. It’s healing, protecting, feeding… All those aspects that you find in natural fatherhood and motherhood can be found in supernatural fatherhood.
Some people may be surprised to find the idea of priesthood and fatherhood linked, how are these concepts related?
– I think it’s also probably a language thing, because in English we usually call the priest “father”. So even though people haven’t really thought through why they call them “father”, there is this understanding that priests are fathers. I guess it is a little bit more of a shock for people who don’t have that custom, and believe it or not, that custom in English speaking countries is not even two hundred years old.
Fatherhood and motherhood is really about giving life to others. And ordinarily, we do that in a biological and natural way. But there’s still, for human beings an immortal soul that is generated and that requires an act of God. So just as the mother and father come together to generate a third through the agency of God, so too in the order of grace we generate others. The celibacy of the priest enables him to live a life completely dedicated to that level of fatherhood, of generating life in the order of grace.
What we are made for is to love as human beings,and that love is supposed to be fruitful. Every human being is called to have fruitful love. And so even if people are not married, they are still called to have that kind of love. And the way that the priest does that is through living that kind of spiritual fatherhood.
Celibacy is today a choice that is considered radical, just as it was in Jesus' time, since it was strange for a rabbi or teacher to be unmarried. Do you think that those who say that celibacy is unnatural are partly right?
– I wouldn’t be unnatural in a negative way, it doesn’t do harm to our nature. But it is supernatural. It’s something we are not normally capable of living without grace.
Having said that, I also wanna kind of modify it a little bit, because there have always been people in History that did not get married. They weren’t necessarily celibate for the Kingdom, maybe they were taking care of other people or never found a spouse.
We always see sex and marriage through the lense of sexual revolution, which sort of sees these as an indispensable human need, which is just not true. People can live perfectly good lives, whether or not they are married.
So, on the one hand it is a supernatural vocation to live in the order of grace. On the other hand I think we make so much of the role of sex in the modern world that we forget that people can live a perfectly satisfied and good life without sex in it.
Does celibacy have the same value today as it had in the early days of the Church?
– I would say as much or more. In the early Church many saw celibacy as a way of continuing that complete give of self, which was martyrdom. And after Christianity became legal, you started to have groups of men and women that we would now call religious or consecrated life. There is a piece of History there.
But I think that something that connects us with the early Church culturally is a real misunderstanding about the human person. There's anthropological confusion today, related to what makes a man or a woman, sex, the meaning of marriage… There is a lot of confusion about what it means to have a healthy integrated sexuality, just like there was back then. And I think that what celibacy does when it’s well lived is that it helps to dethrone the idolatry of sex.
One of the reasons why I think that celibate priests and women are so threatening in a way to our culture today is not because they are particularly interested in whether I get married or not, it’s because if it’s true that you can live a fulfilling life without sex, then it dismantles one of the key ingredients of the sexual wisdom of today.
Apart from all the other reasons of supernatural fatherhood and all of that, just on a sociological level celibacy teaches something that is indispensable for people today. So we can recover the true dignity of the human person, which is that we are not animals craving the next sexual experience, we are sons and daughters of God. Celibacy has a unique way of helping to restore that.
Is celibacy important in the Catholic Church?
– Yes. The main reason would be at the supernatural level I talked about earlier. Celibacy is ordered to the good of the members of the Church. Celibacy has a really strong order to the building up of the Kingdom of God.
You are a seminary rector, how do you help students understand and integrate celibacy into their lives?
– An important part is understanding that celibacy is not ordered to just growing in discipline or having more time available, but that is something really life-giving. The way we form our virtues of celibacy and supernatural fatherhood are very similar to the way that we should be forming virtues for a natural husband and father.
If you think about the virtues that make a really good husband and father, they are the exact same for the priest. When we put this in the context not of merely ascetism or discipline, but we put it in the context of love, what it means is that so much of our formation happens of natural formation.
I would say that there is a sense of availability in the celibate heart, but it’s different from the availability of time. It’s more like an emotional availability. A husband and father should be, first of all, available to his wife and children, and then other people get what’s left. Whereas for a celibate person, they can focus on whoever is coming.
You wrote the book “Why Celibacy? Reclaiming the Fatherhood of the Priest”. Can you explain the main idea of the book?
– The original idea came from my doctoral dissertation, which I wrote on supernatural fatherhood and celibacy. That topic came around because I went to Rome to do my doctorate and my original idea had to do with John of Ávila and his influence in the Council of Trent. But the two people that could’ve directed that dissertation both had just retired, so I needed to find a new topic. I contacted a priest friend of mine who had worked with Pope Benedict and I asked him what he thought the Pope would want me to write on. He immediately said the theology of celibacy. Pope Benedict had in his mind that there was a real need for a deeper understanding and awareness of the theology of celibacy.
Then the idea of turning the dissertation into a book came about. I think there is a really superficial understanding of celibacy, so having something that can give a little bit more of a theological underpinning for it was really the goal.
If you could give us three main short ideas about what celibacy actually is, what would they be?
– Celibacy is first of all a way of foregoing marriage and human love and sexuality, for the sake of a higher love.
Celibacy is a witness to a reality beyond ourselves and above ourselves. It’s a witness to the fact that God exists and that we have another life that we are living for.
And I think that celibacy is something that helps us, those who are celibate, give ourselves more completely. It’s not just for the people that we serve, but also for us, to expand our hearts.
