With this article, Vigilius continues the analysis begun in his first part. Today the theme is celibacy. PAK
In his Introduction to Christianity, the young Joseph Ratzinger comments on the phrase of the Creed “conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of Mary the Virgin”:
Jesus’ sonship with God is not based ... on the fact that Jesus did not have a human father; the doctrine of Jesus’ divinity would not be affected if Jesus had come from a normal human marriage. For the Sonship of God ... is not a biological, but an ontological fact; not a process in time, but in God’s eternity: God is always Father, Son, and Spirit; the conception of Jesus does not mean that a new Son of God comes into being, but that God as Son ... is Himself man.[1]
This statement by Ratzinger is as unspectacular as it is irritating. It is unspectacular because the person of the divine Logos can of course only be constituted by the first person of the Godhead; the divine persons are nothing other than “relationes subsistentes” (Thomas Aquinas), i.e. their eternal reciprocal relationship. If Joseph were the father of the man Jesus, this would not change anything about Jesus’ being the Logos.
However, emphasizing this self-evident fact is irritating because, in Ratzinger’s thematic context, it can be understood as the insinuation that there is no theological relevance to the talk of Mary’s biological virginity, which might be confidently deciphered as a mere metaphor for the new beginning of salvation through God’s action. This is precisely how the speech in question is usually interpreted in modern theology, and one would not be wrong to regard Ratzinger as a partisan of it at that time.
However, it would be wrong to conclude that—because of the ontological reality—Mary’s biological virginity is theologically irrelevant. Its relevance is simply on a different level than the Trinitarian theological proposition; therefore, it can also not immediately be disqualified by this proposition. Rather, it is the other way around: the statement about biological virginity refers precisely to the Trinitarian theological facts, precisely insofar as it seeks to bring them to the fore. This relationship is one of correspondence, which was already described by Plato as the “most beautiful of all bonds”.
The fact that the sole Father of the person of the Logos is God Himself is appropriately brought to the fore by Jesus’ earthly fatherlessness with regard to the incarnation of the Logos. In Jesus Christ there are not two persons, one divine and one human. Rather, Christ is the divine person who constantly emanates from the eternal Father and who now also adds to His divine nature the human one, “unmixed and undivided.” Although an earthly father of Jesus would not destroy this structure ontologically, it would nevertheless obscure it at the level of revelation, i.e. the appearance of the divine Father in the humanity of the person of His eternal Logos. In contrast, the free gift of the human nature to the Logos by the Mother of God on behalf of humanity is absolutely constitutive for the event. In her, creation receives its Lord and lets Him be man.
I have briefly discussed this question because the structure of Ratzinger’s argument reappears in the celibacy debate. It is part of the established rhetorical repertoire of opponents of celibacy to invoke the metaphysical substance ontology on this very point as an indication that celibacy is not ontologically constitutive for sacramental priesthood. This is true. However, as in the case above, ontological indifference does not mean that celibacy is completely arbitrary. Rather, we are again dealing here with two different levels of argument, in precise analogy to the question of Jesus’ father. For once again, the argument is one of appropriateness, that is, of existential correspondence to the ontological definition of priesthood.
Now, it is in the nature of determining appropriateness that such relationships cannot be made distinct a priori. However, it is evident that celibacy, as the renunciation of marriage and family formation, is for the priest the existential correspondence to the theological definition of his ministry par excellence. From the point of view of correspondence, the ordained ministry would suffer substantial damage if celibacy were not bindingly linked to the ministry. In order to make this plausible, the Trinitarian-theological and Christological motives mentioned by Ratzinger play a decisive role. Let us first look at them again.
The basic ontological definition of Jesus Christ is that as a person He is the eternal Logos of the divine Father. The Father expresses His divinity in this Word, so that the Logos is the complete self-communication of the Father. And because the perfection of the Father includes being a person, i.e. His unique possession of the divine nature, the Logos, in whom the Father expresses Himself in His perfection, must Himself be a person. The Logos could not be the consubstantial image of the Father if He did not own the Father’s self-communication as a person, in order to be able to give the divine nature He has received back to the Father. This is why we also call the Logos the eternal “Son”—just as we generally refer to the first, self-expressing person of the Godhead as “Father” only with regard to the Son.
When the eternal Son becomes man, He possesses human nature in order to receive it into His eternal relationship with the Father. At the same time, the Father first becomes accessible to us in Christ, insofar as the Son, glorifying the Father, becomes an atoning sacrifice for the sake of our salvation. This is the “Office of Christ” of which Karl Barth, quoted in the first part, speaks. There is, as Barth rightly says, “no neutral humanity of Jesus.” Jesus is the Christ, who has no other mission than to bring forth in Himself the God-glorifying supernatural communion of life between God and creature. The Father sends his Logos into the world precisely for the sake of this bringing forth. The Son is obedient to this will; He allows Himself to be given into the sacrificial death by the Father as a continuation of His eternal relationship with the Father. For Jesus, there is no other ontological and existential dimension apart from this mission: “My food is to do the will of Him who sent Me and to accomplish His work.” (John 4:34)
Against this background, it becomes clear that Jesus, as the Christ, did not enter into marriage and had no biological children. Again, one may initially state with Ratzinger that marriage would neither have ontologically affected the eternal logos-hood of the person of Christ nor produced children who would be gods. Nor is this about moral issues, because marriage and family are goods in which the divine will of creation manifests itself. This is explicitly affirmed by Jesus. The reason for Christ’s celibacy is therefore neither on the level of ontological nor moral principles, but solely on that of appropriateness, which is connected to His specific ministry.
It is this ministry of establishing a kinship that no longer arises from the power of nature, but only in grace, that forms the basis both for the biological virginity of the Blessed Mother, whose child is “born not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God” (John 1:13), as well as for the celibacy and sexual abstinence of Christ Himself. In contrast to the aforementioned diluting reduction to the level of mere metaphor, which modern theology loves out of cowardice in the face of the natural scientific world view, it is precisely the biological dimension that most decisively brings to the fore the spiritual reality. Just as the incarnate Logos does not have a human father, He Himself does not become a husband and father, for He becomes a genitor for us in such a way that in Him, as the Son absolutely, we also become sons of God in an analogous way. For Him, who as a human being is identical with this work, it makes no sense to additionally beget physical children. The fact that—in terms of the theology of salvation—the only thing that matters is this undeducible context of grace, is reflected in an existentially adequate way by the Lord’s celibacy.
Taking into ministry
Pope John Paul II was a staunch supporter of the celibate life. The Pope expressed his views on this question in numerous texts and would certainly have vehemently rejected Jorge Bergoglio’s—practically initially unsuccessful—proposal to abolish compulsory celibacy. In my opinion, however, Wojtyła’s concept of celibacy raises a difficulty which, on closer examination, presents itself as an application of the perhaps even central problem of the entire Wojtyła pontificate. Karol Wojtyła thinks in terms of subject philosophy and anthropology, coming from his philosophical, i.e. personalist, origins. And this has an effect on the understanding of priestly celibacy, as it does on all other religious and ecclesiastical dimensions (such as the liturgy). The reservations that traditional Catholics almost instantly harbor against Wojtyła are related to this anthropological approach.
There is an instructive study by Martin Mayer on Wojtyła’s understanding of celibacy, the title of which is already illuminating: “Celibacy as a path of personal self-realization. The view of celibacy in John Paul II / Karol Wojtyła and its anthropological-spiritual foundations.”[2] The author works out here that Wojtyła conceives celibacy as a function of the maturation and relational abilities of the person. Celibacy is a means that should enable the person to realize the original meaning of sexuality, namely devotion to another person. Wojtyła hoped to use this rationale to convey the meaning of celibacy to modern man.
In my opinion, the problem with this moral-psychological definition of the essence of the celibate life is not that it incorrectly describes the anthropological and subjective-spiritual effect that could possibly be observed phenomenologically. The difficulty is rather that Woityla makes this effect the motive of celibacy. This turns the description into an anthropocentric, i.e. a subject-theoretically framed justification. This does indeed correspond to modern subjectivity. For it is this subjectivity that, to paraphrase Martin Heidegger, sets everything from itself and to itself and thus outlines the normative region only in which things can show themselves and be considered as being at all. In terms of truth theory, this means that only such positions can attain the status of rational and affective plausibility that allow to be situated in this region.
At this point, I do not wish to discuss the inner problems of the modern turn to the subject, which can also be observed in Karol Wojtyła, in philosophical detail. I have only mentioned the Wojtyła approach because it is the last prominent attempt to justify celibacy without, in my opinion, succeeding in adequately formulating priestly celibacy. In fact, the personalist perspective must systematically miss the point of celibacy. And as such, it is a heuristically useful contrasting foil to make the point of celibacy visible.
The justification for celibacy is precisely not an anthropological one and therefore not a personal-spiritual one, because the celibacy and childlessness of the priest is a requirement of the ministry. The priest is not obliged to lead a celibate life in order to attain his human fullness, but rather this form of life is the existential manifestation of the objective content of the priesthood, which is Christ making Himself and His sacrifice sacramentally present. To put it more pointedly: priestly celibacy is not an anthropological but a ritual function. It is essentially a moment to the liturgy of the Mass, and from here also a function to the pastoral and teaching role of the priest. The celibate renunciation is a sacrifice owed to the sacrifice. The fact that Wojtyła had no understanding precisely of this comes from his personalism, which finds no access to the sphere that Hegel calls the “objective spirit.”
However, it is precisely this definition of celibacy that results from the previous descriptions of the essential nature of the “Office of Christ” defined by sacrifice, of the Mass, the priesthood, and the Church as a whole. For the priest, as Sacerdos, is Christ who mediates Himself through the Holy Spirit, who makes present His sacrifice—which has perpetual actuality in divine eternity in the transfigured mode—in the ecclesial cult. He makes Himself and His sacrifice present in order to realize in it His mystical body, the supernatural communion of the faithful with Him. The real way of our inclusion in this new “relationship of kinship” made possible by the sacrifice of the cross is the participation, opened up by baptism, in the liturgy of the Lamb, who wants to become our life in God already under earthly conditions. But because this mediation process takes place through the priest, who, as it was said in classical parlance, becomes the spiritual father of the faithful by virtue of his sacramental role, it corresponds to the being of the priest most eminently to live a celibate life precisely for the same reason that Christ Himself lived a celibate life. Priestly celibacy, too, testifies that the salvation of man is exclusively becoming a son in the eternal Son, and that this is brought about by the sacrifice of the Son and “not by the will of the flesh.” If this connection, which justifies itself from the principle of Christ’s sacrifice and His ecclesial re-presentation of Himself, disintegrates, the Catholic concept of priesthood inevitably disintegrates, too. And without this concept, priestly celibacy is indeed completely implausible, just as implausible as the obligatory celibacy of the Protestant pastor would be.
By defining celibacy as a function to the rite, I am not denying that celibacy must and can be taken up by the priest in his personal spirituality. However, he can only do so by affirming his celibacy as a requirement of his ministry. He can only succeed in this if he wants to serve his ministry, and he will only succeed in this if he loves this ministry. This distinguishes the structure of the spiritual life of a priest from the spirituality of the religious. For monks, it does not matter in principle whether they are priests or not, and the question of their celibacy is not affected by the ministerial dimension at all. The priest, on the other hand, is not specifically called to celibacy, but to the priesthood. Like the Levites, he is chosen for an incomparably holy ministry, which he can exercise because he is marked with the “character indelebilis” of the high priestly authority of Christ Himself. Through the priest, the sacrificial Lamb becomes present on the altars of the Church and communion with the Trinitarian God is made accessible to the faithful, and therefore the priest—like Christ Himself—must place his humanity completely at the disposal of this ministry. So if there are to be priests who sincerely affirm celibacy, the Church would have to return to the understanding of the Mass as a sacrificial act and to a rite in which the essence of the Mass is clearly visible.
Election to the priesthood is a kind of divine fate. What can the often-heard lament mean here that the renunciation of marriage and family given with the office is “unbearable”? When the Deity comes and decrees over us, it does not ask whether we consider its impositions to be bearable. We are God’s possession: “Is not the potter master of the clay?” (Rom 9:21) We may assume that the priest who submits to the decree “realizes himself” in Wojtyła’s sense. However, this will only be a non-intended side effect for him: “When you have done all that you were commanded, say, ‘We are useless servants; we have done only that which was our duty to do’“. (Luke 17:10) And only the one who speaks as ordered will then hear: “Come, share in the joy of your Lord.” (Mt 25:21)
Celibacy and the late modern sexuality discourse
Due to the emancipatory character of modern subjectivity, institutionally imposed—but now even biologically determined—limitations to sexual self-determination must appear as repressions that need to be overcome. In addition to this formal aspect, there is the substantive aspect that the sphere of sexuality, beyond the context of reproduction, is now seen as an excellent space for individual self-realization and meaningfulness. In this space, the alleged self-determination is largely colonized by the underlying system imperatives of the modern world subjugation enterprise, but it is one of the illusions that are obviously particularly important in terms of system function that people cannot lead a good life without sexual activity. It has penetrated deeply into the late modern subjects that they find their autonomy precisely along the system imperatives that have eaten into their brains through a gigantic manipulation apparatus.
For this reason, the institute of celibacy is seen as unhealthy and morbid, because sexual abstinence per se is seen as hostile to self-development. It is precisely this assessment that is intended by the system propaganda, and it has also done an efficient job in the perspective that the priests themselves take on their celibacy. The disciplinary conditioning of the body and the disempowerment of the individual, which Michel Foucault’s analyses of modern societies deal with, celebrates its greatest triumphs precisely where the suggestion has become perfect that these are reclamations of intact individuality and spaces of freedom.[3] This means that, contrary to the philanthropic rhetoric, the position on sexuality, which the masses now take for granted without question, is a standardization instrument—perhaps even the central one—employed by the rationality of domination of the evolved modern age.
The fact that the late modern discourse on sexuality is in fact primarily concerned with the creation of masses of people who can be manipulated from all sides is particularly evident in the sexualization of early childhood in the media and state institutions. The actual aim here is to prevent the development of a sense of shame. For shame is a reclamation of inalienable privacy; it forms the arcanum of moral personality, and its dissolution is intended to reduce the human being to the level of merely animalistic acts of an individual who sees himself as a collective being. The obsession of the power with total sexual permissiveness can only be explained by the intention to unconditionally publicize the human being, to take away the primal impulses of mental self-protection and thus to create mass points that are unresisting and exploitable. What happens in sexuality is exactly what happens to people in the digital cosmos. Nietzsche’s “last man”, the “earth flea” hopping around everywhere, is the thoroughly digitalized and thoroughly sexualized plastic man of late modernity, who can thus be comprehensively controlled and modelled almost at will.
Celibacy therefore ultimately infringes the principle of the controlled mass-man, which has been culturally and structurally implemented under the semblance of its opposite. In this context, it is downright outrageous that a class of people should claim the right not to see themselves as collective beings with inevitable instinctual satisfaction practices. In other words, this motive of resistance to celibacy is in truth a resentful one. It complains about the lack of will to egalitarianize, the refusal to submit to normality, and evaluates this refusal as elitist conceit, which, however, must not be named as such, but is made contemptible by means of the moral and bio-political normalization categories of late modern consciousness.
What needs to be explained in this context, however, is the striking fact that priestly celibacy is more strongly attacked than the celibate life form of the religious orders. However, one must not allow oneself to be blinded by this. For the celibacy of monks is only more compatible with the modern consciousness than the celibacy associated with the ministry insofar as it can be reconstructed, albeit with the hermeneutics of violence, as a purely individually based exotic lifestyle variant. Michel Foucault’s references to the ascetic practices of philosophical and religious traditions have a significant character here. He extracts these practices from their original self-understanding and reconstructs them as functions in the self-staging of the subject. The subjectivity paradigm thus reappears here, and it has become radicalized in comparison to Wojtyła’s “self-realization”. For the deconstructivist perspective, which no longer recognizes human “nature”, is concerned with the complete self-invention of man in the late Marxist manner. As a theatrical subject, the human being is a specific form of a self-organizing material agglomerate; it is not about something being realized that was already there before, undeveloped. There is no truth of things and therefore, as Foucault emphasizes, no “truth in gender”. The staging is the thing itself. And ultimately, the ascetic practices only serve as means of dietetic prudence to increase the pleasures within this agglomerate.
The extent to which this perspective has also become the principle of understanding traditional ascetic practices within the Church is revealed by the complete disappearance of the old ecclesiastical position that religious life represents the “state of perfection”. This objectifying view is just as incompatible with liberal theology as it is with Foucault’s philosophical approach. For the formulation violates both the law of equality of all and the conviction that pleasure in all its colorful varieties is the highest human fulfillment, from which even partial renunciation first of all attains its good meaning. Remarkably, there still seems to be something like an “order of things” here. After all, the liberal front has long been fighting in the wake of Rousseau and in each case with reference to the very latest “human scientific findings” to free the Church’s understanding of sexuality from its alleged Augustinian ghetto and to establish a new culture of “uncrampedness” in the Church. The relevant texts of the German Synodal Way are the preliminary highlight of this project of “becoming uncramped!” But the old idea of perfection is also a thing of the past among today’s religious themselves. They usually attach great importance to no longer being distinguished, but to seeing themselves as humble pilgrims on the path of maturing towards a greater capacity for relationship and pleasure. After all, we are all the same.
The old battleships for an uncramped approach to the healing powers of “touch, sensuality, sexuality”[4] such as Claudia Lücking-Michel from the so-called Central Committee of German Catholics are now enjoying increasingly uncramped public support from the episcopate. After a breakthrough in the area of uncrampedness a few years ago, when moral theologian Eberhard Schockenhoff, at a meeting with the German bishops, recommended masturbation to single people as an independent variant of self-pleasure[5], bishops who were working on their uncrampedness have since repeatedly spoken out in a lust-affirming manner. Recently, for example, Bishop Joseph Bonnemain of Chur, who comes from Opus Dei, gave an interview to the Swiss online platform “Blick”.[6] In this interview “Joseph Bonnemain open as never before”, the 76-year-old confessed: “Sex is God’s greatest gift to us humans.” For the Bishop, the greatest divine gift to us is therefore not to receive the supernatural union of life with God Himself through the grace of Christ, but that we can have sex with each other. Incidentally, the platform announced that Bishop Bonnemain would offer a “hot line” by telephone; what you always wanted to ask but didn’t dare to ask can now be discussed without taboos. You could well imagine such a hot line with the sympathetic Bishop of Limburg, Georg Bätzing. Or with Reinhard Marx, the sympathetic cardinal from Munich. After all, Bishop Bonnemain’s enthusiastic statements on sex can also be considered representative of these two gentlemen. If we also consider Cardinal Tucho’s research into orgasm mysticism in this context, it is fair to say that Michel Foucault’s apotheosis of lust is now coming into its own in the Catholic episcopate.[7]
If sex is now considered the greatest of all gifts, sexual abstinence can logically only be a prelude at best. It is therefore only logical that this practice disappears when it is perceived as dysfunctional or can be replaced by more plausible functional equivalents in view of its effects. If at some point it seems more plausible for someone “to mature” through intimate relationships, or if they like themselves more as another work of art and believe that they have now starved themselves enough in preparation for the enjoyment of the greatest of all gifts, they will modify their lifestyles accordingly and possibly even justify the changes by claiming that the human-friendly God is now leading them down a different path to personal self-realization.
The equal one must not be unequal
However, celibacy does not even enjoy conditional toleration. This is because celibacy is the way of life of people who, as official representatives of the Church, are celibate. The opponents of celibacy understand even better than Wojtyła that this model cannot be interpreted as an individual way of life even with hermeneutical force. Priestly celibacy implies two things. Firstly, the link between celibacy and ministry obviously forms a completely different dimension of segregation than religious life, because we are dealing here with an institutionally discriminatory complex that also has considerable power-political consequences. Secondly, the linking of celibacy with the ministry not only gives sexual abstinence a prominence that the monastic lifestyle, reconstructed as private enjoyment, cannot produce, but the ministry, if it is linked to sexual abstinence in a binding way, must be something great. Here, it seems to me, lies the decisive reason for the hatred of celibacy. This reason is complementary to the discrediting by today’s sexuality discourse described above and also has a resentful character.
The philosopher Max Scheler pointed out in his important essay “Resentment in the Structure of Morals” that “the tremendous explosion of resentment in the French Revolution against the nobility and everything connected with it in terms of way of life ... would have been unthinkable if this nobility itself ... had not been interspersed with bourgeois roture, who also seized, with the purchase of their aristocratic estates, the titles and names of their owners, and if it had not been bloodily decomposed by money marriages. Only the new sense of equality of the rebels against the ruling class gave this resentment its sharpness.”[8] In other words, it was only because the bourgeois class had already incorporated the nobility and the nobility had effectively lost its former distinction that indignation could now develop over the fact that within this already achieved equality there was still a political privilege of the nobility that could no longer be justified anymore. This special position was now considered as the factually unjust conceit of a class of people which no longer actually existed objectively and merely presumptuously clung to the illusion of their specific being.
We can observe a comparable mechanism in the late modern revolt against the celibate priesthood. The ordained ministry has in fact been thoroughly stripped of its former specific predicates for some time now: For the modern theological consciousness, which has long since left metaphysical ontology behind, there is no “character indelebilis” constituted by an act of consecration, nor does the cross exist as an act of sacrifice and the Mass as an event of making this sacrifice present. Because this entire cosmos has collapsed, the priest in his classical dogmatic understanding as the sacerdos I have outlined can no longer exist. The revolt is therefore not directed against a thing that one wants to extinguish, which one assumes—still—actually exists according to its self-concept. The understanding of revolution here is rather the Lutheran one, i.e. one of re-form: the thing does not exist as it understands itself, but only in the peculiar form of an indeed very effective illusion. Reformation therefore means making this illusion disappear through educational work and, if necessary, by certain practical means, and giving truth the honor once again. And the truth is: “Baptism is the most important thing”; there is only the “general priesthood”; there is no such thing as an ordained ministry ontologically distinct from it; the doctrine of the sacrifice of the Mass is “terrible idolatry”; the so-called “priest” is possibly a churchwarden, as which, however, any Christian can act in principle; sacraments, even baptism, are “signs” of salvation—by no means in themselves indispensable for salvation; and the Eucharist is a communal meal with a reminder of God’s unconditional understanding of all things human, promised to us.
And because the practical implementation of this theology in the Catholic Church is already very far advanced, so far advanced that the German Synodal Way can exist at all, the project of Bergoglian synodalism, which is out for a long process of transforming the Church and in which the Pope himself now wants to make the sacerdotal hierarchy disappear, is nothing other than the final consequence. The special social position of a clerical caste can no longer be justifiable in the paradigm of differencelessness—”all, all, all”—any more than the political privileges of the French nobility were justifiable under the conditions described by Scheler. And just as in the French Revolution, today the drooling rage is directed at the politically highly consequential reclamation of the idea of a priesthood that, in this interpretation, blindly and arrogantly only imagines its sacerdotal identity. In fact: To be or not to be, that is the question here.
The consequences for the concept of celibacy are remarkable. For celibacy is now not simply considered implausible. Precisely because it is intrinsically appropriate to the idea of the ordained ministry as the sacramental re-presentation of Himself of the High Priest Christ and His sacrifice, it is regarded as an illegitimate title of nobility that should be abolished as such. This does not mean that celibacy itself is esteemed. But it is seen as an important fact in church politics, and indeed it is. The intimate relationship of correspondence between the sacerdos and celibacy can hardly be doubted, nor is it doubted at all. But if the priest is not at all what he thought he was for a long time, then he can no longer claim the right to be celibate as a priest. Then the standard for the group of people called “priests” must be the way of life that is the standard for everyone else. Because celibacy is therefore the most efficient representation of the idea of the divine dignity of the priesthood, the priesthood-hostile claim is aimed precisely at dissolving the binding link between celibacy and ministry. Celibacy should become a personal decision of the priest. This is tactically clever, because prima facie it looks as if the value of celibacy is not being fundamentally questioned. But the opposite is true. If priestly celibacy is de-potentiated to the level of the celibacy of the religious, it has lost its essential institutional character and becomes a spiritually private matter. And if these priests are then treated intensively enough, at some point they will all realize that the only meaningful path to self-realization is queer sexual practices, which are praised by the Synodal Way in harmonious concert with all other voices from the nihilistic Orcus.
I well remember a short conversation I had a long time ago with one of the most radical and prominent representatives of feminist theology in the USA at the time. It was not a matter of course that this conversation took place at all, because the lady in question did not actually talk to men. So I was lucky and was able to tease something out of her that I wanted to elicit. When I asked her whether she was against priestly celibacy because she felt sorry for the lonely young priests, she replied: “I hope you don’t seriously believe that I feel sorry for priests. Celibacy has to go so that this clique of sacred rulers can finally disappear.” She said, and disappeared herself. Why, Nietzsche asked, did Luther “give the priest back sexual intercourse with the woman”? Because, according to Nietzsche, “above all, as a man of the people, he was deprived of all inheritance of a ruling caste ... ‘Every man his own priest’ – behind such formulas hid in Luther the abysmal hatred of the ‘higher man’ and the rule of the ‘higher man’ as conceived by the Church: — he smashed an ideal that he did not know how to achieve, while he seemed to fight and abhor the degeneration of this ideal.”[9] Nietzsche’s intuition can be reformulated: Today’s revolutionaries also want to “give the priest back sexual intercourse with the woman”, or at least sexual intercourse, because they interpret his sacramental distinction as well as the power of domination stemming from sacerdotality as presumptuousness and regard him as an equal among equals.
But the tradition is old, and because no elephant decays in a day, for revolutionary tactical reasons they often still create the illusion that they are only concerned with eliminating the degenerations of the ideal. The “Synodal Way” is the perfect example of this. But the truth is that we are still dealing with what Nietzsche called the “peasant revolt of the spirit”, which in its resentment cannot bear the sacerdotal state that eludes the lifeworldly normality. And the liberal spirit can no longer tolerate it because it already cannot tolerate the doctrine of the Sacrifice of the Mass as the articulus stantis et cadentis ecclesiae, which alone justifies this state. The sphere of the sacred has been publicized, one could also say: democratized, which is clearly expressed by the fact that the sanctuary has lost its spatial demarcation and the altar itself has been replaced by a universally accessible communion table. “Mystery has vanished from our churches,” mourned the French poet Julien Green, referring to the developments unleashed by the last council. And, he added, “it will never return there again.”
Hopefully Green will not be right with this prediction. However, the internal rot in the Church has reached a level that not even the contemporaries of the Renaissance would have thought possible. That is why the abolition of celibacy will inevitably come in the name of the “new sense of equality” if the power of the vulgars cannot be stopped in time by a counter-revolution. It would have to be achieved above all by the younger generations of priests and young Christians who make pilgrimages to Chartres or Vézelay, for example, and it will require a considerable willingness to make sacrifices. For their conservatism is causing the establishment increasing concern. The functionaries of the revolution still occupy all positions of power—from bishop’s chairs to educational institutions. They are tenaciously defending their sovereignty of interpretation and are devising ever more vicious means to secure their ultimate rule. And if they cannot win, they will try to take everything down with them to their downfall. It is exactly as David Engels describes it: They would rather break their toys than pass them on in their traditional form.[10] At least, the war now seems to be fully ignited. It is a war that will decide whether the region of the sacred can be re-established, in which the Deity may once again take up residence. And then the priest would come home too.
NOTES
[1] Josef Ratzinger, Einführung ins Christentum, Munich 1968, 225.
[2] Published in: Moraltheologische Studien. Neue Folge, vol. 7, St Ottilien 2011.
[3] https://www.tichyseinblick.de/meinungen/lily-phillips-onlyfans/
[4] https://www.kath.net/news/41086
[5] https://www.dbk.de/fileadmin/redaktion/diverse_downloads/presse_2019/2019-038d-FVV-Lingen-Studientag-Vortrag-Prof.-Schockenhoff.pdf
[6] https://www.blick.ch/news/joseph-bonnemain-offen-wie-nie-was-ist-aus-ihrer-jugendliebe-geworden-herr-bischof-id20394837.html
[7] https://caminante-wanderer.blogspot.com/2024/01/se-descubre-un-nuevo-libro-oculto-del.html;
[8] Das Ressentiment im Aufbau der Moralen, in: Vom Umsturz der Werte. Abhandlungen und Aufsätze, GW 3, Bern 1935, 34-147, 42 (footnote 2).
[9] The Joyous Science, No. 358.
[10] https://www.tichyseinblick.de/kolumnen/aus-aller-welt/die-wiedereroeffnung-von-notre-dame-als-kaleidoskop-des-21-jahrhunderts/
