A celibate priesthood is not part of the discipline of any other church (all of which allow for married men to become priests; the Eastern
Catholics also do this), though I have read in numerous places that this is one of the oldest continual traditions kept by the Roman Church in particular (older than any of the major schisms, as seen by the canons of the Synod of Elvira which I posted earlier...that was in the first quarter of the fourth century). I want to say that based on that, I'd rather it not be messed with, and yet at the same time I do have to wonder why so many RC priests seem to have trouble with this (as opposed to, the celibate priests found in other traditions, including my own). Surely they know what they are getting into when they begin the process of becoming RC priests, as it's not as though this is a new discipline in their church. Is there something deeply wrong with the structure or formation processes of RC seminaries, as some (Catholic) sources I have read allege? I've never been, and obviously it's past time for me since I'm not in that church anymore, but it is distressing because of the effect it has on people. If I were a bishop overseeing one of these places, I would want to take a hard look at how men are prepared and vetted. Just as a counterpoint (not perfect, but it's the one I personally experienced), a few years ago when I was in the Monastery of St. Shenouda the Archimandrite, a Coptic Orthodox monastery in upstate New York, I remember having a conversation with its single full-time resident because I wondered why they have this relatively large complex (with a chapel, a church, sleeping quarters for several people, showers, etc.) if they're just going to have one guy in it. Y'know...it's a
monastery, so where are all the other monks? Brother Antonios told me that it was originally intended purely as a monastery, but that more was added on to it to make it a fitting place for retreat once it became obvious that finding other monks to fill it with is more difficult than finding non-monk pilgrims. And indeed, the church on its grounds was quite full all of the time I was there (about two weeks), even though myself and one other layperson (a recent arrival to America from the Netherlands). At first I was kind of sad, because I figured that this was a lonely life for the one brother who was there, but after thinking about it a bit I realized that what he was really telling me was there no one else who had been there yet was up to the task of actually
being a monk. They had had various people come there with an intent to stay, but it didn't work out because it actually takes a lot of dedication and a very strong constitution to live that way
every single day of your life, forever, until you die. I mean, I lived a very soft, modified version of it there as a guest for only about two weeks, and...yeah...I'd be a
terrible monk. I'd be a terrible anything.
So I wonder if something similar might be going on with the RCC in its priesthood, but they are perhaps not yet ready to leave the building empty, so to speak? You could have seminarians who actually should not continue but do because otherwise there wouldn't be whatever number of vocations they have, and things would probably fall into some degree of financial ruin, and so on. I do know that the RCC, as the world's single most visible church (media-wise) gets a lot of flak from secular society already about why it has so much money, so much property, so much everything, so it's probably important to...y'know...actually
do something with the resources that it does have, including I guess (in a way) the people who really want to be priests...whether they should be or not.
I dunno. Maybe that's a totally off-base comparison, but it's something I thought of when I got back from the monastery (as it's not just a Catholic problem; there are certainly some priests of the Coptic Orthodox Church who should be doing something else instead!). And also about how for years before their rejuvenation in the 1960s under the direction of the modern Coptic (de facto) saint Matthew the Poor, many of our monasteries in the desert had only a handful of elderly monks in them, and were decaying. Now they are booming throughout Egypt, with hundreds of novices, and people -- monastics and laypeople -- are really immersing themselves in the spirituality of the desert, and by all accounts Coptic monasticism is probably now in better shape overall than it has been at any time in the past several hundred years. Now you can go to Italy, the heart of Roman Catholicism, and see Coptic monasteries where
tiny children chant the Midnight Praises in Italian! What?!
So maybe right now you guys are going through some struggles in this area, but experience tells me that if there are people who
want to do things right, and those people are put in positions where they can live in a way that others can see and emulate (as opposed to being shut away in some far off corner of the Church, where they can't influence anything), then you might be surprised at how few people it really takes to get things going. Remember in St. Athanasius' day, it was pretty much just him against the world, which was collapsing to the Arian heresy. Maybe you guys need your own St. Athanasius or Matthew the Poor, or even just someone to stand up and say "This thing's broken. Let's stop letting people in who clearly shouldn't be here, because doing so is further entrenching the problem."
I mean, I know you guys like to publish stats on the number of priests in formation or added or whatever each year, but is there a corresponding statistic of those who are turned away? Sometimes that sort of thing helps to sort the wheat from the chaff. When I was first on the road to converting to Orthodoxy I was warned that some people might make things difficult for me, partly out of ignorance or distrust ("What's that guy doing here? He's not from our ethnic group!"), but also partly because we do not want to receive just anyone who a few years down the road will wander off into whatever their next thing is. So they make it harder to get in so that it's harder to leave, because especially if you're a Westerner like me and only used to Western Christianity, it's a huge change of life (from fasting one or two days a year to over two hundred, a daily prayer rule that you're actually expected to keep that isn't just a few memorized prayers, but all of the psalms, the doxologies, etc. of the Agpeya, and so on). Priests should also be prepared to "take off the old man" too, right?
