The Evangelization of Celibacy

We are created in the image of God  with sexual identity. What does this mean? This has infinite meaning in God’s plan for us but for the sake of this discussion let us talk about the meaning of celibacy in the realm of evangelization. So ordered with sexual identity, we are endowed with the ability to procreate through marriage. This is part of the Creative Nature of God manifest in His image, His creatures. It is part of His identifying mark on us. This identity cannot leave us. It is part of us.

Obvious in marriage and obviously compromised in sexual activity out of marriage, what then happens to this identity in a celibate person. The identity remains obviously, but does it become dormant? A review of the incessant temptations of the celibate person can easily remind us that it is still present and wanting. The celibate person however gives over his sexuality to God and so consecrated, he/they has the potential to become even more procreative than we can imagine. When a priest , religious, or even nonreligious does this, he or she in fact enacts the dual nature God bestows on us in the sacraments, divine and human, in a procreative capacity.  A faithful priest generates a much larger family than he could ever physically, in his parish or other. Similarly with a consecrated religious female. Or consecrated nonreligious. God’s Nature does not sleep:

Mark 1029 “Jesus said, “Amen, I say to you, there is no one who has given up house or brothers or sisters or mother or father or children or lands for my sake and for the sake of the gospel 30who will not receive a hundred times more now in this present age: houses and brothers and sisters and mothers and children and lands, with persecutions, and eternal life in the age to come. “

This is why the Roman Catholic Church has proliferated so much more than the Eastern Rite, the latter not requiring celibacy except for bishops.  A matter of historical record. It is why the Eastern Rite churches are often tempted to nationalistic identities. It is how the Church can stay united across national borders, which are the extended physical families of man. It is a Trinitarian Unity. It is in fact the only “familial” unity that can exist across borders, despite what the proponents of borderless humanity preach.

Note the proliferation of homosexuality “advocates” in the church is a sinister imitation of  this plan that undermines the Church. The devil always presents a fraud. A Roman Catholic priest with “homosexual inclination” has to be celibate as one with heterosexual attraction. But who is sacrificing the more for God? The one who is giving up illicit sexuality or the one who is giving up illicit sexuality or licit sexuality with progeny? In recent times there has been the proposal that the apostle Paul’s thorn in the flesh (Corinthians 2: 12:7-10) was homosexual inclination. As if heterosexuality is not vulnerable to temptation?

If one wants to insist that homosexuality is an innate and natural state, then one has to seriously consider that it is incompatible with the priesthood. If you are not physically disposed to progeny, then you have no business becoming a father. That is the WHOLE point of God’s plan. To increase His family. At least with a married Orthodox priest with children, you know that he is disposed to fatherhood, albeit potentially distracted from his flock.

In God’s grace the eastern churches, the other lung of the Church, those with married priests, serve as a a reminder for us against globalization that is the fraudulent version of the Universal Church. A reminder of the fractal organization of family, community, and country.

“Whoever denigrates marriage also diminishes the glory of virginity. Whoever praises it makes virginity more admirable and resplendent. What appears good only in comparison with evil would not be truly good. The most excellent good is something even better that what is admitted to be good.”

Saint John Chrysostom, De virginitatae