Celibate Marriage

Celibate Marriage

By Greg McAllister

I’ve been thinking about celibacy again.  Everyone always confuses celibacy with chastity and abstinence - just like they mix up the Immaculate Conception with the Virgin Birth.  Any time you combine sex and theology, it always gets confusing.

Celibacy doesn’t mean no sex; it just means you’re not married.  God-fearing Catholics in the Middle Ages used to beg their bishops to marry off their celibate priests so they’d stop bonking all the young women of the parish.

In the seminary, I thought I was celibate.  But that’s where I was dead wrong. I was chaste, abstinent, virtuous, and many other lovely things, but no way was I celibate.  I was definitely married, or at least promised in marriage.  It was an arranged marriage, set up by well-meaning Irish Catholic parents and grandparents.  And, even though there was no sex involved, it was nonetheless a marriage - although a rather incestuous one, to Mother Church. She was a jealous spouse too, demanding faithfulness and exclusivity, even while withholding sexual favors. That’s why her oath of faux celibacy was so obnoxious.  It was her devious way of possessing me, of keeping me from other women.  

As her young seminarian husband-to-be, I became addicted to her charms and inebriated with her promises of power, influence, and near-cosmic significance.  She was my first love and I, at that early age, had no idea what sacrifices she would eventually demand.  She, like many frigid lovers, perhaps intended me no harm, and could never grasp the extent of the psychological bewilderment she left in her wake.

I lasted 26 years in that first marriage, and I have to admit the first twenty years were good.  She encouraged and inspired me, taught me discipline and introspection, and my conjugal love was great enough to blind me to her shortcomings.  Eventually, though, the spell was broken.  I began to notice little things about her that bothered me. She was petty and small-minded, judgmental and self-righteous.  She constantly found fault with my behavior.  No matter what I did, I couldn’t seem to please her.  She was always trying to make me feel guilty. 

Eventually I began to see how mean-spirited she could be, how hypocritical.  She condemned others for things that were mere trifles, and rationalized the truly heinous things she had done.  She seemed ever more rigid and unforgiving, and I began to feel alienated from her.  Still, though, I couldn’t let go.  I simply couldn’t imagine life without her.  My only identity was as her husband.

For two years I struggled with my doubts and fears, vacillating between the allure of imagined freedom and the security of habit.  But one morning I woke up to the truth:  She was not my lover; she was my jailor.  After that I knew I couldn’t stay any longer.  Despite my deep feelings for her, I had to leave her.

That’s when I finally embraced true celibacy, when I left the seminary in 1966.

But even after I terminated my marriage to the Church, I remained under the spell of her power for many years, unable to fully commit myself to other women.  Even the pleasures of sex, long awaited and eagerly welcomed, were not powerful enough to break her bonds.  My body was still not my own, especially my sexual organs, which I lugged around like some rusty musket whose bombastic discharge always left me powder-burned and smoke-blind.  The Church had infected me with her own strain of Manichaean chlamydia and it had mutated on a deeper level than I realized, severing Flesh from Spirit, pleasure from self-confidence.

She had promised me fame and influence, that I would be “all things to all men.”  She had inflated my public persona and hollowed out my self-awareness.  Without realizing it, I continued to wear that clerical mantle, only to discover that most other women were put off by such narcissism.  Or perhaps they still detected her scent on my soul and realized that, on some deep level, I was still a married man and that, until I ended that primordial relationship, I could never be fully present to them.

Horace, in his odes, described celibacy in terms of the plane trees that were so popular in the manicured Roman suburbs of his day.  The wealthy landowners preferred the platanus caelebs– the plane tree “to which no vine is attached” - over the older, more scrubby foliage.  It’s taken me a long time to fully appreciate that horticultural aspect of celibacy.  The Church’s vines are tenacious and deep, many of them symbiotically comforting.  

I thought I had cut myself loose. But I realize there’s still pruning to be done.  

Hopefully in this lifetime.