2073 words, 11 min read
As the events surrounding the introduction of Cardinal Sarah’s book “From the Depths of Our Hearts” unfolded last week, I felt no desire whatsoever to write about them. Instead, seeing Pope emeritus Benedict XVI, for whom I have the highest regard and to whom I am deeply grateful, being dragged into that mess was a real source of suffering for me, also on the back of having watched a recent documentary about him done by Bavarian television from which it was clear that his health is much deteriorated and that he is coming to the end of his life. The events surrounding this book, of which he at first was alleged to have been a co-author, simply did not make sense and were not consistent with the great theologian whose wisdom has been and remains a source of light for me. As events unfolded, it emerged that Benedict had only written one of that book’s chapters and I was keen to get hold of it to see what he had actually said about the topics of the priesthood and of celibacy.
A few days ago, the German edition of CNA then published Benedict’s chapter in full (in German) and I would here like to share a rough translation of some of its passages.1 The chapter is 5903 words long (including 3 footnotes), is entitled “Die Gestaltwerdung des neutestamentlichen Priestertums in der christologisch-pneumatischen Exegese” (i.e., “The taking shape of New Testament Priesthood in Christological-Pneumatic Exegesis”) and is dated 17th September 2019. What follows will be well short of a full reflection on the text and will focus on the parts that either most spoke to me or that most puzzled me. The chapter overall focuses on the question of how the priesthood brought about by Jesus is in continuity with the priesthood of the people of Israel that precedes it and that, Benedict argues, it brings to its fulfilment. Far from being the central question of this chapter, celibacy is only one of a variety of aspects of the priesthood that Benedict speaks about here. The central focus here, as in all of Benedict’s thought, is Jesus and his invitation to us, as humanity, to become one with him.
Early on in the chapter, Benedict speaks about how the Jewish priesthood was viewed differently in Jesus’ time, with the Pharisees being its proponents, while the Essenes opposing its then-current form that they wanted to see purified. In that context, Benedict writes:
“This means that Jesus sees the destruction of the temple as a result of the misguided attitude of the ruling priest hierarchy. God, however, uses the misguided attitude of people, as at all corner points of salvation history, as a means for his greater love. In this respect, Jesus obviously sees the destruction of the current temple ultimately as a step of divine healing and interprets it as a final redesign of ritual worship. In this sense, the cleansing of the temple is the announcement of a new form of worshiping God and thereby affects the nature of ritual worship and priesthood as such.”
What radiates from Benedict’s words here is God’s love and and a thinking whose stage is that of eternity and universality. This is also apparent from my favorite passage, where he offers an astonishingly beautiful exegesis of the last supper, the crucifixion and resurrection:
“It is important to consider that the same Jesus who stands among the disciples surrenders himself to them in his flesh and blood and thus anticipates the cross and resurrection. It would all be pointless without the resurrection. The crucifixion of Jesus is not in itself an act of ritual worship, and the Roman soldiers who carry it out are not priests. They carry out an execution, but do not even remotely think of preforming an act of ritual worship. That Jesu, in the Upper Room [and] for all time, gives Himself as food, means an anticipation of his death and resurrection and the transformation of an act of human atrocity into an act of devotion and love. Thus Jesus himself performs the fundamental renewal of ritual worship, which remains decisive for all time: He transforms people’s sin into an act of forgiveness and love, into which future disciples can enter by participating in the foundation of Jesus. This explains what Augustine called the transition from the Last Supper to morning offering in the church. The Last Supper is God’s surrender to us in the forgiving love of Jesus Christ and enables humanity in turn to take up God’s gesture of love and to return it to God.”
Benedict then continues with setting out the significance of the cross and its relationship to the Eucharist, which he presents with reference to not only the Church but to all of humanity and he concludes with reflecting on the relationship between New Testament priesthood and the priestly office of Israel.
“The cross of Jesus Christ is the act of radical love, in which the reconciliation between God and the sinful world takes place in reality. Therefore this, which is in no way an event of ritual worship, is nevertheless the highest worship of God. In the cross, the katabatic line of the descent of God and the anabatic line of the devotion of mankind to God became one single act that made the new temple of his body in the resurrection possible. In the celebration of the Eucharist, the Church, indeed humanity, is repeatedly drawn into this process. In the cross of Christ, the prophetic criticism of ritual worship has reached its goal once and for all. However, at the same time, new ritual worship is established. Christ’s love, which is ever present in the Eucharist, is the new act of worship. Accordingly, the priestly offices of Israel are “raised up” into the service of love, which at the same time means worship of God. This new unity of love and ritual worship, of a criticism of ritual worship and the glorification of God in the service of love is, of course, an unheard-of assignment for the Church, which has to be renewed in every generation.”
After setting out the role of New Testament priesthood as existing in a tension between the cross and worship, and as being preceded by and bringing to fulfilment the priesthood of Israel, Benedict turns to the question of celibacy by first reflecting on its Old Testament nature:
“In the general awareness of Israel, it was apparently clear that priests were obliged to practice sexual abstinence during the times when they were involved in ritual worship, that is, in contact with the divine mystery. The connection between sexual abstention and worshiping God was entirely clear in the general awareness of Israel. As an example, I would only like to bring to mind the episode in which David asks Ahimelech for bread while fleeing from Saul. “The priest replied to David, “I have no ordinary bread on hand, only holy bread; if the men have abstained from women, you may eat some of that.” David answered the priest: “We have indeed stayed away from women.”” (1 Sam 21, 5f). Since Old Testament priests only had to devote themselves to ritual worship at certain times, marriage and priesthood were perfectly compatible.”
It seems to me that this is a curious argument and one that lacks the sharpness and deep insight of the earlier part of the text. Instead of going to the heart of the matter, like in the case of his profound reflections on the relationship between Jesus’ crucifixion and ritual worship, this passage effectively says: during Old Testament times it was obvious to everyone that priests had to abstain from sex during times when they were involved in ritual worship, and it offers as Scriptural foundation a passage where a priest (Ahimelech) tells King David that his soldiers may only consume bread used in ritual worship if they (the solders) have abstained from sex during some preceding period of time2.
What follows immediately after the above is a paragraph on how New Testament priesthood differs from the Old Testament one:
“For the priests of the Church of Jesus Christ, the situation was fundamentally changed due to the regular or in many cases daily celebration of the Eucharist. Their whole life stands in contact with the divine mystery and thus demands an exclusivity for God, which excludes another, life-encompassing bond like marriage alongside itself. From the daily celebration of the Eucharist and from the comprehensive service for God that comes with it, the impossibility of a conjugal bond arose by itself. One could say that functional abstinence had by itself become ontological. This changed the reasons for it and its meaning from the inside. Today, however, the objection immediately arises that this is a negative valuation of the body and of sexuality. The accusation that priestly celibacy was based on a Manichaean worldview was raised as early as the 4th century, but was immediately rejected by the fathers with determination and then fell silent for some time. Such a diagnosis is wrong already because in the Church marriage was considered from the beginning to be a gift given by God in Paradise. But it required the human person as a whole and the service for the Lord also requires the human person completely, so that both vocations appear as not realizable at the same time. In this way the ability to forgo marriage to be fully present for the Lord had become a criterion for priestly service.”
This also strikes me as a peculiar argument since it suggests that married people could not wholly devote themselves to serving God or that married priests would in some way also be incomplete in their service (a long list of counter examples here includes St. Hilary, 4th century bishop of Poitiers and Doctor of the Church, who was married and had a daughter – St. Abra). It is also at odds with a 4th century magisterial text of the Catholic Church – the Apostolic Canons, where canon #6 declares “Let not a bishop, a priest, or a deacon cast off his own wife under pretence of piety; but if he does cast her off, let him be suspended. If he go on in it, let him be deprived.” In no way do I mean to argue against the value of celibacy here – its choice is certainly a gift that one can be called to make and a gift that also flourishes and becomes an ontological part of priesthood for celibate priests. But, post hoc does not imply propter hoc, and an argument for ontological unity between celibacy and the priesthood for a person who made the beautiful choice of giving themselves wholly to God in celibacy does not imply that it is a necessary prerequisite.
I really have mixed feelings about this text, where some of its parts brightly radiate with Benedict’s genius and are on par with the masterful magisterial writings from his time as Pope Benedict XVI, while other passages seem intellectually sluggish and superficial – adjectives I could not apply to any of his other writings …
Let me conclude with a translation of a brief passage from later on in the chapter, which made my heart burn within me, like the hearts of the disciples on the road to Emmaus:
“It is the temptation of mankind time and again to want to be completely autonomous, to follow only one’s own own will and to think that only then will we be free; that only in such freedom without barriers is a person wholly human. But that’s precisely how we position ourselves against the truth.
Because the truth is that we have to share our freedom with others and that we can only be free together. This shared freedom can be true freedom only if we place ourselves into the measure of freedom itself, into the will of God.”
1 I will again favor as literal a translation of the text as I can manage, over polish or readability. All mistakes in the translated text here are exclusively mine.
2 In the Hebrew original it says “about three days”, which is rendered as “yesterday and the day before yesterday” in the German translation used in this passage’s original, while a variety of English translations, like the New American Bible (Revised Edition) I used in my translation here, make no specific reference to duration.
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