Brennan Responds

Pat Brennan responds to Tersa's last post as follows. (By the way, Pat, the John F. Scarpa Chair of Catholic Legal Studies at Villanova, will be joining our team of blogistas shortly)------

I appreciate Teresa's clarification of the point of engagement with M. Perry on the question of "sin;" a neophyte blogger, I guess I hadn't seen the whole context. With that point of engagement clear, I can say that I can readily imagine circumstances in which individuals acting authoritatively in the name of the Church could sin against men by excluding them from the priesthood, either one by one or through the adoption of a "policy," on the ground of their being "homosexual." This is not because anyone has a "right" to claim the office of ministerial priesthood for himself in the abstract (see CCC sec. 1578), but because the Church's role and responsibility is to determine "who is called to it [the sacrament of Holy Orders] by God'' (ad illud fit a Deo vocatio). The task that this traditional theology sets the Church is the one of discerning God's will; a person or regime that supplants that inquiry with one into more straightforwardly "managerial" concerns risks sin against those whose divine calling goes unacknowledged by the Church and is thus frustrated. If we are to maintain a sacramental theology that teaches that the question is "whom God calls," we cannot be content with policies and platforms that would cut off this inquiry in the name of all the reasons recent history has made painfully clear.

Furthermore, I do not understand the Catholic tradition to have taught that God does not call homosexual men to ministerial priesthood. Of course, this modern way of framing the issue was perhaps subsumed in the traditional, psychologically less-nuanced inquiry into a person's suitability to function in ministerial priesthood, but this latter point remains to be made - and most of us know so many homosexual men who are exemplary priests that this point would seem hard to establish. Also of course, the tradition is developing, and it could be that we are now seeing for the first time clearly that a man's being a "homosexual" prevents him from truly "imaging" Christ. The tradition has been clear, as Teresa points out, that women and men image the triune God differently and complementarily. I do have some inchoate (if inarticulate) insight into the difficulty of trying to separate a person's anatomy from his or her unchosen desires for purposes of sorting out the "imaging" metaphysics, but it seems altogether important that, so far as I am aware (and I stand to be corrected), in two-thousand years the Magisterium has not in its sacramental theology of discernment of priestly vocation taught that homosexuality (which current understanding acknowledges is not necessarily an all-or-nothing state) precludes such imaging. Pope John Paul II's theology of the nuptial meaning of the body perhaps suggests a new direction in sacramental theology of the priesthood, but that question should be separated from the one about what should be done in order to restore the (American) priesthood to the regular fidelity to chaste celibacy to which the Church has called its priests for nearly a millennium.

Finally, I'm aware that I could appear guilty of a kind of sacramental naivete and in need of a little "sacramental realism." My objection to the kinds policies I'm reading about depends on the Church's role's being one of discerning God's will (and the Church's having not taught as a matter of sacramental theology that homosexual men are disqualified from priesthood). Judgments of suitability, which are required by sacramental theology, can operate as a cover for a regime that decides rather discerns who is called to priesthood. But I remain hopeful that, at Rome and in the particular churches, those with the power to ordain are looking for those whom God calls as His priests.