by Leonardo Meira
edited with information from the Italian edition of L’Osservatore Romano. Translation to Portuguese by Canção Nova News

Celibacy is a gift from the Lord that the priest is called to choose and to live in fullness,” stresses the Prefect for the Congregation for the Clergy, Cardinal Mauro Piacenza, in an article written for the Thursday March 23rd edition of L’Osservatore Romano, the official journal of the Vatican. The article is entitled “Question of Evangelical Radicality.”

“Celibacy is a question of evangelical radicality. Poverty, chastity and obedience are not counsels reserved exclusively to the religious. They are virtues to be lived with intense missionary passion.” He defended.

Piacenza made a criticism to the objections that return and are raised against celibacy, especially that this doctrine would be a pre-conciliar residue and a mere ecclesiastical law. The Cardinal explains that not one of these have a real foundation in the documents of the Vatican II Council, nor in the pontifical magisterium. The examination of the texts explains a radical continuity between the magisterium before and after the Council.

The papal teaching for decades agreed on founding celibacy on the theological reality of the ministerial priesthood, on the ontological and sacramental configuration to the Lord on his participation in the only priesthood and on the imitatio  Christi that this implies.” he said explaining that mistaken interpretations could lead to seeing celibacy as a residue of the past from which one is liberated.

The cardinal also notes that the papal teaching encourages overcoming the reduction of celibacy as merely ecclesiastical law. “In fact, it is lay only because it is a demand intrinsic to priesthood and of the configuration to Christ that the Sacrament of Orders determines. In this sense, the formation to celibacy, beyond all human and spiritual aspects, should include a solid doctrinal dimension, because one cannot live this without understanding the reason,” he taught.

Challenges

Piacenza said that the debate on celibacy does not favor the serenity of young generations in understanding the gift so determined of the sacerdotal life.

“I realize, obviously, that in a secularized world, it is always more difficult to comprehend the reasons for celibacy. I believe, to this respect, that the motivated support to celibacy and its adequate appreciation in the Church and in the world could represent some of the efficient ways to overcome  secularization.”

The prefect of the Congregation which justify the theological roots of celibacy encounter themselves in the new identity that is given to that which is conceded  to the Sacrament of Orders. “The centrality of the ontological dimension and the consequent structural and sacramental Eucharistic dimension of the priesthood represent the areas of understanding, development and existential faithfulness to celibacy. The question,therefore, concerns the quality of faith. A community that does not have celibacy in high esteem, which anticipates the Kingdom or that Eucharistic tension would be able to live? ” he asks.

Finally, the Cardinal said that it is not possible to allow conditioning or intimidation by whomever does not comprehend celibacy and would like to modify the discipline of the Church in this question, opening cracks. “On the contrary, we should recuperate the conscience motivation which our celibacy challenges the mentality of the world, putting in crisis its secularism and its agnosticism and screaming in the centuries that God exists and is present,” he concluded.

translated from Portuguese