♫ THOSE CLERGY WIVES ARE BREAKING UP THAT OLD GANG OF MINE ♫

From Sara Ritchey at the New York Times:

On Sunday, the Vatican announced the creation of the Personal Ordinariate of the Chair of Saint Peter, a special division of the Roman Catholic Church that former Episcopal congregations and priests — including, notably, married priests — can enter together en masse.
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Nonetheless, the Roman Catholic Church is prepared to house married priests in numbers perhaps not seen since the years before 1123, when the First Lateran Council adopted canon 21, prohibiting clerical marriage.
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By the time of the First Lateran Council, the priest’s wife had become a symbol of wantonness and defilement. The reason was that during this period the nature of the host consecrated at Mass received greater theological scrutiny. Medieval theologians were in the process of determining that bread and wine, at the moment of consecration in the hands of an ordained priest at the altar, truly became the body and blood of Jesus Christ. The priest who handled the body and blood of Christ should therefore be uncontaminated lest he defile the sacred corpus.

Damn! You know, having grown up in the Roman Catholic Church, I knew this, but to see it spelled out again is revoltingly shocking. Remind me about the Incarnation. Did it really happen? Did Jesus really defile himself and become human like us? Did he truly hang around with contaminated women? Did Jesus allow the woman who was a known sinner wash his feet and dry them with her hair?

The medieval theologians may have been at the moment of deciding that the bread and wine became the true body and blood of Jesus, but they seemed to have forgotten the Gospel in the process.

The priest’s wife was an obvious danger. Her wanton desire, suggested the 11th-century monk Peter Damian, threatened the efficacy of consecration. He chastised priests’ wives as “furious vipers who out of ardor of impatient lust decapitate Christ, the head of clerics,” with their lovers. According to the historian Dyan Elliott, priests’ wives were perceived as raping the altar, a perpetration not only of the priest but also of the whole Christian community.

Whoa! Methinks Peter Damian needed to take a look inside himself. The psychological concept of projection was not known at the time, but Jesus surely gave warning in the Gospel, when he said that we must remove the planks from our own eyes before we judge the peccadilloes of others.

In my lifetime, I remember certain priests recoiling from me during an ordinary conversation. I could see the panic in their expressions, as they thought, "I gotta get away!" Mind you, I was not coming on to them. I promise. But back in the day, the priests were taught in seminary, some of them entering at the tender age of 13, that women were living, breathing, walking, talking occasions of sin. While some priests were clever enough to shed the harmful, nonsensical teachings once they matured, others bought it hook, line, and sinker and hung on.

Pray for the priests and their wives who become part of the RC ordinariate. Pray for all who enter there. The converts may be in for some surprises.

From Wikipedia:

Petrus Cardinal Damiani is a saint and was made a Doctor of the Roman Catholic Church by Pope Leo XII in 1828, with a feast day of February 23. His body has been moved six times, each time to a more splendid resting-place. Since 1898, Damian has rested in a chapel dedicated to the saint in the cathedral of Faenza. No formal canonization ever took place, but his cult has existed since his death at Faenza, at Fonte-Avellana, at Monte Cassino, and at Cluny. His feast has since been moved February 21.

The saint is represented in art as a cardinal bearing a knotted rope (the disciplina) in his hand; also sometimes he is depicted as a pilgrim holding a papal Bull, to signify his many legations.

Image from Wikipedia.