Professor Alfonso Carrasco Rouco

The "San Damaso" Faculty of Theology – Madrid

"Perfect and perpetual temperance for the kingdom of heaven", celibacy, is not required by "priesthood’s very nature", with which however it is, in "intimate convenience". It is a charisma, a particular gift from God, without which the Latin Church does not allow consecrated ordination, with which she considers celibacy strictly linked. Therefore, according to the words of the Council, celibacy is "an incentive to charity, and is certainly a particular source of spiritual fecundity in the world" and is a prophetic sign of the Kingdom of God in the world.

Within this framework, celibacy must be understood first as an answer to the complete and total love expressed by Jesus Christ in consigning Himself to humankind, welcomed and returned with a love that, due to its grace and particular vocation, attempts to be in the likeness of the Lord also in this aspect.

Celibacy is therefore above all a sign of the Lord’s love, of the novelty of the Kingdom made manifest by Jesus himself. It speaks of His presence, of the new forms of humaneness and love He renders present in the world and provides all Christians with the possibility of having a gratuitous and non-possessive relationship with things and a chaste and virginal relationship with people.

Celibacy however contains a prophetic value of its own, as a new form of nuptial donation of oneself through love, announcing to the Church and to the world the presence of the Kingdom of the Lord, the only One destined to renew and redeem all things.

The priest, who through the sacraments renders present in the Church Christ’s redeeming work, renders explicit in a manner particularly suitable to his mission the love personally experienced by Jesus Christ through His sacrifice on the Cross, through His abandoning Himself to the Father for the redemption of all humankind, the foundation for all priesthood. The priest’s celibate existence is thereby converted into a manifestation of the love through which Christ achieves His work for redemption, and that he offers and requests in different ways, to all the faithful, with the objective of achieving redemption.

Priestly celibacy constitutes therefore an eminent sign of the primacy of mercy, without which all that is Christian loses its meaning, losing also the prophetic words directed at each believer who belongs to the Church; Christ’s mercy must penetrate the depths of the soul and the body, totally characterising them, including personal affective relations and relationships.

For the priest himself celibacy is also the mark and the stimulus of mercy. He preserves the memory of his personal encounter with the Lord’s love and the free and personal answer, and shows that the priest’s mission can never be reduced to the formal implementation of impersonal or even mechanical duties, on the contrary, this is from the very origin a personal and free gesture of giving love.

This means that celibacy is for the priest a mark of Christ’s mercy, welcomed and reciprocal, and an everlasting stimulus to live ones own mission as a free act of faith and love for the Lord, in Him. A gesture of humble service, fully dedicated to the goodness of all humankind, so that the truth and mercy shown by Christ may shine in their lives, and they may thereby achieve redemption.

Through this, the Lord allows the priest to participate in that mysterious fecundity that is characteristic of authentic mercy bestowed by God. This fecundity, present in the signs that the Creator left us in all the manifestations of love, achieves its greatest splendour in the personal and free gesture of mercy experienced following Christ, the results of which are entrusted to the very Spirit of God. A fundamental and profound dimension of fatherhood is manifest thereby in priests, which does not ever only represent a physical aspect, since the real fecundity and the real destiny of man lies in his participation – thanks to a divine gift – in the generation of those who are called upon to be God’s children.