Danger of the Vows

In a recent issue of Commonweal magazine there is an article in which a psychiatrist reflects on his very successful schooling in a Jesuit secondary school and college, and then speculates on the influence of the vow of celibacy on the action or inaction of bishops and priests in the sex abuse scandal.

A set of letters to the editor then followed in which writers initiate a debate about whether negative forces within the nature of religious vows retard personal development. In one letter reference is made to a 1947 talk by Jesuit John Courtney Murray entitled Dangers of the Vows. (see the whole text at
http://woodstock.georgetown.edu/library/murray/1967a.htm)

Below is a summary of the article and excerpts of letters reacting to the article as well as a summary of Murray’s speech.

Gault Commonweal article excerpts

On completion of their training Jesuits take vows: poverty, chastity, and obedience. And what are the challenges of adolescence? With what must we come to terms as we struggle to adapt to a place in the adult world? Wealth, sex, and power. Are these not the three great forces, the perplexing and dominant mysteries with which the untroubled child must at last unhappily contend? These men had vowed to avoid these issues. Poverty, chastity, obedience. However admirable in the purity of their moral rigor, might not these principles forfend some of the most difficult challenges of full adulthood? About the schoolmaster there is an ancient saying, Inter pueros senex; inter senes puer. A man among boys; a boy among men.
… That the church and some of its priests can have been so good and some so bad boggles the mind. But I recall your attention to the issue of incomplete adulthood. Celibacy may facilitate the consecrated life, but not full and ordinary life. Obedience may make one a good soldier, but not necessarily a good decision maker. The unworldliness of a pious man, like that of an intellectual, ill equips him for administrative emergencies. The absent-minded impracticality of professors is legendary. Everyone forgives them their somewhat childlike single-mindedness and understands that ivory towers are necessary for the protection of their endangered species. Perhaps both the spiritual and the academic life conduce to one’s retaining some traits of the innocent child. Poverty, chastity, obedience. Perhaps these abnegations are accomplished at some cost, dulling the shrewd discernment and restraining the decisive reaction that crisis management requires.
St. Paul, in his letter to Timothy, offered this advice: “A bishop, therefore, must be above reproach, husband of one wife.... He must be one who manages his own household well and controls his children.... For if a man does not know how to manage his own family, how can he take care of a congregation?” There’s a commonsense plausibility to Paul’s argument, and he seems to be making a case against a celibate clergy. A man can stop being a child without becoming a husband and father, but it isn’t easy.
…I’m wondering whether, as in classic tragedy, heroic virtue and fatal flaw may both derive—at least in part—from one source: the Catholic clergy’s incomplete personal entanglement in the perplexing challenges of full adulthood.
It was from women, several of them, that I first heard the observation that priests are like children. My informants didn’t actually explain this idea in a way I could fully grasp. It reminds me of the parallel observation, heard from more than a few women, that men are like children. But priests, perhaps, even more so.
Maybe that’s it. Maybe they were boys themselves, boys who loved school, and teaching school, and being with boys at school. They consecrated their lives to it; and they created Marquette High School, where I was so happy, although I still don’t quite understand why. Not really

Excerpts of Letters in Response

Perilous Vows
I was disappointed in Barry Gault’s article on Jesuits (“Society Men,” April 22), but I enjoyed the letters in response (May 20) and the debate over whether religious vows can keep the young Jesuit from growing up. In a little-known essay published in Woodstock Letters (Vol. 96, Fall 1967), John Courtney Murray, SJ, discussed the dangers of the vows. It was originally a talk he gave to fellow Jesuits in 1947.
He warned young Jesuits about the “risks of religious life,” especially “the one supremely perilous risk—that of losing your manhood.” Look around, he said, and see men damaged by their reaction to poverty, chastity, and obedience; and see men unorganized, and intellectually and emotionally immature. They lack responsibility and purpose because they have failed to grapple with three elemental forces—the earth, woman, and their own spirits. “Man is not a man until by his own hard work he has bent stubborn earth to his own purposes.” Without woman, a man loses the possibility of becoming a father, more fully like God, and the “possibility of headship”: Adam’s fault was allowing Eve to “rule” him into temptation. (Obviously Murray wrote long before Theological Studies had published articles on feminist theology.) Finally, through obedience, one loses power to choose a destiny. “Your typical bachelor is proverbially crotchety, emotionally unstable, petulant, and self-enclosed—small and childish in the emotional life.”
Jesuit life has been radically revised in an effort to avoid producing typical bachelors. Nevertheless, some of what Murray wrote still rings true.
Raymond A. Schroth, SJ

Excerpts from other letters

Barry Gault’s article “Society Men” (April 22) raises thoughtful questions. Does Catholic priesthood, as it is actually lived today, promote certain kinds of extended adolescence or boyishness among its members? “A man can stop being a child without becoming a husband and father, but it isn’t easy.” Gault then raises the intriguing metaquestion of whether that extended boyishness, resulting from “the Catholic clergy’s incomplete personal entanglement in the perplexing challenges of full adulthood,” might have positive as well as negative effects on their character. Among its negative effects, Gault seems to count pedophilia, which I find a dubious linkage—but then, I guess he is the shrink.
I think a celibate, tenured priesthood does tend to make priests like children. Psychic prices are paid. But what generally passes for growing up has its prices too.
Bill Schrempp
Newberg, Ore.

I am disappointed that Commonweal, which usually holds to high journalistic and intellectual standards, saw fit to print the tired old argument that clerical celibacy leads to psychosexual immaturity, which, according to the baseless logic of this line of reasoning, led to the clergy sexual-abuse crisis in the church. This argument, often associated with left-leaning Catholics, is as discredited and without foundation as the argument often put forth by right-leaning Catholics that homosexuality is the source of the problem. Given my study of the data in my seven years as director of vocations for the Upper Midwest Jesuits, there is no evidence that either is the case.
Since when is marriage the cure-all for life’s problems? Are there no immature married men? Are there no mature celibate men and women? What about the great celibate saints of the church, not to mention Buddhist monks such as the Dalai Lama and other celibates from non-Christian traditions? For that matter, what about Jesus Christ? From scriptural evidence, church tradition, and doctrine, Jesus never married. Was he psychosexually immature? Was he an abuser?
Warren Sazama, SJ
Milwaukee, Wis

Another letter
As for the vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience, Gault asks, “However admirable in the purity of their moral rigor, might not these principles forfend some of the most difficult challenges of full adulthood?” On the contrary, far from removing one from a confrontation with those “three great forces” of the adult world—wealth, sex, and power—living the vows obliges one to come to terms with them, if the vows are to be lived in a holy manner. To consider only the first of these forces: the complacent greed of an unscrupulous CEO is not so far removed from the petty possessiveness of a sister guarding her space or her few belongings. Neither has confronted adequately the mighty pull of material treasure.
Rose Hoover, RC
Gainesville, Fla.

MY RESPONSE

The Gault article has produced an interesting set of responses which tend to be more defensive than analytical. One exception is the reference to the Murray article. Gault’s thesis and charges seem to deserve a more critical analysis based on psychological theory and new knowledge about moral development gained in the last one hundred years.
I suggest that further discussion might be based on three ideas: Jung’s theory on individuation and the development of the self, studies on the development of personal moral responsibility, and the notion of human rights.
Jung wrote in response to the apparent lack of personal responsibility in the collective atmosphere of communist oppression in the 50’s in Eastern Europe where identification with social norms provided little critique of them. A strong sense of self should lead to critical analysis. Psychological studies about the process of moral development are numerous and new emphasis on human rights questions under what circumstances it is morally responsible for an individual to give up those rights.
Having lived the three vows for over sixty years, I am in a position to question how it is that religious orders have not done the critical analysis it seems is necessary to address the very rapid and fatal decline in membership. A new understanding of the vows in light of new psychological knowledge may be the place to start.
Philip Aaron, S.M.
Dayton, OH

summary of Murray article

The Danger of the Vows
An encounter with
earth, woman, and spirit
John Courtney Murray, S.J.


Many conferences are given about the obligations of the religious life, the beauties of it, the graces one receives in it. Perhaps one aspect is a bit neglected—the risks of the religious life, the dangers inherent in it because it is religious. Let me speak of them.
Actually you run one supremely perilous risk—that of losing your manhood—impoverishment, diminution, deformation (if true, a serious threat to our Holy Orders). If you doubt, look about. How many take the risk and lose . . . so many men of diminished manhood, of incomplete virility . . . not necessarily more than in the world. To be a man in any walk of life is not easy; few achieve full virility, full womanhood either . . . but for reasons that do not entirely operate among us. The world puts obstacles in the way of manhood; religion does, too. And there are those who succumb to the obstacles.

Recognize them by certain marks: men who are at least in some greater or lesser degree irresponsible, whose manhood has something lacking, who have been damaged because of the way they have reacted to the vow of poverty . . . men who are dispersed, energyless, because unorganized and immature intellectually and emotionally . . . their manhood has been changed by the vow of chastity . . . men who to a degree are purposeless, their lives not consciously and strongly patterned, not inwardly directed toward a determined goal with all the organized power of the whole self.

Lack of responsibility, lack of integrity, lack of purpose—all somehow relate to the three vows. All are indicative of diminished manhood.
…
Our problem

You see now our problem. On entering religion, we avoid this triple encounter, we step aside from the struggle with these elemental forces. By the vow of poverty, we are redeemed from the struggle with earth; security is given to us without a struggle; we do not know want nor the fear of want. We are no longer responsible for creating the conditions of our life; they are created for us. We free ourselves from the heritage of work. The collectivity assumes a responsibility for each of us; we vow to depend on it, and we do. And that is a terribly risky thing to do—seemingly it amounts to a violation of the law of nature. No man may depend on another for livelihood—a child may, because he is a child; but a man should assume responsibility for himself. And if he does not, he risks remaining an irresponsible child. He risks the destruction of living an inert, parasitic life—living off the collectivity. He has taken out of his life one of the elemental forces, motives that drive a man to the achievement of his manhood. And unless it is replaced by a comparable drive, he will inevitably be less a man—diminished, impoverished.

By the vow of chastity, we decline the encounter with woman. We make the radical refusal to enter the world of Eve—that strange, elemental world of life, wherein is offered to man the possibility of being the principle of man, the head of woman, and therefore himself (caput mulieris . . . vir per mulierem). Again there seems to be a violation of a law of nature. And the risk is manifold (adolescent senility; sex is dead). The Fathers pointed to pride as the danger one runs in choosing virginity—a certain hardness of spirit, a withdrawal of reason into a world of unreality because it is isolated from the facts and forces of life, and therefore unable to be integral. Man risks becoming a disembodied head, that fancies itself a whole thing when it is not; when it denies its dependence on the body and all that the body stands for; and therefore risks denying its dependence on God who made it dependent on the body. The pure spirit can readily be the proud spirit—whose hardness makes it poor material for priestly consecration.

This is the danger of false integrity. There is the opposite danger of a failure to reach any integrity—of a relapse into softness and dispersion of an immature emotionality, that has never grown up, been strongly polarized, and therefore wanders into sentimentality, wasting itself, and draining off the psychic energies. In a word, there is again the danger of childishness. Your typical bachelor is proverbially crotchety, emotionally unstable, petulant, and self-enclosed—small and childish in the emotional life. Your religious risks being the same. The chaste spirit risks being also the childish spirit.

Finally, by the vow of obedience one declines the most bruising encounter of all—that of a man with himself, with his own spirit and its power of choice, with his own powers and the problem of their full exercise, towards the achievement of a determined purpose.

Here again one throws oneself on the collectivity, and on the will of another. One ceases to be self-directed. One's choices are made; and there is the comfortable feeling that one does not have to assume the responsibility for them—that falls on the superior. One need go through no particular agonies of decision; one need only follow the crowd, and obey the principle, "munere suo fungi mediocriter." There need be no greatly earnest searching of heart, to discover if there are powers not yet exploited. And hence there can be an end both to aspiration and conflict. In a word, one can live through one's public life, and spare oneself the lonely agony of the desert struggle. In eliminating alternatives and the stern necessity for choice, obedience eliminates also the necessity for self-assertion and the assertion of one's own purposes. And thus it subtracts from one of the elemental disciplines that make for manhood. Your obedient man can become relatively inert, purposeless, and to that extent less a man.
These are the dangers; this is our problem. We have no time here for a solution, but such a solution as we need is founded on a paradox. By taking vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience, we risk irresponsibility, childish immaturity, and purposelessness. We avoid the risks by keeping them integrally. Any chipping off in their observance is a blow, light or heavy, on one's manhood. Truly poor equals responsible; integrally chaste equals mature; absolutely obedient equals enterprising and purposeful.