Canon N.

It seems to be absurd that sexual desire and love of a male person from his earliest youth and for his whole life should be directed only to a person of the same sex, but this pathological manifestation is not rare, without one being able to label such men as a variation of normal men, as Hirschfeld3Magnus Hirschfeld (1868-1935) was a German physician and homosexual who founded the Institute for Sexual Science in Berlin. Hirschfeld thought that homosexuality was inborn. In nineteenth century language, such men were “urnings.” has tried to do. Only from the personal admissions of this poor canon was it possible for me to gaze into the abyss of the tragedy his life, which was like a novel. His entering the priesthood was influenced by, among other things, his deeply religious mother. He himself wavered between sanctimonious piety and a liberal attitude to life. In his being was a monstrous tension, an overwhelming drive, which he daily begged through prayer and religious exercises for heavenly strength to resist. It did not help him much. This unhappy human specimen openly described to me, how a magical power, despite established reasons to the contrary derived from moral norms, flung him into the arms of lascivious homosexuals, until there was no return. Who would thinks that the depths of this sexual underworld played and still plays a much greater role in history than one usually believes, that these psycho-pathological manifestations, in part are inherited, in part are acquired in the course of life (continual absence from the feminine, improper training in the seminary, military schools, life on board ship, novitiates in southerly regions with a climatically conditioned higher sexuality [!!!]) Scientific research has not yet said the last word, whether such unhappy persons actually possess the sexual glands of reproductive organs of one sex while the brain in its sexual-motor nerve center shows characteristics of the opposite sex.

Shame, sorrow, and constant worry made this poor brother pessimistic about life, while outwardly he seemed to be of very high character. In his monastic solitude he led frustrated, heroic battle against these sick drives. So it was a life full of pain and worry. He would rather commit suicide than be defeated again and again. Actually he later chose the former, like not a few of these homosexuals do. That all belongs to the region of human tragedy, which compels to silence. The breakdown of the whole personality is, however, as this case of a brother especially told me, always an unavoidable consequence. The tendency to this sexual satisfaction, if it is not question of only a one-time childhood error, by experience is incurable. 

The ones affected -- mostly it is men with an unambiguous facial expression – accustom themselves in this way to this false outlet of sexual life, so that they lose a taste for the opposite sex and not seldom become a strong woman-hater. According to the research of Professor Kraft-Ebbing there is in the current state of medical science no cure. The punishments imposed on such men by the church (laicization with celibacy) are definitely least suitable for healing. They lead in most cases to complete ruin, because the punishments are given without consideration to the emotional and physical condition of these homosexuals. It is not a question of a moral, but of a medical problem. How can one lock such men, especially for correction, into the rooms of a cloister, rooms often empty of every natural humanity, of refined culture, and of true love for fellow man.

Is it not more in the interests of the church and of religion, to free them from every religious duty forever and to give them back to the world? One can further ask, if such an ordination under these medical conditions can be regarded as valid despite good dogmatic and canonical arguments against it – the early Church thought otherwise – since there can scarcely be any possibility of the fulfillment of the duty of celibacy from the very beginning. It is fortunate that the number of such pitiable men is not according to careful statistics, very great. The actual conditions in southern climates are hardly determinable, because a veil is drawn over it for understandable reasons. And so it would be easier here to begin another discipline based on medical reports.

He was the poorest of the brothers whom I encountered in my journey of life.  The later suicide of this brother in the waters of the Salzach river has deeply disturbed me. In Rome I offered a mass for him, and I felt as if angels bore this Lazarus up on their hands into paradise, while his judges called to him: “Tell the Lord, that we are also coming over.” This vision brought home to me the human tragedy that dwelled in such a life. He was no longer able to handle life. Despite all books of morality. It was a flight motivated by the greatest mental stress. Only God alone knows how many efforts at love and humanity, how much loneliness and smothered cries of pain were scattered on the way to this freely chosen death. Had this poor man really found no human being who with understanding and devoted love would struggle with him in order to keep him going? No gentle pastor and true friend with whom he could speak trustfully in his homeland? The knowledge of this man’s fate and still more a congress of fallen-away priests in Italy led me to the following petition to the Holy Office, that reads as follows in German translation and was not without success, as the decision with serious consequences of Pius XII on Good Friday 1953 would show. 4 I have not been able to find any decision made by Pius XII on Good Friday, April 3, 1953. It is unlikely that the Vatican would have transacted any business that day. Hudal may be remembering a talk that Pius XII gave on March 28, 1953, in which the Pope “described Communists and other enemies of Catholicism as ‘lost sheep’ and said they will always find the doors of the church open for their return’ (“Pope Describes Reds as Lost Sheep,” Monassen Daily Independent, March 28, 1953) or more probably a talk that the Pope gave to a Catholic Congress of of Psychotherapy and Clinical Psychology on April 12, 1953. The Pope in this talk advocated “an efficacious sexual education which in entire safety teaches with calmness and objectivity what the young man should know for his personal conduct and his relationship with those with whom he is brought into contact (“Pope Approves Psychoanalysis but Cautions Against Its Abuses,” New York Times, April 16, 1953). Or Hudal may be misremembering the date. In 1953 Pius XII gave permission for a married Lutheran minister, Rudolph Goethe, to be ordained a Catholic priest and to remain married. This was followed by similar permission to two more Lutheran ministers in 1952, and to a fourth in 1954 (Joseph F. Fichter, Wives of Catholic Clergy [Sheed and Ward, 1992 ] p. 97). Rudolph Goethe, whose wife attended his ordination, was a descendent of the poet.

Rome 8 December 1948

A short note and a suggestion on the report about the congress of fallen-away priests held in Rome (!) from October 12-15, 1948: Apart from the anticlerical pronouncements of this congress, that was so much the less pleasant, as it was held in the capital of the Catholic faith, there are two circumstances that are impressive: the number of fallen-away priests (the statistical report of 4,000 could well be an exaggeration) and the necessity of a certain care for these unhappy brothers, who, even if separated outwardly from the clergy by law, like lost sheep always remain the object of pastoral care that indeed may be difficult but is greatly needed and of a delicate kind.

If the work for old, sick and unable-to-work priests by the nuns who are supported by Cardinal Spellman is a genuine challenge to humanity and love of neighbor, so in a certain sense a confidential work of charity would be more appropriate and urgent - to lead back fallen-away secular and order priests at least to an honorable employment and to a Catholic lay life.

In  past decades so many congregations were founded, almost always with the purpose of work in schools, hospitals, clinics, and so forth, but seldom, or better said, almost never, does one read in the histories of the new works of charity that one of these founders at least in secret had dedicated his help to the care of the clergy who had become faithless to their noble and holy call. So there is a lack of any realistic. not distorted statistics on the defection of secular priests and religious.

In the great cities without doubt there live several dozens of ex-priests, naturally avoided by the clergy, and in part perhaps not known as such. But how many of them are the cause of continual offenses or the originators of attacks in the press on Holy Church. It suffices to remember that the principal spokesmen and coworkers of the central organ of the SS (Black Corps) and by the ugly publication “Men around the Pope” were mainly were fallen-away priests (!).

The undersigned had the satisfaction of being able to bring back two fallen-away priests to the Church (one of them had become the leader of the movement “Freethinkers in Austria”), but with this opportunity  he had to find out how many disappointments,  difficulties, and obstacles opposed such an apostolate from all sides. Many times it was as if the devil would not release these unhappy priests from his claws, these priests, the victims of passions, but often also of the lack of a true and sound preparation in the seminaries and monasteries for the difficult tasks and duties of the priestly call.

May I therefore be allowed humbly to make the suggestion that by a command of the Holy Office in each diocese a priest be chosen and assigned sub secreto by the appropriate bishop, a priest, who along with his normal duties, in a delicate manner and without the public noticing much,  would with the spiritual and affectionate support assist the cause of  fallen-away priests living in the area of the diocese. 

Could the Holy Office after the passing of a certain time get a report from the Ordinaries (a statistic concerning how many worked secretly in anti-religious organizations, what the cause of their defection was, what kind the seminary and education of young people and so forth) so the collected material would serve for further decisions on the matter of the formation of future clerics?

The tragedy of many priests is heartbreaking. In a few months they destroy by public offenses what worthy priests have built up by wearisome toil – nevertheless the Roman Church cannot easily give in on the demand for celibacy without opening a door. Without doubt celibacy does not come either from the Bible or from the discipline of the early Church, which stood closer to the religious program of Christ than later centuries do. It is in itself difficult to change a counsel of Christ into a general requirement in so important a matter. Much less can the words of Paul to the Christian community at Corinth, which he wrote in the conviction that the world would soon end, be stated as a justification, without doing violence to the Bible. Celibacy belongs much more to those historically developed arrangements of experience that tomorrow can be done way with, without thereby hurting in its essence Christianity as a religious world view. Once things are established, going backwards is difficult, if not impossible.

The Catholic laity, who have a calm judgment about life and are not Pharisees, would scarcely be upset by a change of the present practice of the universal church. There was no upset when the fast before communion was changed by Pius XII! How many secrets and intimacies must a modern specialist in sexual diseases keep to himself. How much must a juvenile judge, bound by the confidentiality of office, keep to himself. The confessional would not suffer by this. The reaction against ever so small a change would come perhaps from priest-members of religious orders in whose ascetic system, and also in the world of secular priests, priesthood and family life have become things difficult to unite and whose morality revolves more around the sixth commandment, as if faults against the love of neighbor would not in the end weigh more heavily, since such faults do not find their source in the natural drives of the human being.

I experienced in my conversation In September 1917 with the Serbian orthodox Metropolitan Letica of Sarajevo that in this difficult question political considerations play a role in the Eastern Church.  He regretted, as we spoke of the grounds for union, that the Eastern Church had not long ago taken over this practice of celibacy from Rome on disciplinary grounds. “Nothing is more difficult than to transfer from one place to another pastors with families and children, even when it would further the interests of the Church.” Letica came out of a monastic environment. So there is no solution in regard to priestly celibacy in the universal church because the optional form would lead to envy, jealousy, and suspicion on all sides and with this undermine the entire discipline.

The solution could at most be a partial one in the case of wounded priests, poor brothers. On the grounds of medical reports, in very special cases, the return to the perspective of the early Church would be accepted, when the monastery with its ideal of life did not yet have a determining influence on the entire church.

More than the opportunists and Pharisees in the church, these wounded priests are to  certain extent the demonic element inside the church, a hindrance to the effectiveness of divine grace. Parishes that have the misfortune to be in the care of such pastors die slowly like plants without the sun. I found striking the relevant observations in individual dioceses. When priests fell way, then were they ever the true ruin of the Catholic laity, which already no longer practiced their religion, but now took as an excuse the example of these priests.

Much evil in the Church stems from those who have gone off the tracks and from Phariseeism. Priests, who have inner resources, men of the law or men destined by nature to a certain isolation, overcome all the crises that come from the physical. So it is perhaps comprehensible that exemption from the requirement of celibacy is not in principle easily granted by Rome even in the case of great offenses. If this door were once opened, many would choose the way of a public scandal, since they not all too seldom have received in seminaries and novitiates an inadequate explanation in regard to duties of this kind and of the whole area of sexuality.

This chapter will remain disturbing when one thinks of religious priests and those of the secular priests who because of offenses are thrown back into the world with the remaining condition of the above-named duty, as it is stated thus in all decrees with the stereotypical chancery formula: Firmiter remanente lege celibatus, - by which the law of celibacy remains unchanged.  What is such a priest in this condition to do in the world? His residence in monasteries and in religious houses is impossible. In families, however, he, as a laicized priest, lives in constant danger. As understandable as it seems at first glance that congregations of religious especially seek to rid themselves of such a wounded brother by throwing him out into the world, one feels that something is not right in this system of justice.

But despite many reservations and lessons of history can one say that the Catholic priesthood with its daily liturgy and hourly prayer, duties which are taken over from the monastic ideal of life, can scarcely be united with family duties, so great and honorable as they are, without taking away something typical of Roman Christianity: the heroic ideal of the priestly call. National churches are unthinkable without priestly families but a universal church with married priests would gradually dissolve into ethnically divided churches.

No one can deny the shadow side and dangers of celibacy, that are so well known to priests and laity, such as caste spirit, egotism, lack of understanding about conflicts in marriage and sexual needs, hardness of heart even to the atrophy of emotional strength, the asocial, the putting oneself above race and family, and by doing that removing himself  the blood stream of his own people, the danger of an abnormal attitude to the opposite sex, because celibacy influences the character of a man no less that marriage does.

The secular priest lives in the world, which is no monastery, and cannot distance himself from the world through idealistic contemplations of the world. In addition, the overwhelming majority of men do not have the aptitude for the heroic and for the drive to extraordinary achievements. It therefore requires strong characters to hold fast to and to guard through all experiences the high attitude to life of the first priestly years. On the other hand, what a noble vocation is the Catholic priesthood, if all its sacrifices, especially giving up the happiness of a family and worldly diversions, are borne only in the interests of the community. If priests moving alone through the world do not consume their energy in religious egotism, but reveal themselves to all men as completely, generously apostolic.

Our age wants to see again this Christian-humanistic reality, a noble humanity with more natural and at the same time supernatural virtues. If the Church of the present had an army of selfless idealists, who would completely sacrifice themselves for the poor, the oppressed, and the social proletariat of the great cities against the might of the capitalistic ordering of society, she should doubtless again win Europe back to her religious ideas.

Footnotes

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