The issue is not about the marriage or celibacy, or sexuality at all _ not really. The issue is how does our culture make sense of Catholic priesthood when we have come to understand the diminishing role of clergy (Protestant as well as Catholic) solely in terms of functionality?
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Now contrast this development with what was claimed of the Catholic priest in the same 16th century. Committed to the idea that what one is has priority over what one does, Roman Catholicism came to understand the priest as an icon of sorts: He was a sign of the "other." It wasn't that he was holier or wiser, or even necessarily a good person. But the priest bore a certain other-ness, often (usually?) in spite of himself.
Rev. David Lewis Stokes, Jr., When the Priesthood Becomes a Bundle of Cliches
Via Eve Tushnet
In her work Icarus Fallen Chantal Delsol noted the collapse of role into function:
“In a practical sense, roles remain determined. Not that playing them is compulsory—a mother may abandon her child, and [Vaclav] Havel could have refused to lead. But to take on a role is very often a response to a felt moral obligation. In a sense, the person inherits the role because of the position he is in, the responsibility he has accepted, or the irreplaceable experience he alone can draw upon. Because he is irreplaceable, and because action is necessary, he simply cannot turn away without failing to live up to his duty.
The very idea of obligation, in combination with the inegalitarianism inherent in the notion of role, has led contemporary society to reject roles in favor of functions. Functions have no obligations because they can always be carried out by someone else. They leave open the freedom to abandon one’s post, which is not considered a desertion. And because of their neutral and anonymous character, they presuppose that virtually every and any individual can fulfill them. Functions serve both liberty and equality. And so our contemporaries reject roles, which create both obligations and distinctions.
Just as functions have replaced roles in modern society, the individual has come to replace the person, the latter phenomenon being a corollary of the former. The person is unique, the individual interchangeable. The more functions there are, the more human beings define themselves by their competencies and repertories of technical abilities. This is the price of equality. With the disappearance of roles, the individual is left to himself and is henceforth able to choose anything. A society cannot make absolute equality a reality. In our society, however, we have managed to at least make it a virtual reality: anyone can, in theory, take the place of anyone else.
Thus, the modern individual no longer expects at all to be “indispensable.” Everywhere replaceable, he has become free and indistinct. He has gained liberty at the expense of his uniqueness, and even further, at the expense of his identity. For we identify with what makes us distinct from others more than with what makes us the same: we prefer to present ourselves to others by talking about our athletic accomplishments, the volunteer work we do for such-and-such a cause, or a hobby in which we have suddenly found interest,rather than by referring to our professional titles, which we share with a hundred thousand others. It is obvious that personal identity is attached to roles rather than functions.
The society of roles saw inequality everywhere, even where it did not exist. The society of functions sees equality everywhere, even where it does not exist.”
(Icarus Fallen, p. 143-144)
So too we see the flattening of "Father" or "Mother" into a functional "caregiver," and a "husband" or "wife" or even "spouse" is transmogrified into "partner." Even the origin of life itself, the womb, is now viewed as simply a functional uterus which can be replaced by artificial and impersonal means in just a few years.
All this functionalism makes one feel like one is simply another part in the Matrix. No wonder the movie was so popular.
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