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These facts, and in general the public reaction
or aggression of the press or certain publishing entities which seem
voraciously thirsty for clerical scandals, tell us a fundamental thing:
celibacy/virginity is still understood as a purely clerical or religious fact,
something substantially unnatural and outside the time, the culture and the
choices of the majority, and strictly pertinent to priests and religious
brothers and nuns. On the one side
there is a large part of public opinion that understands it as something
irritating and embarrassing4. On the other hand there are those who
contemplate it gratuitously as something heroic, accessible to only a few
entrusted persons, and which, anyway permits asking everything and more than
everything of the super-man priest or brother, almost imposing an impossible
ideal on him. In the middle there are
those who look upon it with notable diffidence and seek and fine confirmation
of their suspicious in the periodical scandal news or they amuse themselves by
digging up and stressing the infidelities of the reverend. For all, it represents a risky and
excessively demanding choice, not recommendable to a young man who is planning
his future.
These reactions say a lot not only about the
idea that others have about our celibacy, but perhaps also about our own idea
of celibacy, which we have never challenged, which in some way we
undergo/submit to (also from public opinion), and consequently, they say a lot
about the quality of our witness.
It is necessary and absolutely indispensable,
today, to have the courage to take another look at this concept, to subject it
to healthy reflection. There is an
important conversion here to carry forward, with significant repercussions in
the formation context, initial and ongoing formation and its stages, and
therefore also in the context of the existential lived experience of the priest
and the quality of his life and his proclamation: being celibate cannot but
have an immediate resonance on all these levels. But it is necessary previously
to clarify the idea we have of it.
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