Clerical Celibacy: The Heritage

Catholic New Times, Dec 18, 2005

Clerical Celibacy: The Heritage by William E. Phipps, New York, Continuum, 2004, 272 pp.

An absolute gem of a book, scholarly and completely accessible to the lay person. Phipps, a Methodist minister, has a long and intense experience with the topic. He traces celibacy through the different eras beginning with the Jewish and pagan cultures and shows how the sexual pessimism and Gnostic asceticism invaded Christianity, where it was canonized by church fathers from Clement, Origen and Augustine to Jerome. This is a brilliant compendium of the church's failed attempt to impose celibacy on a generally unwilling and fallible priesthood. Remarkably candid in his evaluation of another communion's discipline, Phipps says that Roman Catholicism has retreated to its institutional tower along the Tiber and refuses to face the reasons thousands are departing the priesthood." For this scholar, "Celibacy has exacerbated sexual immorality in every century it has been present."