28 February 1990
To Each Confrere

My dear Confrere,

May the grace of Our Lord Jesus Christ be with us forever!

Over the years in my letters to you I have touched on some of the subjects which are at the heart of our vocation in the Church and in the Congregation. Of the four vows which we take, I have already written to you about three of them. Now at the beginning of Lent allow me to offer you a thought on our vow of chaste celibacy.

Meditating on the person of Our Lord, I have often wondered how striking and almost paradoxical He must have seemed to those who saw the works of His hands and listened to the words of His lips. Here was a man who loved life, who came eating and drinking, who appreciated the beauty of creation as He saw it in the birds of the air and the lilies of the fields, Who, more significantly, was highly sensitive to and accepting of those for whom celibacy was anything but a value. He himself was a celibate. He announced that He had "come that they (people) may have life and have it more abundantly," (Jn 10:10) and He was a celibate. Clearly He was speaking of a life that was deeper and more mysterious than that which physical generation produces.

Of all the evangelical values that Christ left us and is still offering us, I would dare to say that the one which is hardest to understand and accept is the value and meaning of celibacy. When Our Lord made clear and explicit reference to celibacy, He hinted that not all men would grasp this: "Jesus said to them: 'Not all men can receive this precept, but only those to whom it is given.'" (Mt 19:11). I think it can be said that there will always be a deep mystery surrounding celibacy, for Our Lord linked this value directly with the growth of the kingdom, which is one of the deep mysteries of the New Testament. All Our Lord's stories about the growth of the kingdom have the element of mystery in them, and something of that mystery must also surround the value of evangelical celibacy. Some of the difficulty in discussions about celibacy as a value arise from the fact that it is seen more as a problem than as a mystery, and there is a profound difference or distinction between a problem and a mystery.

Celibacy is about life. It was that life to which St. John, at the end of His Gospel, refers when he expresses the hope that those who read what he has written may believe in Jesus Christ and have life in His name. (cf. Jn 20:31). To be celibate is to transmit that life which has its source in the loving heart of the celibate Christ. Our vow of chaste celibacy is about loving. We live among God's people as special signs of His loving care. For all that, the pain of loneliness can at times gnaw sharply at our hearts. We are acutely conscious of what we have sacrificed. What we have assumed, however, is even greater than what we have given up. The hearts of celibates are a shelter for "the joy and hope, the grief and anguish of the people of our time, especially of those who are poor or afflicted in any way....Nothing that is genuinely human fails to find an echo in their hearts." (Gaudium et Spes, p1).

The task that we have taken on through our vow of chaste celibacy is to give life to others and to give it to them more abundantly. The question that we can pose to ourselves at the end of any day is: To whom have I given life today? Whose life have I enriched by prayer, by word, by action, by understanding, by patience, by compassion? Caring is at the heart of the celibate's vocation. One who is celibate for the sake of Christ and for the Gospel (cf. Mk 10:29) is eminently a man who cares for the world in which he lives, and cares, too, that those to whom he is sent will reach the city that lies beyond the horizons of life and of time. Indeed, the temptations that come to all of us celibates may sometimes stem from a diminishment of our sense of caring for others. Where our sense of caring for others diminishes, we become less celibate and more distant from the celibate Christ, Who saw himself as the good shepherd Who gave His life for His sheep. "No man or woman," wrote Cardinal Newman, "can stand alone." His words highlight the importance for the celibate of prayerful union with the Eucharistic Christ. These words also could be said to evoke the importance for us of authentic community life, if we are to support each other in giving fruitful expression to the charism of celibacy which we have received. Intimate union with Christ and true fraternal communion are two of the four means which our Constitutions suggest to us as helpful, if we are to be "a living source of spiritual fecundity in the world." (C. 30).