Mgr. Edward Walker is right that celibates have observational experience of the marriages of parents, and others (The Tablet, 25 July). So do married persons, but they have actual experience as well. I had 20+ years observing my parents' and other marriages before I married. As the eldest of five I had plenty of involvement with childcare before my own eldest was born. In neither case did that experience prepare me for the truly different intensity when dealing with my own marriage, my own children. Matrimony and parenthood, like many areas of human life, can only properly be observed from the inside.
Were it otherwise, we would have to declare that the grief of Christ's Mother at the cross was no different in intensity and value than that of the others there.
Revd Patrick Bryan, Wolverhampton
Professor Nicholas Lash (The Tablet, Letters, 25 July) mentions that preserving church property was part of the reason for celibacy. Another reason was Innocent III’s understanding of sexuality: “Who does not know that conjugal intercourse is never committed without itching of the flesh, and heat and foul concupiscence, whence the conceived seeds are befouled and corrupted?” He it was who thought he had the right to declare all clergy marriages null and void, and imposed mandatory celibacy on the clergy thereon after. His thinking merely echoed what was being said by many 12th century theologians who believed Augustine’s theories of sexuality to amount to revelation. In the 4th century Augustine had parodied the words of Christ: “They two shall be one flesh, therefore are they no longer two but one flesh” into “in intercourse a man becomes all flesh”.
It is hardly surprising that celibacy was seen as the first step to holiness, and that mutterings about subduing “instincts and passion” are still to be found in documents like Humanae Vitae, and that “abusing the pleasure put in the act for the good of the race” was one of the arguments used more than once by Pius XII in his Address to Midwives to assert the sinfulness of contraception!
Elizabeth Price, Linton, Kent
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