+JMJ+ Thank you for this.
Do you know what you might be able to scan/transcribe it? I'm having a hard time reading it?
Hope this helps:
"It is not good for man to be alone; let us make him a help like unto himself" (Gen. 2:18). The Bible indicates with these words that God intended to create woman as a help to man, that woman is the natural complement of man in accordance with the will of God. Therefore man and woman are so correlated and so co-ordinated to each other that neither he nor she is the perfect human being, since they both together realise the idea of man as it was ordained by God.
Celibacy inescapably entails a renunciation of the influence and the completion of the heterosɛҳuąƖ partner. It is clear that this renunciation may have far-reaching consequences for the soul, especially when this renunciation did not come as the result of a decision of the free will for the sake of higher ideals. These consequences are not so much due to mere sɛҳuąƖ abstention as to the renunciation of the deepest possible human love with its resultant psychic loneliness.
It is undoubtedly a gross exaggeration on the part of physicians to hold sɛҳuąƖ abstention responsible for all psychic afflictions and instinct perversions. Liertz's assertion is also an unjustified generalisation: "In normal sex life there is no neurosis, i.e., no psychic affliction, with strong somatic or physiological symptoms." Against this we quote P. Schulte who has treated many psychopaths: in my pastoral-psychological practice I have met with very many cases where the sɛҳuąƖ element was completely irrelevant." (
Was der Seelsorger von nervosen Seelenleiden wissen muss [Paderborn, 1937], p.19.) But we must insist, especially in view of many books on asceticism which seem almost Manichaean, that it is Christian marriage and not celibacy, which normally corresponds best to human nature as given to us by God.
It is the clear teaching of Scripture, Tradition, and Christian Doctrine that virginity preserved by the love of God surpasses the state of marriage in perfection. It is also borne out by the fact that by far the greater number of canonized men and women have led a life of celibacy and abstinence. Yet we must concede that vocation to voluntary celibacy for the love of God is rare. This follows from the strong human inclination to the family community. It is and remains a great sacrifice to renounce forever this community given and ordained by God as a natural community. The renunciation by itself, however, would not be enough; he who only nolens volens [willy-nilly] accepts this renunciation may falter badly sooner or later. The renunciation must not be an end in itself, but a means to an end. If someone is called upon to live in lifelong chastity and abstinence and to renounce the highest and most intimate life community of human beings, he may do so only if he can thereby become free for the still higher community with God.
One might argue that the celibate who has, after all, chosen his state of his own free will should feel perfectly happy. His voluntary renunciation should provide a kind of guarantee that this is really the case. It is probably correct to say that the celibate who, in one way or another, does not feel very happy has been most likely forced into celibacy by circuмstances. It is also possible that the celibate was not aware of the far=reaching consequences of his (or her) decision at the time it was taken. This is the case not only with Priests and Religious, but also with lay people living in the world. Many a girl, especially the independent professional girl, has renounced marriage in her early years without much consideration, only to repent bitterly of her decision at a time when it was too late to reverse it.
The consequences of celibacy differ in their effects according to the personal character and circuмstances of the individual concerned. They are revealed most distinctly in the spheres of their psychic life, their character, and their spiritual life.
It cannot be mere coincidence that mental homes and sanatoria contain twice as many celibates of both sexes as married people (see P. Schulte, op. cit., p.24). Even if we admit that many such patients failed to marry because they were sufferers, and not vice versa, the fact remains that renunciation of the marriage community entails renunciation of community per se, i.e., the family - a decision that may have grave repercussions in psychic life. The Priest need not wait for the opinion of the medical expert. He can see in his own everyday experience that the overwhelming majority of the anxious, the compulsion-neurotics, the discontented, the hypochondriacs, the psychopaths, consist of celibates. If there are married people among them, they are almost exclusively people who do not find adequate sex satisfaction in married life for psychological or physiological reasons. Has it indeed ever been observed that happily married people are neurotics, beset with scruples? Do we, in fact, find in a harmonious marriage any kind od psychic debility, no matter how great may be the external difficulties with which such a couple may have to contend?
The Priest observes again and again that girls of a healthy, cheerful, radiant disposition, seem to go "off their rockers" once they reach their later twenties and begin to fear that they may have missed their chance of marriage. At the age of forty we find them quite prepared to embark on the most hopeless and absurd marriage projects, although they have formerly refused other marriage opportunities without the least qualm. Abstinence as such does not seem to worry them unduly. But it frequently happens that they break down because they suffer greatly from renunciation of marriage happiness and motherhood, from the bitter necessity of smothering the most burning desire of the womanly soul - the desire to be loved and to have children.
These psychic distortions and discontents are associated with grave injuries to their character and their spiritual life. Renunciation of the most intimate human community may lead to the atrophy, the degeneration of many a valuable gift or disposition, unless these endowments are developed for reasons of higher, nobler motives. The man, if he has no opportunity to work and to care for a small circle, such as his family, easily petrifies in his natural egotism. "I have no pity on anyone, because no one has pity on me," someone once said in his solitary bitterness. These words repay careful study. We realise how easily such a man will suffer the atrophy, the degeneration of his originally noble and natural humanity, how he will become frustrated, discontented, but also peculiar and "odd." He will develop into a "typical bachelor." The same holds, perhaps even to a greater extent, of women.
We often find in the Mother Superiors of convents a great lack of motherliness, little sympathy for or interest in others, much egocentricity, freakishness, moodiness, resentment. Many a young novice who enters the convent from a warm, affectionate home could tell us about the lack of understanding, the coldness and heartlessness of her Mother Superior, about all those paltry vexations and chicaneries which are so ill-concealed under the term "acts of humility" and are, in fact, nothing but a display of mother superior's incalculable moodiness and unbridled overdomineering. We find good illustrations in the biographies of St. Teresa and St. Bernadette; both had to suffer much from their superiors. Psychology teaches us that woman finds it difficult to combine in leadership the qualities of kindness and discipline. It is as if the woman feared to be too kindly, if she lacked in severity. And so she often exaggerates her strictness and insistence on discipline, in order to maintain her authority over her inferiors. On the other hand, a great deal of this discontent, this persistent fault-finding and criticising, is merely an abreaction of their psychic discontent due to the renunciation of the happiness of marriage. For similar reasons we find that servants show more discontent in vicarages and rectories, even if they are better off than servants in family houses. The reason is they fear that their chance of marrying is diminished. Enjoyment of work may even be increased in the case of celibates who have a natural liking for work. But it is equally true that those who remain unmarried against their disposition or against their will often lose all enjoyment of regular work, and even their capability for it (see E. Spranger:
Psychologie des Jugendalters [Leipzig, 1932], p.118).
The difference between male and female is not merely a matter of biology; we are confronted with two different elementary forms of man's spiritual existence and spiritual personality. The two sexes are fundamental types of the human race, and have their specific values and their specific complementary functions. The Biblical account (Gen. 2:18 sqq.) of the creation of woman indicates this fact quite clearly.
When we are aware of the peculiarities of male and female psychology, we also realise the specific completion an co-ordination of the two sexes. There is, in the first place, the mutual task entailing the creation, or the restoration, of an equilibrium due to the influence exerted by the other sex. It is a kind of preventative against certain dangers resulting from the peculiarities of the male or female character. Without the correcting influence of women, men tend to get brutal, or inflexible, or dry and empty, or all of these; they become "overobjective" - i.e., they degenerate into mere slaves or "officials" in their work or profession, provided there is no beneficent womanly influence to counter this development. Women, on the other hand, become narrow-minded and petty, they withdraw into themselves, take themselves and all their irrelevant little feelings much too seriously; in other words, they become "fussy," if they lack the correcting influence of the spirit and mentality of man.
The distinctive difference between the male and female psychology contributes greatly to the realisation of specific values, but it also contains great dangers. It is the role of the spontaneous influence of the two sexes on each other to prevent such dangers by means of mutual compensation. We see this role at work in the family. Each child, male or female, normally experiences the influence of both father and mother. Contact with the other sex displays its complementary function. Thus it is a great advantage for boys to have sisters, and for girls to have brothers. Even under circuмstances where close contact with the other sex is out of the question, some contact is beneficial. The influence of a spiritual director in convents is of great importance. Likewise, male religious should have some contact with nuns, e.g., in charitable work. The main function of the spiritual director in convents is his function as a Priest; but his manly characteristics and personality have an important compensating function.
The role played by one sex in relation to the other is not of a merely negative character - the prevention of inherent dangers. The spiritual and intellectual contact of man and woman has a positive function of mutual intellectual and spiritual stimulation. This leads, among other things, to the stimulation of special virtues which might otherwise have remained dormant.
The man will experience a development of his chivalry, an intensification of self-control and self-constraint, a certain humility of attitude, a greater tenderness and purity; the inflexibility or harshness of the man will lessen, and he will become amiable. The woman, on the other hand, experiences a broadening of her intellect, she attains to a broader understanding of values, and, indeed, to a grasp of the intellectual principles underlying values; she acquires a noble reserve on the one hand, and a specific warmth and self-dedication on the other (Dietrich von Hildebrand:
Die Bedentung von Mann und Frau fureinander ausserhalb der Ehe, in "Zeitliches im Lichte des Ewigen" [Regensburg, 1932], pp. 143-44).
The celibate who aspires after a harmonious development of his personality in accordance with God's will, must be quite conscious of the one-sideness of his disposition and must endeavour to compensate with the assistance of divine grace for the natural complements he sets aside.
Who finds celibacy more difficult, man or woman? Let us listen to the opinion of a physician:
The woman finds celibacy easier to bear than the man. We cannot avoid the impression, however, that the neurotic, psychopathic woman suffers more from abstention than the man who can find other sources of satisfaction which seem to be far remote from the sphere of the merely sɛҳuąƖ (Liertz,
Harmonien, p. 91).
From the theological point of view it would seem, however, that fundamentally woman suffers more from the renunciation of marriage - in view of God's intentions at creation. In sɛҳuąƖ abstinence man no doubt makes the greater sacrifice. Woman has been created by God as a help to man. Therefore it does mean a great sacrifice for the man to live all his life without her help and compensation, as ordained and given by God, and to renounce forever the deepest and most intimate form of human love. On the other hand, he can follow his calling, his profession, and very often he can do so even better than the man who must take into consideration the needs of a family circle.
All this is different in the case of woman. God has created her, and intended her to be the help and companion of man; and the more womanly a woman is, the more intense will be her longing to become a wife and mother. Therefore St. Paul says: "Yet she shall be saved through child bearing, if she continue in faith and love and sanctification with sobriety" (1Tim. 2:15). For the same reasons, St. Paul demands "threescore years" for a widow to attain the religious state of chastity. He warns his disciple Timothy to leave out the younger widows. They should rather marry for a second time, become mothers, and look after their household tasks (see 1 Tim. 5:9-16). St. Paul shows here great wisdom and experience of life and pastoral care. We must conclude that a woman who renounces marriage for reasons other than a higher vocation and nobler values, or does so at a time and under conditions where she was unable to assess the far-reaching consequences of her decision will remain discontent all her life, especially if her care for others does not offer an opportunity for the display of her motherliness. Her discontent and frustration will be projected into the outer world. Such a woman will, perhaps without knowledge or intention, hold other people and outer conditions responsible for her own discomfort. She has no opportunity to display and to utilise her specific female dispositions and gifts received from God. In spite of intensive work, she will feel that she has no task or calling, and is therefore redundant and superfluous. She will easily fall victim to feelings and emotions, which are vague and tend to roam about freely unless they are tied to an object of her specifically womanly affection, i.e., to child and husband. This and only this explains the fact that women, be it inside or outside the convent, can become more unhappy and more discontented than married women or at least, women who live in families, even if their outer living conditions are much better than those of the latter.
Woman is capable of great sacrifice but she naturally wishes to bring this sacrifice inside a family, and direct it to a circle of persons whom she loves, and not toward an idea, no matter how sublime. Since a woman is often compelled to live the life of a celibate against her wish and intention and through no fault of her own, a conflict situation evolves in her soul; she quarrels with her fate, which refused her the state of marriage. Moreover in the opinion of medical authorities, the sex-urge of women increases all the time until it reaches its climax at the beginning of the climacteric. (By way of comparison we might state that the sex-urge in man increases to about his 35th year, that it then remains steady and sometimes experiences a further intensification at the age of 50. After this the intensity diminishes in most men, although the urge may continue to an advanced age. But a striking
libido sɛҳuąƖis, both in intensity and direction, in the case of an old man would make us suspect some morbid condition).
As woman is more sensitive, and as her emotions are tied to subjects, she is more inclined to psychic illness than man. The repressed libido in the woman often does a lot of harm. Rhaban Liertz, who as psychiatrist has great experience in this field, writes:
The sad consequences of morbid processes in the sex-urge, especially since they are connected with feelings of inferiority and frustration in the woman, remain a source of suffering for the woman even if the egocentric instincts find an outlet in some life-task and even if, by ceaseless work in the service of some spiritual ideal, dissatisfaction has been removed. Certainly, there is a notable victory of the mind over the flesh. Yet it entails a thousand hours of distress and a persistent renewal of the fight, because this struggle is against and beyond the natural destiny of woman. The only remaining advice left for the Priest or psychologist is, to make this melancholy and frustration the very meaning and function of such a woman, and to dedicate this suffering and this struggle with its defeats and humiliations, in a truly Christian spirit, to the Passion of Christ (
Harmonien, p. 93).
It is natural and understandable that the psychic discontent of the celibate woman will have its effect in the spiritual sphere. A lay woman whose affection and sɛҳuąƖ powers are unconsumed in actual or sublimated fashion easily becomes the victim of her own moods and unpredictable impulses. It is different with women in a convent, with its supernatural charity in a spiritual milieu. We can understand why an unmarried woman, in spite of (or rather because of) her natural disposition to love, may become conspicuous for her ambitions, her desire for self-esteem, her jealousy, her desire to quarrel and to domineer; and why lack of love, affection, and charity are so often the chief characteristic of this distortion. A woman who has no opportunity of serving others with love, will attempt to rule them without love, in order to gain "respect".
In our experience of these unpleasant phenomena we should not forget about those who have renounced married life perhaps not for the purpose of making "themselves eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven" (Matt. 19:12), but for other reasons of great moral value. Many a girl has renounced the happiness of married life from motives of unselfish charity, and has perhaps even chosen a hard profession entailing many sacrifices, only in order to be of support to her elderly parents who are in need of special care. Again, many woman teachers, social workers, and nurses have renounced marriage because they wished to dedicate themselves unreservedly to their calling. Who can say how much unselfishness, heroism, true charity issues from such souls. If such women succeed in keeping their Christianity alive, then it is they who attain to an inner harmony and equilibrium and deep joy of heart which is the share of all who in truth and in love seek self-abandonment to the will of God. Many people who learn to make a virtue of necessity find, in spite of their renunciation, or because of it, joy and happiness of soul.
What we can learn from all this for the practice of pastoral care is that, above all, the Priest should never try to talk anyone into the choice of celibacy; on the contrary, he should use every means to dissuade from the choice of celibacy those who give him the impression of lacking the necessary conditions and natural dispositions. Much more difficult is the question of the spiritual guidance of those who are unwilling celibates. For many women who must remain unmarried through no fault of their own, involuntary spinsterdom is a dreadful affliction, one that can be finally overcome only by being supernaturalised like any other sacrifice. There is no other way but to make the unfulfilled longing for human love the starting point of a strong longing for God and to take, with the assistance of divine grace, the steeper but shorter road to God. This requires more than average spiritual effort. It requires a considerable amount of living faith and moral heroism. A pure, spiritual love of Jesus Christ, a love filled with a readiness to sacrifice, a love far removed from all morbid ecstasy of feeling - that is the decisive achievement. The way of married people leads through a land, holy through the Sacrament of marriage, through the mystical image of the union of Christ with His Church, and so to God. The way of those who have renounced marital love for the love of God, leads to God immediately; but from God it leads back to our fellow men, in order to serve them, not now from motives of personal affection or personal advantage, but for God's sake. Much is demanded by such an attitude of active resignation.
This attitude implies the voluntary, conscious renunciation of what is unattainable. But it does not entail the renunciation of the fight for and the aspiration towards it. In this renunciation, all those urges, desires, and impulses are withdrawn into the soul, as it were, in order to be transformed in the depth of the soul into new, powerful life energies. Thus come into being those strange, quiet personalities who are indefatigable in their unselfish pursuit of what is good. They carry a secret in their souls. It is the secret of a great life sacrifice, of a deeply hurting renunciation of great happiness. But from this wound which never quite heals, flows their amazing power to work. From the depth of their unfulfilled longings arises that warm love that radiates from them. From the tomb of their own happiness arises the urge to bring happiness wherever they go. From their own darkness they get the light they give to others. Thus their renunciation becomes a source of life and strength for others (Willibald Lauck,
Inneres Werden).
Therefore, all those who remain unmarried, not from free decision, but by force of circuмstance, must endeavor to acquire the attitude and mentality characterising those who have given themselves to God. This requires the grace of God. Those who have chosen to dedicate themselves exclusively to God strive after an undivided dedication to God, and aspire to use this union with God for works of unselfish charity.
The involuntary unmarried should consider that it is no blind fate that has condemned them to unmarried life, but that God's loving Providence keeps guard over man's way of life.
If Providence has so willed it that you must remain chaste, then this is most assuredly also your calling ordained for you by God. There is only one thing that such people must beware of: namely, self-deception. He who would like to convince himself that he really despises marriage, although he longs for it with all his strength and being, becomes easily distorted and warped and falls into a kind of false mystical piety, which yet fails to offer him compensation, simply because it is not in agreement with his true self. No, admit to yourself the whole truth, but then carry your cross and offer your resignation as sacrifice. Others may laugh about such people, but God has a special love for them. For if God himself forces a man into an act of resignation, then this is a sign that God wishes him for Himself (Willibald Lauck,
Das Evangelium des hl. Matthaus und des hl. Markus [Freiburg i. Br. 1936, p. 286]).
The Priest must guide these people with much understanding and with even greater patience so that they do not attach their heart to earthly, passing things, but seek God in everything and give eternal value to earthly life through acts of Christian charity, like care for children and the sick, for the old and the helpless, not only in view of life eternal, but also with a view to giving meaning, direction, and joy to earthly life. Who can say how much joy for the whole Kingdom of Heaven, and how much joy for individual persons, has come from those unselfish souls who find their life's happiness in helping people and doing good works for the love of God?