A Brief Note on Marriage and Celibacy

Deacon Douglas McManaman

In some circles, celibacy continues to be described as “undivided love for Christ and His Church”[1]. And given peoples’ tendency to inference rather quickly, without a great deal of care, it is natural for most people to conclude that those who are not celibate can at best only hope to achieve a divided love for Christ and His Church. After all, St. Paul seems to imply as much in the seventh chapter of his first letter to the Corinthians: “Brothers and sisters: I should like you to be free of anxieties. An unmarried man is anxious about the things of the Lord, how he may please the Lord. But a married man is anxious about the things of the world, how he may please his wife, and he is divided. An unmarried woman or a virgin is anxious about the things of the Lord, so that she may be holy in both body and spirit. A married woman, on the other hand, is anxious about the things of the world, how she may please her husband. I am telling you this for your own benefit, not to impose a restraint upon you, but for the sake of propriety and adherence to the Lord without distraction” (32-35).

Such an inference, however, is seriously problematic given the sixth beatitude: “Blessed are the pure in heart; they shall see God”. A pure heart (katharoi te kardia) is an unmixed heart, that is, a heart that loves undividedly, and of course this beatitude has a much larger and wider scope than would: “Blessed are the celibate”; for purity of heart is a fundamental characteristic of every genuine Christian, while celibacy is not. 

Consider a genuinely dedicated priest or bishop, or even a sister of a congregation. The priest or bishop is often busy with administrative duties (paying bills, building churches, repairs, etc.)—not to mention various other pastoral duties–, and a Missionary of Charity, for example, is often busy with serving the needs of the poorest of the poor, i.e. making baby formula, feeding a dying man, etc. It would hardly be fitting to refer to the bishop’s love as divided between administrative work and the Lord, or a Missionary Sister’s love as divided between her love and service of the poorest of the poor and her love of the Lord. Rather, the very work they do is part and parcel of their love of God; it is the very expression of that love. The priest serves God by serving the parish in the many and varied ways this service takes shape, just as the Missionary Sister of Charity serves God when she cleans the dirty apartment of a poor woman living on her own in the Bronx (Mt 25, 31-46). And in precisely the same way, Christian married men and women are not, by virtue of their married state, leading divided lives with a divided heart; rather, their love for one another, their labor ordered to the good of the household, the sacrifices involved in raising their children and supporting one another are all part and parcel of their love of and devotion to God,  the very expression of that love. 

Returning to Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians, it should be emphasized that the section quoted above is only a small portion of the entire chapter, and taken out of its larger context one easily comes away with the impression that the celibate life is genuinely religious, while the married state is not. Such an interpretation, however, would be contrary to Paul’s overall teaching on marriage. In the larger context of this chapter, we see that Paul believes we are in the last period of salvation history. He refers to his own time as a time of distress, which in apocalyptic literature, is said to precede the time of the Second Coming of Christ. Paul writes: “So this is what I think best because of the present distress: that it is a good thing for a person to remain as he is. Are you bound to a wife? Do not seek a separation. Are you free of a wife? Then do not look for a wife…. I tell you, brothers, the time is running out” (26-27; 29). 

This is hardly the kind of advice we would give to young people today. What Paul says about those who are married and those who are not must be read in this context, otherwise we come away with the impression that marriage has little if anything to do with serving the Lord. 

But Christ’s love for his Church is a conjugal love, and the love of a baptized husband for his baptized wife is that very same love, and vice versa. Marriage is a sacrament, a sacred sign that contains what it signifies, and it signifies the paschal mystery; for just as God called Abraham to leave (to be ‘set apart from’) the land of Ur and go to the land that He will lead him to, and just as God called Israel to leave Egypt behind (to be ‘set apart from’) with its pantheon of false gods, and just as Jesus leaves this world behind in order to go to the Father–that is, he consecrates himself (sets himself apart. See Jn 17, 19)—, so too in matrimony, the two are called to leave behind a world closed in upon itself; they are consecrated, that is, set apart, for they are called to leave behind their comfortable world of independence and self-sufficiency, to be given over to another, to belong completely to one another, in order to become part of something larger than their own individual selves, namely, the one flesh institution that is their marriage. The couple relinquish their individual lives; they are no longer two individuals with their own independent existence; rather, they have become one body, a symbol of the Church who is one body with Christ the Bridegroom.

The lives of a married couple are a witness of Christ’s love for his Church and the Church’s ever expanding response to that love; they witness to that love in their sacrificial love for one another and for the children who are the fruit of that marriage–and raising children well demands a tremendously sacrificial love, especially today–in fact, given the circumstance in which couples find themselves in the 21st century, one could well argue that in some cases marriage and family life demand a far greater sacrificial disposition than does celibate life, given the increased cost of living, the housing crisis, food prices, inflation, job insecurity, time constraints, etc. In giving themselves irrevocably and exclusively to one another, without knowing what lies ahead, a young couple die to their own individual plans, they die to a life directed by their own individual wills, and in doing so, they find life; for they have become a larger reality. The heart of Christ is pure and undivided, yet the love that Christ has for us (the Church) is not in competition with his love for God the Father; rather, the two are one and the same. Matrimony as a sign of the very love that Christ has for his Bride is the ultimate meaning of marriage. In short, married love is undivided love for Christ and his Church. 

Certain habits of thinking, however, are clearly rooted in a centuries old anthropological dualism that extends all the way back to the patristic era in which there was indeed an “embarrassment, suspicion, antipathy and abhorrence of sexuality”, an attitude that permeated hellenic culture, and of course that antipathy affected their evaluation of marriage itself.[2] I refer, of course, to the dualism that holds that the true self is the immaterial or noetic aspect of the human person, which is said to be in continual conflict with the material aspect (the body and the emotions). When such a dualism becomes a conceptual framework, other dualisms are spawned, such as a two-tiered understanding of nature and grace,[3] or the dualism of heaven versus earth (i.e., our primary purpose is to get to heaven, and not to work for justice and the emancipation of the oppressed),[4] or the dualism we’ve been discussing, that between married life versus religious (holy) life. 

In the patristic era, marriage was allowed, but it was not encouraged. It was Jerome who said that the saving grace of marriage (or sexual intercourse) was that it produced virgins: “I praise wedlock, I praise marriage, but it is because they give me virgins. I gather the rose from the thorns, the gold from the earth, the pearl from the shell” (Letter 22, 20). Moreover, the parable of the sower was typically interpreted allegorically in a way that says a great deal about how married life was regarded at the time; the seed which fell on good soil bore fruit: some one hundredfold, some sixtyfold, and some thirtyfold. The seed that produced one hundredfold was said to represent martyrdom, the seed that produced sixtyfold represents virginity, and finally the seed that produced thirtyfold was said to represent marriage–martyrdom was obviously the best, followed by virginity, and at the bottom of the hierarchy was married life; for martyrdom involves the sacrifice of the entire body, virginity involves the perpetual sacrifice of the sexual act, while marriage apparently involves neither, but a capitulation to the flesh.[5] 

Although marriage is not quite regarded in such a negative light today, we still have not entirely freed ourselves from every residue of this ancient worldview, and in light of the Hebrew understanding of knowledge as experience, perhaps we will not do so until we return to the ancient custom that the 23 Eastern Catholic Churches never relinquished, namely that married men can be ordained as priests. Whatever the case may be, the belief that things will eventually work out well as long as we continue to speak as we’ve always spoken and do what we’ve always done, without any significant change in the pre-conciliar way that many have been taught to regard the world and its relationship to the kingdom of God, might very well be denial, and denial has never accomplished much beyond impeding healing and growth. 

Notes

1. Letter from the Holy Father Leo XIV to the Archdiocesan Major Seminary of “San Carlos y San Marcelo” in Trujillo, on the occasion of the 400th anniversary of its founding, 05.11.2025).

2. Donald F. Winslow. “Sex and Anti-sex in the Early Church Fathers” in Male and Female: Christian Approaches to Sexuality. Edited by Ruth Tiffany Barnhouse and Urban T. Holmes, III. p. 30.

3. Peter Fransen S. J. writes: ““In the spirituality commonly met with in convents and religious writings, a distinction is drawn between the purely natural human values in our life and the “supernatural” ones. The natural values are treated as having little or no consequence unless they are sanctified by a special “good intention,” which has to be superimposed on them. The joy of watching a glorious sunset has no supernatural value unless I offer it up to God. A mother loves her children–but that is normal. A man goes to his office–but that is as it should be. If these activities and states are to have any value before God, more especially, if there is to be any “merit” in them in the sight of God, something must be added, namely, a “good intention.” A little more and these people would declare that nothing but the exceptional, the uncommon, counts for anything in God’s eyes. Hence they embrace a constrained spirituality that is not met with in the life of Christ or in the lives of most saints. 

Of course, this is a wrong notion of the supernatural, the spiritual. The Germans have a name for it: the doctrine of the two stories. On the ground floor are the service quarters, on the top the drawing rooms. God does not deign to appear on the ground floor; He dwells only in the drawing rooms! The truth is that our divinization is also our humanization. We have been made children of God in a renovated humanity. God is pleased with our courtesy to others as much as with our prayers, with our enjoyment of nature as much as with our rejoicing in His glory, with our human friendships as much as with our faith, with our justice and loyalty as much as with our charity–so long as we act with the heart of a child of God. No special intention is required for the purpose.” The New Life of Grace. Translated from the Flemish by Georges Dupont, S. J. London: Geoffrey Chapman, 1971, p. 135. Further along, he writes: “The so-called “pure nature,” that is, a human existence in which divine grace has no part to act, has never existed. The call to grace,…owes its origin to the divine presence in our actual history.” Ibid.,  p 156.

4. Fransen writes: “Love for God is greatly threatened when the neighbor is not loved. Some “pious souls” drink avidly the cup of maudlin devotions while indulging their own sweet will, and shutting their hearts upon the neighbor. A companion of St. Ignatius, and for many years his secretary, vented one day his long experience in the government of the religious in the sarcastic remark: “Why must ‘pious’ religious be those who are the most intractable, the most wayward and self-willed men? “Piety” meets with scant sympathy on the part of many outsiders, not because these people foster an aversion to fellowmen who consecrate themselves to God, but because such a consecration seems to serve for a cloak for hardheartedness, indifference and inhumanity. In their eyes, “love for God” appears either a pretext for grim severity, or a form of escapism from real life, a flight from the simple solid human virtues, such as courtesy, tact, sincerity and honor.” Ibid., p 304

 5. Op.cit., Winslow, p. 33-34.