Ecclesiastical Empire and The Feminine

In this article Dara Molloy records his disillusionment with the institution of the Roman Catholic Church. He writes that it has distorted, masked and masqueraded the Gospel. It has practiced the politics of sexuality and control. Using the power mechanisms of the Roman Emperor, it went about suppressing women and controlling men. The end result is a Church that is seriously dysfunctional. This disfunctionality has passed into Western society, which has inherited these patriarchal attitudes. Nothing short of a new theology is needed — a Godhead that is male and female.

Recently I was presented with the gift of a picture. It was a black and white pen and ink sketch of a Celtic Cross with a Sheela-na-Gig integrated into the circular part of it. The shock of seeing it took my breath away. Some people would be seriously offended if we published it in this magazine, so we have not done so. However, the image captures what was rejected and dismissed by the Roman Catholic Church in the course of its empire building throughout the centuries. Both the Celtic Church and the feminine were marginalised because they did not serve the male, hierarchical, clerical structure envisaged for the ecclesiastical empire of the papacy.

The rejection of sexuality and the feminine has gone on at every level of the Church, but has been particularly focused in the priesthood. I am now 47 years of age. I have been a priest for nineteen years and a vowed religious for twenty-eight years. I joined a religious order at the age of 18, and at the age of 22 I took vows for life. The vows were of poverty, chastity and obedience, what were called ‘the evangelical counsels’.

Subsequently, at the age of 28, after further ‘formation’ and study, I was ordained a priest. The priesthood in itself required a life of celibacy, but I had also taken a vow of chastity. I was doubly bound.

The church landscape has changed dramatically in the intervening years. This last year alone, four priest friends of mine have left the priesthood. Two of them were also in religious life. The religious order of which I have been a member has had nobody join it in Ireland in the last five years, has nobody at all in training, and had its last ordination three years ago. This is true of the church scene in general in Ireland. The church is in crisis especially at the clerical and episcopal level. All priests and bishops are effected. Until now, I tried to survive the impending crisis by moving to the edge, where I found some space. But now even the edge is contaminated. I have had to step over into the void.

What I imagined to be a void is, of course, not a void at all. Many people have come here before me. However, I am now in a place that for most of my life was beyond the limits of my imagination. "No salvation outside the Church" was a phrase tatooed on my brain. I have had to step outside the structures that until now were my world — to seek the salvation I was not finding within.

As I head towards 50, I have been thinking about how the Church invited me as a young boy to ‘dedicate my life to God’ in the priesthood and religious life. The Church had a road mapped out for me. All I had to do was follow it. I would then be serving God and growing in holiness. This was what I wanted.

For the first ten years of my religious life, I was ‘in formation’. I was taught to think and behave in a certain way. This prepared me for priesthood and religious life. I could then be ‘let out’. For a further seven years I lived in religious houses and worked in schools. But by 1982, five years into my priesthood, I had hit serious difficulties. Much and all as I wanted to serve God in my life, I was becoming seriously disillusioned. I discovered that priesthood and religious life was not necessarily about serving God, and could be used to serve many other agendas.

There are those who say that disillusionment is a fact of life. Growing older, they say, means that we have to face realities, compromise, and often let go of our dreams. We stop being dreamers and begin to accept things as they are. My problem was that I could not let go of my dream. And yet the way I was living and the work that I was doing fell far short of that dream.

My first disillusionment came from my work in formal education. After a number of years teaching it became clear to me that the school, which my order had founded after the famine, had been hijacked by a value system and an agenda that was not gospel based. By working in this school, I was promoting this agenda, what is now called 'neoliberalism'. Because I could not convince others of this, I could do little to change school from the inside, although I tried. I had to get out. I left teaching, after six years in it, in 1983. I did a further year and a half in school retreat work, travelling to schools throughout the country, and then I left schools altogether.

But my second crisis was with religious life itself. My commitment to the gospel challenged me to give up every worldly good to follow Christ. Yet here I was in a high status profession, in a job that gave me power over others, and with a comfortable middle-class lifestyle. I had financial and job security, staff to cook and clean for me and every material thing I needed including a car and all modern conveniences. My vow of poverty could find no avenue of expression other than in communal ownership. But even here, the value of our property in Ireland had rocketed to many millions of pounds. My spirit yearned to be in the desert or on the open sea, free from these trappings and away from this role-playing, dependent on God alone.

In 1985 I moved to the edge of the Church and the edge of society. I left my community life, my role-playing and my professional lifestyle. I went west, to the Aran Islands, where many before had come in search of a new church and a new society. The hope that these searchers such as St Enda and St Ciarán gave me was that they had achieved, in some way, their dream of creating a new society and a new church inspired by the gospel. The Celtic Church which they created offered huge inspiration to me.
Since coming to live on Aran, I have become, one might say, de-professionalised and de-institutionalised. I have been in a process of un-learning, of counter-formation. I am recovering from something that was done to me. I believe that I have changed more in the past twelve years of my life than during any other period.

But now my disillusionment has taken another turn. My disillusionment is now with the Church itself. Of course, like many others, I have complained for years that the vision of Vatican II has not been accomplished, that the pope continues to appoint conservative bishops over the heads of local wishes, that intellectual debate is suppressed, that the Vatican acts in an authoritarian fashion, and so on. But the crux of the matter for me now goes much deeper.

I now see that the Roman Catholic Church has been engaged in the politics of sexuality since at least the fourth century. By this I mean that the papacy has used the issue of sexuality to gain power and to build an empire. In the process, everything in Church and society has been distorted and the truth has been filtered.

This distortion began in Judaism with the presentation of God as exclusively male, and with the suppression of all female images. By presenting God as a creator God, who lived ‘out there’, in heaven, the sense of the divine presence in creation was removed. This sense had normally a feminine association in earlier religions (including the Celtic). The earth was Mother Earth, and rivers and mountains, etc., were often associated with feminine deities. By denying this awareness, and suppressing it, the way was paved for materialism. Matter was inanimate. All of creation could be treated as material for human use, without a sense of the sacred. Thus began one of the root-causes of the ecological crisis the world now faces.

Christianity, being rooted in Judaism, inherited this one-sided theology and continued the distortion. Whether Christ can be blamed for this or not is a moot point.
One way or another, the early Christian Church, as far we know, did not question patriarchy either in heaven or on earth. While the Christian Church was made up of small, scattered groups, who were being persecuted from time to time, women did play a strong role and patriarchy did not get such a dominant hold. This was the case from the first to the third century. But as soon as the Church hitched up with the Roman Empire, in the early part of the fourth century, everything changed. In the first of many a Church-State alliance, the ambitions of the Roman Emperor were matched by the ambitions of the Roman Papacy. In these plans, women did not feature, and they and their children were dispensable. This was to be a man’s world, and everything was to serve that purpose. In theological terms, they were serving a male God.

In this process, the women were ignored, but the men had to be controlled. The empire of the time provided a two-pronged answer to this question. The first prong was the hierarchical structure of the Roman army. Through this structure, the emperor could control a vast number of men. All that was required was the imposition of strict obedience on every soldier, with a system of percs and punishments. The second prong of control came from the harnessing of men’s sexual energy. Soldiers at war were forbidden to have sexual relations with their women. In this way their sexual drives were used to motivate them and energise them in battle. Men in battle could look forward to raping the enemy’s women, or bringing women home as prizes.

This is a long-standing custom for soldiers at war and is to be found in many different cultures. In the Celtic tradition, there is a story of Cuchulainn separating himself from women before he went to battle. Celtic warriors went into battle naked, apart from a torc on their necks. Before going into battle they worked themselves up into a frenzy, causing an erection. Battle for the Celtic warriors was an orgasmic experience. For this reason, they preserved their sexual energies for battle, and so they abstained from women. Nor were they slow to bring women home as prizes.

In the Jewish tradition also, continence for soldiers was required. In Old Testament times, when soldiers went to war to protect the Promised Land, they were prohibited from having sexual relations with women (1 Sam.21:5-6). This was a religious law. We have a clear illustration of this prohibition in the story of David and Uriah, the husband of Bathsheba. David had fallen in love with Bathsheba and slept with her while Uriah was at war in David’s army. She became pregnant. David tried to arrange for Uriah to come home and sleep with her so that people would think the child was Uriah’s. But Uriah would not go home to her because he was a soldier and the war was still on. Finally, David sent him back to the war and had Joab the commander put him in the front line, where he was killed. Then David took Bathsheba as his own wife. (2Sam.11:1-27)

When an alliance was made between the Christian Church and the Roman Empire, these twin concepts of obedience and sexual continence were appropriated by the papacy and applied to the clergy, who were to be the pope’s army. Priests, and later religious, were to become ‘soldiers for Christ’. 'Soldiers for Christ' is a phrase that has been applied by the Church to priests even to the present day.

Although obedience and celibacy are termed by the Church ‘evangelical counsels’, that is, that they have their origin in the gospels, there is no evidence that this is true. The concept of celibacy does not appear in the gospels. Jesus, as he chose his disciples and particularly his apostles, made no issue around their marital status. Some were married, some were single, as far as we know. When he sent his disciples out to preach, he gave them clear instructions. The instructions contained a very serious call to poverty, but not a word about the exercise of their sexuality. There is one reference in the gospels to ‘eunuchs’, that is, castrated males (Mt.19:10-12). While Jesus indicates that some become eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven, it is not clear if he means physical castration or not, nor do the gospels point to anyone who has actually done this for the sake of the kingdom of heaven. The reference is made in the context of marriages breaking down and Jesus’ condemnation of divorce. It is therefore most likely to do with an invitation to remain continent after the failure of a marriage. There is nowhere else in the gospels where an invitation to celibacy is even hinted at.
Similarly, in one of the letters of St Paul, 1Cor.7:8, Paul writes that he would prefer if people remained like him, i.e. single. But in a later letter to Timothy, Paul appears to change his mind, and encourages even young widows to remarry (1Tim.5:14). Meanwhile, Paul has no problem appointing married people to positions of priestly leadership among the faithful, and in giving instructions on this matter asks that the candidate be ‘married only once’ (1Tim.3:1-7).

A further argument presented by the Church in relation to celibacy is the argument that Jesus himself was celibate. But again there is no direct evidence of this and it can only be presumption on the Church's part. From the age of twelve to thirty, the life of Jesus is unknown. In Jewish society he would have been expected to be married. It is also clear that he had some sort of special relationship with Mary Magdalen.

It seems to me that the concept of celibacy for the clergy grew not from the gospels, nor from the vision of church preached by Jesus, but from the lessons of armies and war. It was a concept that was to do with controlling men.

In the case of obedience in relation to the gospel: it is clear that obedience to the Father was of prime importance to Jesus. This has been used as an argument for taking a vow of obedience and for promising obedience to a bishop. However, the vow of obedience requires obedience to a human superior, and not directly to God. In the vow-taking ceremony this superior is named as the local bishop or as the Superior-General of the Order. But the obedience that Jesus adhered to was clearly not obedience to any human being. On the contrary, Jesus was a thorn in the side to the human authorities, both political and religious. It was this precise lack of obedience to the human authorities which led to his crucifixion. The incident with his parents when he was only twelve could also be taken as an act of disobedience, and his justification for it was obedience to a higher power: “I must be about my Father’s business”.

Jesus’ obedience was to an inner calling. His faithfulness to this calling brought him into trouble first with his parents, and then with the religious and political authorities. Whatever scant and dubious evidence there is in the New Testament for a call to celibacy, there is none at all for a call to the type of obedience required of clergy and religious today. Celibacy and obedience make much more sense when imposed in relation to soldiers and an army at war, than when justified as expressions of the gospel. Celibacy and obedience are instruments of control, and their imposition is to do with the exercise of power over others.

In the fourth century, the Church took on the shape of the Roman Empire, a political structure that was not democratic and that gave absolute power to one man. When Jesus speaks about power of this kind, he condemns it: “You know that among the pagans their so-called rulers lord it over them, and their great men make their authority felt. This is not to happen among you.” (Mk.10:42-43). In many other passages, Jesus condemns the exercise of power of this kind, especially when he attacks the Pharisees and the lawyers (cf. for example Lk.12:37-54). When questioned about his own authority, Jesus indicates that it is an authority that is bestowed directly by God and and not by humans, as was also the case with John the Baptist (Lk.20:1-8).

Yet the Church chose to exercise power according to the pagan model. The pope claimed emperorship of the ecclesiastical empire. His bishops became ‘princes of the Church’, with palaces, titles, dioceses, rings and robes. All of these were taken from the political structure of the time. The priests took on the status of nobles and were given their own territories and flocks. The faithful became the foot-soldiers.

The alliance of Roman Church and Roman State was one that served both sides well in their hunger for power. The emperor and the pope commanded two parallel empires, one political, one ecclesiastical. Each headed an army. The structure of command was male, hierarchical and authoritarian. Soldiers of both armies were trained to strict discipline, accepting a command and doing it immediately without questioning. Sexual continence was required. For the priests, or God’s soldiers, this meant celibacy for life.
Ironically, while the political empire of Rome has long gone, the ecclesiastical empire of Rome remains and its male, hierarchical, authoritarian structure has survived. It has carried with it to this day the structures, concepts and practices of that time. These were not given to us by Christ and it is clear that they do not reflect the values that Christ preached.

I have consequently arrived at the conclusion, half way through my life, that what were presented to me as the three evangelical counsels - poverty, chastity, and obedience - are in fact a combination of two military counsels and only one evangelical counsel. Ironically, the counsel to take on poverty, the only truly evangelical or gospel-centred counsel, is the counsel least insisted upon, and least lived out, in the Church.

Part of my disillusionment with the Roman Catholic Church is the realisation that this Church was capable of duping me in order to get me into the priesthood and religious life. I joined with the belief that the three vows, including celibacy, were a way to perfection. This is what I was told. Religious life / priesthood was presented to me as ‘the better path’ to holiness and to God (cf. Vatican 11 document on Priestly Formation n.10: "Let them perceive as well the superiority of virginity consecrated to Christ …"). Now I see that the party-line given to me in relation to celibacy and obedience was a mask of authoritarian power and had nothing to do with living the gospel.

Disobedience, it seems to me, may be a much more important virtue to practice in my journey towards Christian perfection. The virtue of disobedience, practiced by Jesus, is a commitment to follow one’s inner calling, one’s conscience, even when it clashes with human authority, or threatens relationships with family and friends. The virtue of disobedience is a belief that the Holy Spirit is a source of authority within each one of us, and must be the primary source of our direction in life. Obedience to this source may require, on occasions, a disobedience to human authorities. This will demand courage, another gift of the Holy Spirit, and may lead to opposition and even persecution. All of this Jesus exemplified in his own life, and required it of his disciples.

In allowing myself become disillusioned with the Church’s teaching on celibacy and obedience, I have had to reconstruct my attitude to marriage and intimate sexual relationships. It is clear to me now that marriage is a natural way to human growth and Christian perfection. Various passages in the New Testament reflect this view, once the layers of distortion imposed on the texts by the Church have been removed. The giving of self, the integration of masculine and feminine in one’s psyche, the emotional development required, the teaching and example demanded in the rearing of children and the challenges of living intimately with another person all indicate a more natural and healthy way to holiness and wholeness than a life of celibacy. The ‘fullness of life’ that Jesus wished for all of us is less likely to be achieved if we cut ourselves off from parts of that life-force within us.

This is not to deny that men and women have become holy while remaining celibate. The lives of many saints illustrate this point. However, St Paul, St Augustine and others like them are not free from the suspicion of patriarchal attitudes and from a bias and prejudice against women and feminine values. The acceptance of the Church’s teaching on celibacy led to many a heroic battle among the saints. I experienced first hand many of these battles myself. However, the pictures painted of these struggles among the men saints inevitably entailed the rejection of a woman, often in a brutal fashion. Thomas Aquinas is said to have taken a red hot poker and chased a young lady out of his room. Kevin of Glendalough rolled in a bed of nettles to cool his passion and then beat his temptress off with a bunch of the same nettles. In another story, Kevin is even more violent and pushes the woman to her death over a cliff. These stories reflect the heroism and single-mindedness of the saints, and for this they are impressive stories. However, implicit in the stories is the rejection of women and the rejection of the feminine.
The patriarchal distortion of the gospel and of theology has been woven into the fabric of the Church since it became established, with huge implications for the structure of society, the rights of women, and for the natural environment. Even in the year 305, at the Council of Elvira, it was decreed that bishops, priests and deacons should separate from their wives and that they should not have children. However, these early decrees on celibacy were not widely observed, and, among the secular clergy up to the twelfth century, marriage was the norm rather than the exception.

The same was true in Ireland. While clerical celibacy was presented as an ideal since the foundation of the Irish Church in the 5th century, as soon as the monastic federations assumed control, married abbots, priests and even bishops became commonplace. In most Irish monasteries, families were an integral part of the monastic establishment. It was only as the church in Ireland began to lose its monastic structure and was replaced by a diocesan structure in the 12th century that the issue of clerical celibacy began to be seriously tackled. At the Synod of Cashel in 1101, the first moves were made. These were followed by the Synod of Kells in 1152, where attempts were made to remove what were considered to be major abuses. However, clerical celibacy continued to be an issue in Ireland at least until the seventeenth century 1.

The 12th century marked the consolidation of papal power over the Church in Ireland. This went hand in hand with the invasion of Ireland by the Normans, led by King Henry II of England. Henry had been given permission by Pope Adrian IV, a fellow Englishman, to invade Ireland. He was subsequently congratulated for his deed by a later pope, Alexander III, who wrote that he was overjoyed that his “dear son in Christ, Henry, illustrious King of England … has subjected to his dominion that people, a barbarous one uncivilized and ignorant of the Divine law …”. The Norman invasion meant that political sovereignty of Ireland passed from the Irish kings to the crown of England, and that ecclesiastical sovereignty passed to the pope through Canterbury, the primatial see of England. From now on, the appointment of bishops came from the pope via Canterbury and the British crown. Irish bishops had to take an oath of fealty to the English king and agree to recognise the customs of the English church as binding on Ireland.

The imposition of strict celibacy on the Irish clergy was an integral part of this plan to consolidate the power of both church and state, who were operating hand in hand. Clerical celibacy would weaken the power of hereditary monastic families who accumulated wealth through intermarriage. Their property began to be transferred to the episcopal church where it would no longer have hereditary ties. Episcopal and clerical appointments were taken out of the hands of these families and passed to the pope via the state. Clerical obedience was now to the pope via the state. Monasteries and their families were disempowered. In return for this obedience, the celibate clerics were rewarded by being given secure property rights, a legal status which left them immune to state prosecution and an exemption from conscription to the army.

Clerical celibacy became a key strategy in the building of the British political empire and the papal ecclesiastical empire. Fundamentally, it was to do with removing locally based power structures and centralising that power in a hierarchical male dominated empire. In the greedy grab for power and empire building, women and children were dispensable.

Clerical celibacy is the most visible manifestation of the Church’s dismissal of the feminine in its quest for power. Although the growth of patriarchy was evident in Greek, Roman and Judaic society long before Christianity, Christianity gave it an added impetus and took the movement to heart. The institution of celibacy for the clergy was its particular classic contribution which manifested the patriarchal attitude in clear terms. Christianity in the West gradually became the engine of the patriarchal movement as the other influences faded. It remains so up to the present day.

There is no evidence that Jesus himself was part of this movement, although he had to work within the confines of the culture of his time, a culture which had become patriarchal. His continuous efforts to reach out to the dispossessed and disempowered, including women, indicated his commitment to break down any power structures which marginalised or oppressed people. However, he was a man of his time, despite his extraordinary powers and insights. In his teachings he made it clear that his disciples in the future would have to continue his work. They would achieve things which even he was unable to achieve (John 14:12).

My complete reappraisal of the institutional church has left it demythologised for me. Illusions have fallen like scales from my eyes. Its spell on me is broken and I now see how this church can both masquerade and mask the gospel. It is clear to me that the gospel and the truth have been betrayed by this church many times in history, and again today. Clerics and religious have participated in this, on occasions, out of loyalty and obedience, but perhaps also out of naivety and ignorance. If there is a conflict between one’s call to live the gospel and an apparent obligation to be loyal or obedient to an institution, be it church or religious order, the gospel must come first. I am quite certain that the present Roman Catholic Church differs in significant and fundamental ways from what Jesus was talking about when he spoke of his church. His church is not measurable by statistics or human boundaries. It is made up of people who live by his teachings. These people may be found, in today’s world, either inside or outside the boundaries of a particular church.

Sometimes a woollen garment being knitted has to be completely unravelled in order to remove an error that has been knitted into it. Sometimes it is better to knock a building and start again than to try and repair it. The error of patriarchy goes so far back in the Roman church that a complete new start is required. Jeremiah the prophet gave the example of the potter having to do a similar thing: “… whenever the vessel he was making came out wrong, as happens with the clay handled by potters, he would start afresh and work it into another vessel, as the potters do.” (Jeremiah 18:1-6)
A reworking of the feminine into an expression of Christian church will require a new beginning. That new beginning could be made by refounding the Celtic Church. The stone which was rejected would then become the corner stone. The image of a Celtic Cross with a Sheela-na-Gig on it could become its primary icon. D

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1. This and some following paragraphs draw from the work of Mary Condren in her book "The Serpent and the Goddess". cf. chapter 9 'Clerical Celibacy' and elsewhere.

Dara Molloy is the co-founder and co-editor of The AISLING Quarterly. He lives in the Aran Islands, County Galway. Until July 1996 he was a priest of the Roman Catholic Church. He now continues to work as a priest within the Celtic tradition.

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