Interesting article on celibacy

Here's a link to an interesting look at celibacy in the priesthood, but please note the paragraphs on marriage. This is by ABC's Sarah Coakley via David Virtue's site. My bolds for those readers who like to skim.

Yet one might well say, as did David Brooks in 2003, that our age is in a crisis - not so much of homosexuality - but more generally of erotic faithfulness. However, this is scarcely a chic reflection, granted the current prurient obsession with homosexuality, and the accompanying diversion from heterosexual failures.

A third, and final, "cultural contradiction" that I want to propose hovers over the common assumption that celibacy and marriage are somehow opposites: one involving no sex at all, and the other - supposedly - involving as much sex as one or both partners might like at any given time. But this, on reflection, is also a perplexing cultural fantasy that does not stand up to scrutiny.

The evidence provided by Richard Sipe's book, Celibacy in Crisis, is revealing here. Not only does faithful (or what Sipe calls "achieved") celibacy generally involve a greater consciousness of sexual desire and its frustration than a life lived with regular sexual satisfaction. But married sexuality, on the other hand, is rarely as care-free and mutually satisfied as this third "cultural contradiction" might presume.

Indeed a realistic reflection on long and faithful marriages (now almost in the minority) will surely reveal periods of enforced "celibacy" even within marriages: during periods of delicate pregnancy, parturition, illness, physical separation, or impotence, which are simply the lot of the marital "long haul."

And if this is so, then the generally-assumed disjunction between celibacy and marriage will turn out not to be as profound as it seems. Rather, the reflective, faithful celibate and the reflective, faithful married person may have more in common than the unreflective or faithless celibate, or the carelessly happy, or indeed unhappily careless, married person.

Now I shall return fleetingly to these three "cultural contradictions" later, For by then, I trust, we shall have gleaned some resources for addressing them. But for now, we cannot go further without attacking a different sort of cultural presumption head-on: that of the supposed pyschological dangers of celibacy or of any so-called "repressed" sexuality.

Here we may be surprised to discover what Freud himself said on this matter, and to him we shall now turn. Could it be that Freud actually gives us, despite himself, certain back-handed resources for thinking afresh theologically about the nature of "desire"?

Even Richard Sipe - who wishes, despite his sustained expose of clerical failures in celibacy, to defend the estimated 2% of Roman Catholic priests who he thinks do (as he puts it) "achieve" celibacy - argues that this "achievement" is always at the cost of earlier "experimentation" and fumbling, through which the priest must inevitably pass en route to something like mature sexual balance.

Underlying these gloomy figures (Sipe estimates that nearly half of so-called "celibates" are actually not so at any one time) seems to lurk the psychological presumption - often attributed to Freud - that celibacy is unnatural and even harmful. Or, if celibacy is not inherently "unnatural," then it is deemed distinctly "unusual" and even "utopian."'

It may come as some surprise, then, to find that Freud's own views on what he called "sublimation" (or unfulfilled and redirected sexual desire) were not only malleable over time, remaining finally somewhat unclear and inconsistent, but that he moved distinctly away from his early, and purely biological, account of "Eros" (sexual desire) and its power for redirection.

At no time, in fact (as far as I can see), does Freud's position provide a mandate for the view that "sublimation" is harmful - or, at any rate, that it is any more harmful than the psychological repressions we necessarily negotiate all the time, according to Freud.