Great fisking of silly and obnoxious New York Times op ed

The New York Times, which Kathy Shaidle reminds us will be bankrupt and gone within five to ten years, published a silly piece about priests' wives in the Roman Catholic Church, given the establishment of the Personal Ordinariate of the Chair of St. Peter.

In the New York Times, Sara Ritchey writes:

Given this history, I caution the clerical wife to be on guard as she enters her role as a sacerdotal attaché. Her position is an anomalous one and, as the Vatican has repeatedly insisted, one that will not receive permanent welcome in the church. That said, for the time being, it will be prudent for the Vatican to honor the dignity of the wives and children of its freshly ordained married priests. And here, I suggest, a real conversation about the continuation of priestly celibacy might begin.
Until then, priests’ wives should beware a religious tradition that views them, in the words of Damian, as “the clerics’ charmers, devil’s choice tidbits, expellers from paradise, virus of minds, sword of soul, wolfbane to drinkers, poison to companions, material of sinning, occasion of death ... the female chambers of the ancient enemy, of hoopoes, of screech owls, of night owls, of she-wolves, of blood suckers.”

Carl Olson at Insight Scoop thoroughly fisks the article. Here's a sample.

.... is "For Priests’ Wives, a Word of Caution", by Sara Ritchey, assistant professor of medieval European history at the University of Louisiana, Lafayette, which appeared in yesterday's edition of the award-winning journal of religious thought and Church history, The New York Times. It's difficult to do justice to Ritchey's historical hit piece in a single sentence, but it is easy to bluntly identify what she gets right: almost nothing. Dan Brown would be proud if he weren't so jealous.

Okay, enough praise; let's look at a few of the low lights. The piece opens: "What will life be like for the wives of Roman Catholic priests?"

By "Roman Catholic" I take she refers to "Catholic", as is the common practice. The problem is at least two-fold:

1) she is more accurately referring to Catholic priests of the Latin Church, one of several rites within the Catholic Church;

2) the majority of those rites have married clergy—and have had them for centuries. The Catechism identifies the Latin (which includes the Roman and Ambrosian rites), as well as Byzantine, Alexandrian or Coptic, Syriac, Armenian, Maronite and Chaldean (par 1203). The Byzantine, the largest of the Eastern rites, contains the Ukrainian, Ruthenian, and other rites.

-snip-

The significance of all this is obvious: if the Catholic Church has had married clergy for, well, two thousand years, -snip-

The priest’s wife was an obvious danger. Her wanton desire, suggested the 11th-century monk Peter Damian, threatened the efficacy of consecration. He chastised priests’ wives as “furious vipers who out of ardor of impatient lust decapitate Christ, the head of clerics,” with their lovers. According to the historian Dyan Elliott, priests’ wives were perceived as raping the altar, a perpetration not only of the priest but also of the whole Christian community.

Whoa, whoa, whoa. Hold on. As Paul Moses writes on the Commonweal blog: "I wouldn’t have expected an argument like this from an academic historian; it takes the ascetic Peter Damian’s advocacy of clerical celibacy in the 11th century totally out of its historical context, and inserts it without qualification into a vastly different time." And the context, as always, is pretty darned important.

-snip-

I think most people with any basic understanding of Catholic teaching, vows, and morality will understand the problem: priests were committing the sin of fornication and living with women who were not their wives, and were thus rejecting the discipline of the Church, which they had freely accepted.

-snip-

Ritchey's leaps of mispresentation grow even larger when she, in most bizarre fashion, writes that "Medieval theologians were in the process of determining that bread and wine, at the moment of consecration in the hands of an ordained priest at the altar, truly became the body and blood of Jesus Christ." Is she really saying that until the twelfth century, no one really believed that the Eucharist was the true Body, Blood, Soul, and Divinity of Jesus Christ? Really? Quite the opposite: all Christians—Catholic, Orthodox, Ancient Oriental—accepted this belief; it was not even seriously questioned in the West until the decades immediately prior to the Protestant Revolution; it was never doubted in the East. At best, Ritchey is guilty of extreme sloppiness; at worse, she is guilty of embarrassing ignorance.