The history of Christian attitudes towards the body, sexuality, marriage, and celibacy is enormously complicated and easily oversimplified.

The Church has defended the body and sexuality against all sorts of dualistic heresies that assumed a radical struggle between good and evil, in which good was identified with the spirit or soul, and evil with the body.

Marriage has been celebrated as a sacrament. Catholicism once incorporated erotic imagery into the liturgy (as on Holy Saturday, for instance) with a minimum of embarrassment.

At the same time there has been a strong suspicion of sexuality and the body throughout Christian history, sometime rising to pitched hostility and aversion.

Until modern times, for example, most moral theologians held it was at least venially sinful for married couples to engage even in procreative intercourse primarily for pleasure, though married couples may have remained blissfully unaware of this.

Celibacy itself has had a complicated history, overlapping with the foregoing suspicion. Marriage, sex, and family were the lot of the spiritually average – the C students.

If they could rise to heroism, it was through heroic devotion or sacrifice on behalf of the faith, not through married life, and certainly not through sexual intimacy.  Hagiography confirmed this, as the ranks of the saints still show, featuring a completely disproportionate number of religious.

Today it is contemporary culture that looks askance at celibacy, much as the Church once looked askance at sexuality. The Church today has come to recognise marriage and sexuality as paths to holiness no less authentic, demanding, and rewarding than that of the ordained or vowed celibate – and that has filtered down to ordinary Catholics.

It has shaped the way vocation is imagined, how following Christ is viewed. A new Catholic humanism has displaced the status of celibacy as the model of holiness.

There’s no going back on this, and the priesthood today has to live with this displacement. Heroism has to be imagined in other ways, from within a common humanity rather than away from it, in isolation and false superiority.

In the light of the new theological emphases, and stemming from them, a new category of Catholic leadership has emerged, which has already transformed much of Church life.

This leadership is lay leadership. Before the Council, it was priests who staffed the parishes, and religious who ran the schools. Lay people were volunteers, with the exception perhaps of the cook, the organist and the janitor.

Today lay people are not simply volunteers, as they previously were. Instead, they exercise ministry, and they do so from a sense of vocation or discipleship.

They run religious programmes, parish liturgy and music, youth ministry, care for the sick and elderly, community and social justice programmes, prayer and Bible study groups, marriage preparation, and family support services, and a host of other pastoral activities.

There is also a growing lay presence and leadership in the (theological) academy, with Catholic lay men and women not only being part of faculty but also becoming heads of faculty. They are writing the texts and doing the interpretation of the Church’s traditions for coming generations. 

The ranks of this lay leadership grow in obverse relation to the decline among priests. In the US, by 1997 the numbers of lay ministers in parishes had surpassed the numbers of parish priests. Almost three quarters of them view themselves as engaged in a life’s work. Half feel they have received a call from God; others are motivated by some concept of religious service other than personal fulfillment.

New emphases in theology and ecclesiology, new religious needs, and new spiritual energies have thus fused together to constitute an extraordinary innovation in Catholic life.

Some observers see this development as akin to the emergence in the 12th and 13th centuries of new kinds of religious orders more appropriate to the budding cultures of town and city; or akin to the explosion of women’s religious orders and Catholic worker movements that responded to the conditions created by industrialisation, urbanisation and immigration in the 19th century.

A few more observations regarding this innovation.  First, many of these ministers are married, and their commitment is open-ended. Secondly, the feminine character of the development is clear. More than 80% of lay parish ministers are women. Questions about women’s role in the Church are clearly not going to subside.

In addition, parish ministries, regardless of who carries them out, are increasingly activities – education, care-giving, support – often associated with women in our culture. Understanding and empathy today count for more than authority; and a relational style of working is increasingly the hallmark of parish staffs everywhere.

Thirdly, the development bucks the trend of the centralisation of power that has long been the dominant trend in the Church. The proliferation of new ministries has shifted power from the diocese to the parish (parish priest and staff, priest and council), which constitutes a major growth in local Church power.

A further implication of the rise of these new vocations is that the need for more priests is not simply a need for more priests numerically, but a need for a certain kind of priest leader. Catholicism needs priest leaders for a Church of lay leaders. 

Collaborative ministry will be the norm, and the priest will have to be one who can collaborate. Church life today is an almost total reconfiguration of clerical-lay relations. Older patterns no longer fit; indeed, older patterns are less and less tolerated.

What about the future of vocations itself? The current posture is to refuse any rethinking of celibacy and to reemphasise differences in responsibilities and way of life between priesthood and lay people. Only a well-defined priesthood, it is said, only a heroic way of life, as defined by celibacy, will attract outstanding young men. 

I do not think that present experience bears this out. In any event, the aspirants a “well-defined” priesthood may attract may not be the outstanding but the insecure, unfocussed, and less talented, unable to define their own distinctive place in the world. 

Current research confirms this. Dean Hoge concludes here that contemporary aspirants to priesthood and religious life tend to be conservative, authoritarian, academically weak and psychologically fragile.

It’s hard to see how a viable future for the priesthood is possible without re-thinking of the qualifications for ordination. Until then, the ordained ministry will be stretched to the limit, and communities will be without the Eucharist, as many of them now are, and will have to do with what is called “Sister’s Mass,” that is, a Eucharistic Service.

Pope Benedict once remarked before he became Pope that no community has a “right” to the Eucharist. This is true, of course, but the issue need not be put in terms of “rights,” simply in terms of “access”.

The Church, one may say, has an obligation to make the celebration of the Eucharist accessible to the baptised. A community without Eucharistic celebration in a routine institutional way is an anomaly.

Thus, as things stand, Eucharistic celebration in Church life in many places, including our own archdiocese, will continue to be not normative Catholic practice but an ongoing Catholic anomaly.