It is a foolish thing to make promises about what you intend to do in a year’s time, but at the chapter meeting last year I promised the Provincial that I would give a talk on celibacy this year, hoping to provoke some discussion on a topic that is too rarely discussed. I have had plenty of time to regret it. But I have kept to my original proposal because the reasons I had for making it have not gone away.

The first reason was a sense of irritation at the way some of the brethren speak about the problems of celibacy entirely by way of anecdotes: how Father A was nearly seduced in the parlour, how troublesome women plagued the life of Father B, about Father C and his “cousin”, about the real reason for Brother D leaving the Order. When I thought about it, I realised that there are two things about this kind of talk that I find unsatisfactory:

1. its privatisation of the vows: that celibacy is mostly a matter of an individual keeping his vow of chastity, like a precious object to be kept intact under threats, especially threats from certain women; and that the available collective wisdom on the matter consists in anecdotal knowledge of how to do this.

2. the failure to take seriously the lives of the women whose attentions cause so much difficulty when it gets out of hand and — it must be added — so much satisfaction when it is under proper ministerial control. It is a failure to look very deeply into what happens and ask why it happens in such predictable ways and what this tells us about the injured relationships between men and women,which we celibates have to live out as much as anyone else. Men and women in the life of the Church get caught up in processes of interaction which few people understand and which cause humiliation and frustration on all sides.