The History of Sex: South of France -- Nazism and the Paganization of Europe -- (Chap. III, Pt. 14)

A Catholic theologian summed it up nicely for an Anglican in the 1800s: 'A priest sacrifices himself for the sake of his parishioners. He has no children of his own, in order that all the children in the parish may be his children.'

Granted, the bit about a priest having all the children in the parish sounds unfortunate nowadays, but you get the drift.

What's more, sexual self-sacrifice also exists in the secular world—from football teams that ban sex before matches to artists who forgo parenthood to concentrate on their art.

Balzac churned out nearly 100 tomes for his Human Comedy but believed he could have produced even more if it hadn't been for carnal distractions: after sex, he would sigh, 'There goes another novel!'

A SEXUAL DRAFT DODGE?

In my fallen state, I should also admit that when Father Denis mentions that his class of twenty-two priests in 1946 was the last big ordination at his (now-defunct) seminary, I immediately wonder if the war had been a big motivator.

I ask him if going to seminary was a way of dodging combat.

Au contraire, he replies. 'We were a very patriotic generation before the war. We felt that the war was caused by heathenism—a paganization of Europe—and Nazism was a symbol of that.'

The Nazi Party's 'Horoscope of the Week'

'We believed in something: France—French culture, in the broad sense of the term. We couldn't imagine happiness without faith.'

He pauses. 'Now there is no faith in anything.'

'So did you and your companions view celibacy as a sacrifice on behalf of your congregations?'

'In a way, it was simpler than that,' he admits. His classmates acted as a support network for each other, providing chaste peer pressure.

'Celibacy now is quite an individualistic problem. A young man who dedicates himself to religious celibacy is—well, in French, we call it un bloc erratique.'

In geology, an 'erratic block' is a boulder that's carried along by a glacier but left stranded after the ice recedes. Given Christ's famous quote about founding the Church on a rock, the image seems particularly poignant: with Catholicism in long-term retreat, its priests have been left behind.

I mention the former Pope's reference to celibacy as a 'stumbling block' that keeps men from joining the clergy. 

'Celibacy can exist only if you believe in something to make a sacrifice for,' Father Denis says matter-of-factly. 'For the current generation, very little is done to introduce them to any ideal worthy of the name.'

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