Chastity is a virtue-no argument there. Chastity as replacement for Love is an idol.
That's where the church has it wrong on the married priesthood prohibition.
The priesthood's witness to chastity is life saving in some cases. Women who would have done
themselves in or given into despair from their feelings of emotional abuse at abusive lovers or
or failed marriages or over-sexualization of themselves find solace, comfort and new life with the
care of priests whom they can feel securely are not after them to get into their undergarments but offer a different vision of familial agape love.
But when chastity is idolized above familial love, it is wrongly elevated and insisted upon as the only way to lead people to salvation- and it demeans God's gift. It destroys potentiality for children born in the heart of love.
The church in running priests out on a rail who know this is off its rocker and totally against the heart of God are marginalized, or flatly driven out. The ones who drive them out get promoted, like Chaput now the Archbishop of Philadelphia who ran out an Australian priest who espoused a fair look at the married priesthood.
The insistence that the vocation of priesthood is for everyone for all time a celibate exercise is really evil. There is no biblical, scriptural justification for it and it perpetrates the most unjust harms and emotional abuse on women. It is sick. And it needs to change. It creates an idol where Love should instead rein, and Love is by its essence pro-creative, creating Human Life.
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