Overview

Living Celibacy presents five pathways, active practices that promote the psychosexual health of Catholic priests; together they represent a range of experiential dimensions to living celibacy that can help priests and their publics access the shared and distinctive stories of priests living celibacy and also assess their wellbeing: 1) Live close to God and one’s deepest desires; 2) Develop broad and deep interpersonal relationships and communities of support; 3) Ask for love, nurture others, and negotiate separation: 4) Cope with stress and recognize destructive patterns of behavior; 5) Celebrate the holy. These five pathways attempt to tell the story of living celibacy from a broadly practical and applied perspective. The pathways are not a theology of celibacy, nor do they explain why one chooses a celibate lifestyle. Rather they describe how chastity is experienced and enacted, what some of the opportunities and struggles might be, and how the experience of celibacy can enrich priestly life and ministry. To access the experience of living celibacy and the feelings that might emerge even obliquely, literary and case examples illustrate various aspects of these experiential dimensions and how they so often frame both the priest’s vulnerability and God’s grace. The case examples are often priests’ narratives of their own experience. Sometimes the cases presented are composites of various real life situations. They are all meant to reflect the real highs and lows of ordinary priests living celibacy. †

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