CYCLE FIFTY-FIVE

1. Those who, being objective, cannot hinder others ... usually end-up hindering themselves, while, conversely, those who, being subjective, cannot help themselves usually end-up helping others.

2. One of the main reasons why the clergy tend not to be taken very seriously in England is that, scorning celibacy, they often marry and thus forfeit such crumbs of spiritual authority as accrue to Roman Catholic clergy by seemingly 'having their cake and eating it'. For if it is one thing to live the relatively privileged and comfortable life of a priest when one is sworn to celibacy, it is quite another to do so and share in the fruits of worldly sin as well! The laity can condone the former, but never the latter! Hence in Ireland, where celibacy is the rule for Catholic clergy, the priest is grudgingly and even admiringly respected for the carnal sacrifices he is prepared to make. In England and other bastions of Anglicanism, however, the priest is not taken all that seriously because he is manifestly less a man of God (or spiritual leadership premised upon vows of celibacy) than a comparatively worldly figure who is free to marry and thus enter into carnal relations, instinctively and emotionally, with women. Nothing undermines the credibility of the clergy so drastically in England as its rejection of clerical celibacy! On the other hand, nothing sustains it so respectfully in Ireland as the commitment to celibacy which the Catholic clergy are pledged to uphold ... as befitting their spiritual example to the laity.

3. It may be acceptable, relevant to its liberal criteria of priesthood, for women to become priests in the Anglican Church, but it is doubtful that the Catholic Church could encourage the ordination of women, and for the very sound reason that celibacy for a woman priest (priestess?) would run contrary to the nature of women as beings for whom salvation has less to do (given the ampleness of their flesh) with 'getting high' on the lightness of air ... than with achieving motherhood, and thus acquiring a worldly plenum (in pregnancy) to save them from the vacuum of an empty womb. Thus for women, celibacy would be more of a curse than a blessing, and a celibate woman priest could only be a contradiction in terms, since one cannot advance the notion of spiritual salvation (in the plenum of air) from a worldly vacuum (the empty womb), which will necessarily condition the psyche along negative lines, as germane, in any case, to the generally critical disposition of women. It is not that women are spiritual beings who are denied the opportunity to utilize their potential for spiritual leadership. Women are manifestly not spiritual but fundamentally sensual, and they can no more deny their carnal nature ... as creatures of the World ... than (gender-change exceptions to the rule notwithstanding) become men. What they can do, and often are doing these days, is to seek additional (rather than alternative) outlets for their considerable energies, thereby acquiring the possibility of professional plenums to supplement their need of maternal ones. Yet the priesthood is not a profession but a vocation, and those who enter it do so on the understanding that a commitment to Christ is also and necessarily a rejection of the World. Now a man may reject the World and go beyond it ... to the extent that his priestly vocation permits him; yet a woman who rejects the World does not go beyond it but simply undermines herself as a woman, and therefore imposes a vacuous curse upon herself which, by its very negative nature, cannot make for the transmission of a positive message, or doctrine, in regard to Christ, but will simply hold her back from the only salvation which is open to women - namely motherhood - and thus keep her chained to a sort of female damnation. Therefore the Catholic Church is right in its refusal to ordain women priests since, short of abandoning its commitment to clerical celibacy, the ordination of women would undermine the priesthood and bring the Church closer to the Father (through the subconscious need of a female vacuum to be sexually imposed upon) than to the Holy Spirit. Also there would be immense difficulties in regard to the Confessional, especially with males confessing worldly shortcomings, or sins, to a woman, the cardinal object of such sin from a male standpoint. Then, too, the Mass would provide difficulties with regard to its reference to the body of Christ and association, by default, with womanly flesh.... No, women priests may have a place in the Anglican Church, which, stemming from Henry VIII, upholds carnal freedoms, but they would be grossly out-of-place in the Catholic one, which is the closest of all (Western) churches to the heavenly Beyond of spiritual beatitude. The heaviness of the flesh does not naturally lend itself to the lightness of the air, and where intimations of the latter are upheld (as in the Catholic Church), there can be no justification for those who are more naturally disposed to the former ... to lay claim to spiritual leadership. Even the Catholic Church is something that will ultimately have to be overcome ... if the 'Kingdom of Heaven' is literally to come to pass on properly transcendental terms. And by that I of course mean, as ever, in relation to the Social Theocratic and/or Transcendentalist Centre to which, over the years, I have dedicated a not inconsiderable portion of my mature philosophical quest.