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Affective Maturity and Priestly Celibacy: When Love Is Rightly Ordered (Part Two)

Fr. Paul Check

“And when you have turned again, strengthen your brethren,” Jesus tells Peter (Lk 22:32), which can be interpreted to mean both fortify them as individual disciples (and priests) and in their common bond of love for each other in Christ. Having recognized the safeguard against self-promotion, then we consider how men, within a healthy brotherhood, can encourage and bolster each other in virtue, by their example and fraternal solicitude for each other. At the Last Supper, Jesus told His first priests, “By this all men will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another” (Jn 13:35). 

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Affective Maturity and Priestly Celibacy: When Love Is Rightly Ordered (Part One)

Fr. Paul Check

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Order: Issue Three

Ordo Amoris

In the concluding line of his Divine Comedy, Dante names God "the Love that moves the sun and other stars," thereby giving expression to the ancient conviction that love is a cosmos, a sacred ordering. This is no hollow sentiment, but rather a claim that love alone is adequate for understanding how our world coheres. For in a world of disordered loves driven by the revolt against our given nature, we proclaim some ground other than God's loving condescension in the flesh to be the ultimate ground of our existence. Only the ordo amoris, the rightly structured order of our love of God, self, and neighbor can free us from our miserly estimates of love's proportions and align all things here below to move in harmony with the heavens.

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Humanum is about the human: what makes us human, what keeps us human, and what does not. We are driven by the central questions of human existence: nature, freedom, sexual difference and the fundamental figures to which it gives rise, man, woman, and child. We probe these in the context of marriage, family, education, work, medicine and bioethics, science and technology, political and ecclesial life. We sift through the many competing ideas of our age so that we might “hold fast to what is good” and let go of what is not. In addition to articles, witness pieces, and book reviews ArteFact: Film & Fiction searches out the human in the literary and cinematic arts.

Humanum is published as a free service by the Pontifical John Paul II Institute for Studies on Marriage and Family in Washington, D.C.