Our Founding Document

- Download Adobe Acrobat Version of this document

The Church's Story-Our Story

The singular lifelong commitment of heterosexual marriage and the broad based commitment of a worldwide celibate masculine priesthood organized into diocesan priestly communities under a bishop shape all of Catholic culture. We are a people shaped by the Eucharist and communal sacramental bonds. Our male-only celibate priesthood is meant to create a brotherhood linked by a common love of God. Like the US Marines and the Knights of the Roundtable, it is a brotherhood united by a common purpose and mission. These brothers are meant to act as fathers for all the church, especially the poor, the women alone, and the fatherless boys.

This dynamic outward looking brotherhood receives the good news of Christ and faithfully transmits it to a hungry world. The homosexual cliques and their narcissist fellow travelers look inward to inhabit the bureaucratic offices, buildings, and rituals of Catholicism as costumes for a play they consider a useful fiction. The apostolic masculine bond instituted by Christ was meant “anthropologically” to look outward. The priestly masculine bond is deepened by incorporating men of every nation in communion with the Father and the Son. The healthy non incestuous masculine bond is “anthropologically evangelical.”

For an atheistic culture, celibacy is incomprehensible – and unnatural. But for Catholics, we know our nature is fulfilled by love for God our Father. Our purity codes could not match the splendor of our message if they were easy. Celibacy is difficult, but it marks the priesthood with a spiritual focus, pursued in imitation and anticipation of Christ. Our priests take on a difficult discipline, but it allows them to lead the laity in other difficult disciplines that the world says can’t be done – daily prayer, communal fasting and worship, faithful marriage and teenage virginity. All of these codes are to be lived joyfully and boldly. Properly lived and celebrated, both monogamous marriage and a celibate priesthood lead to the freedom of deep communal love.

These sacramental forms of love shape the deep personal loyalties of family and Church that define Catholic culture. There is a palpable Christian sensibility of vigor and vigilance that attends the discipline of sexual desire. Purity codes are not strictures that build up crazed sexual energy, like a raging river rising against a bulwark, creating pressure that downstream causes the flood wall to burst in a torrent of anti-social perversion. Purity, the Beatitudes teach us, lets us see the face of God. As Shakespeare wrote, it is when “Pure thoughts are dead and still / That Lust and murder wake to stain and kill.” It is not fatherhood or the all-male brotherhood that is the cause of sexual abuse and murder in the church. We need more fatherhood, not less; purity, not perversion; brotherhood, not incest; fatherly protection, not adolescent preening.

previous section | next section