Cultured, idealistic, sympathetic, he seemed to Tess a demigod ,and though she had sworn herself to celibacy, the enforced propinquity ripened into intimacy and drifted into love.
It is campaigning for an end to celibacy, “inclusive ministry” (code for women priests) and a rethinking of sexual teaching, especially on contraception.
An ascetic is one who devotes himself to a solitary and contemplative life, with rigorous discipline of the self, as by celibacy, fasting, and self-mortification.
His belief in celibacy, so reticent, so carefully concealed beneath his tolerance and culture, now came to the surface and expanded like some delicate flower.
Then Homais congratulated him on not being exposed, like other people, to the loss of a beloved companion; whence there followed a discussion on the celibacy of priests.
In a BBC interview, Cardinal Keith O’Brien said the next pope will be free to change the current policy because the principle of celibacy wasn’t of divine origin as it hadn’t come directly from Jesus Christ.
Chastity and celibacy, it is urged, cannot constitute the ideal of humanity, because chastity would annihilate the race which strove to realize it, and humanity cannot set up as its ideal its own annihilation.
This latter step, however, there was no present prospect that Arthur Dimmesdale would be prevailed upon to take; he rejected all suggestions of the kind, as if priestly celibacy were one of his articles of church-discipline.