It is normal for a sober adult citizen to take the wildness and absurdities of the younger generation tolerantly and with a touch of envious admiration, just as those adults who are more inhibited and insecure always must deplore them and feel that things are going to the dogs. In solidly established Augustan ages, such as the period in England between 1688 and the Industrial Revolution, the excesses of well-brought-up young men are even socially obligatory, under the style of sowing wild oats. In outrageously bad ages, such as the period around the World since the COVID-19 pandemic, rebellious youth is esteemed as the hoped-for agent of change. These attitudes all make sense and are still current. There has no doubt been a spirit of variously tolerant, envying, deploring, approving, and esteeming. It is not an interesting question whether or not our present Youth Problems are fundamentally different from those of other times, whether or not they will blow over; whether the Beats are a fad and the Delinquents no worse than in 1850. Rather, such problems, by their form and content, test and criticize the society in which they occur. The burden of proof, as to who is “wrong,” does not rest with the young but always with the system of society. Some societies bear it easily; our society is not outrageously bad, but it is far from adequate, and it stand the test poorly. A poor showing is proved by the fact that young people are paid attention to as a group, as they must be if they are importantly “in the right”; and there are Fathers and Sons, or Flaming Youth, or Youth Problems. In America, our Flaming Youth and Youth Problems have occurred after great wars, for then the adults really disgraced themselves.

We must distinguish between two kinds of special attention paid these days by the Americas to their young. The first is the effect of the disappointment and resignation of the older generation—it is a kind of Lear complex: they themselves have failed to be men and women; they are therefore both timid and guilty before the young. With respect to children, this adult resignation results in the child-centered suburb and the emphasis on “psychology.” With regard to the adolescents, it appears as a craving for youth for oneself, to act like youth, to give in to youth, meaning by youth the teenage foolishness that still has some vitality. This comes to the 27.7 million American teenagers, who spend an estimated $63 billion annually, what can these kids think up except to imitate the customers of their elders? Naturally, once there is such a vast market, sales-minded publicists give most earnest attention to youth. This kind of youth is far from “problematic.” It seems that it will be even more worthless than its parents, and God pity us. However, the second kind of attention is that claimed by the problematic who are importantly in the right. They are problematic because they try to vomit up the poisonous mores. They will not eat them—they are sick because they have eaten too many of them. And they are in the right” because they are obviously in the right, everybody knows it. Flaming Youth of the 1920s had salutary effects. It speeded the sexual revolution and the new permissive psychology of child care. It put the seal on the new simple prose. Our present round of Youth Problems has been dampened and delayed by war anxiety and disillusionment, yet event so it will have, it has already had, positive successes. The young people have latched on to the movement in art that is the strongest in our generation, the so-called Action Painting or New York School.

In music, the matching numbers are the percussive atonalists like Varese, or the musique concrete made of the tapes. There is an Action Architecture. Artaud preached an Action Theater. We have tried to show that this disposition to go back to the material elements and the real situation, is intrinsic and spontaneous in the art action and poetry action of some of the young groups. This means that they are not off the main track. It can be said that this Action art lacks content, it does not carry enough humanity. And we know this to be true. However, it is just its eschewing of a stereotyped or corrupt content while nevertheless affirming the incorruptible content of the artist’s own action, that is its starved and brave humanity—a step beyond the nihilism of Dada—a beginning. Young people have hit, too, on rituals of expression in face-to-face groups, and in provoking the public audience as a face-to-face group, that are clearly better than the canned popular culture or the academic culture. However, these things are in line with what the best sociologists and community planners are also after. It is a move against anomie and the lonely crowd. Naturally it is drunken and threadbare. The English Angry Young Men, again, have specialized in piercing the fraudulent speech of public spokesmen and in trying to force them out to put up or shut up. They have learned to cry out “Shame!” When a million Americans—and not only young men—can learn to do this, we shall have a most salutary change. Disaffected young groups in America, England, and France have also flatly taken direct action in race relations. They present racial brotherhood and miscegenation as a fait accompli. More generally, all the recent doings of problematic youth, whether in the middle of class or among the underprivileged juvenile delinquents, have had a stamp of at least partly springing from some existent situation, whatever it is, and of responding with direct action, rather than keeping up appearances and engaging in role playing.

There is also among them a lot of phony role playing, but no more than in present acceptable society, and rather less than in the average young man or adolescent who has a “line.” I think that the existential reality of Beat, Angry, and Delinquent behavior is indicated by the fact that other, earnest, young fellows who are not themselves disaffected and who are not phony, are eager to heart about them, and respect them. One cannot visit a university without being asked a hundred questions about them. Finally, some of these groups are achieving a simpler fraternity, and animality, and sexuality than we have had, at lest in America, in a long, long time. This valuable program is in direct contrast to the mores of what we have been calling “the organized system,” its public relations, and its avoidance of risk and self-exposure. That system and its mores are death to the spirit, and any rebellious group will naturally raise a contrasting banner. Now the organized system is very powerful and in its full tide of success, apparently sweeping everything before it in science, education, community planning, labor, the arts, not to speak of business and politics where it is indigenous. Let me say that we of the previous generation who have been sickened and enraged to see earnest and honest effort and human culture swamped by this muck, are heartened by the crazy young allies, and we think that perhaps the future may make more sense than we dared hope. Each of us has the moral and social duty to draw the line somewhere against obedience to error. We cannot afford to throw away good teachers to save face for mistaken administrators. It is the glory of good administration precisely to smooth the path for objective work to proceed. Dr. Freud was very dubious about the future of civilization and the role of reason in the life of humans.

He certainly was not a convinced advocate of democracy or equality. And Dr. Weber, much more thoughtful than Dr. Freud about science, morals and politics, lived in an atmosphere of permanent tragedy. His science was formulated as a doubtful dare against the chaos of things, and values certainly lay beyond its limit. This is what the very precarious, not to say imaginary, distinction between facts and values meant. Reason in politics leads to the inhumanity of bureaucracy. Dr. Weber found it impossible to prefer rational politics to the politics of irrational commitments like any other commitments, incapable of asserting their own goodness, thus having lost what had always been most distinctive in them. Politics required dangerous and uncontrollable semireligious value positing, and Dr. Weber was witnessing a struggle of the gods for possession of man and society, the results of which were unpredictable. Calculating reason would end up in dried-up, heartless and soulless administration of things without community-forming and sustaining values; feeling would lead to selfish indulgence in superficial pleasures; political commitment would likely foster fanaticism, and it was questionable whether there was enough value-positing energy left in humans. Everything was up in the air, and there was no theodicy to sustain one in one’s travail. Dr. Weber, along with many other in Germany under Nietzsche’s influence, saw that all that we care for was threatened by his insight and that we were without intellectual or moral resources to govern the outcome. We require values, which in turn require a peculiar human creativity that is drying up and, in any event, has no cosmic support. Scientific analysis itself concludes that reason is powerless, while dissolving the protective horizon within which humans can have no value.

None of this is peculiar to Dr. Weber or comes simply from his distressed personality, which he had at least partly because of the bleak perspective that lay before him. If it is true and it is believed in, there is no doubt that value relativism takes one into very dark regions of the soul and very dangerous political experiments. However, on enchanted American ground the tragic sense has little place, and the early proponents of the new social science gaily accepted the value insight, sure that their values were just fine, and went ahead with science. Compare the character and concern of Talcott Parsons with those of Max Weber and you have the measure of the distance between the Continent and us. In Parsons you see the routinization of Weber. It was not until the sixties that the value insight began to have its true effects in the Untied States of America, as it had had in Germany thirty or forty years earlier. Suddenly a new generation that had not lived off inherited value fat, that had been educated in philosophic and scientific indifference to good and evil, came on the scene representing value commitment and taught their elders a most unpleasant lesson. The image of this astonishing Americanization of the German pathos could be seen in the smiling face of Louis Armstrong as the belted out the words of this great hit “Mack the Knife.” As most American intellectuals know, it is a translation of the song “Mackie Messer” from The Threepenny Opera, a monument of Weimar Republic popular culture written by two heroes of the artistic Left, Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill. There is a strange nostalgia among many of the American intelligentsia for this moment just prior to Hitler’s coming to power, and Lotte Lenya’s rendition of this song has long stood with Marlene Dietrich’s singing “Ich bin von Kopf bis Fuss auf Liebe eingestellt” in the Blue Angel as the symbol of a charming, neurotic, sexy, decadent longing for some hazy fulfillment not quite present to the consciousness.

Less known to our intelligentsia is an aphorism in Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra, a book well known to Brecht, entitled “On the Pale Criminal,” which tells the story of a neurotic murderer, eerily resembling Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment, who does not know, cannot know, that he committed murder out of a motive as legitimate as any other and useful in many important situations, but delegitimized in our pacific times: he lusted after “the joy of the knife.” This scenario for “Mack the Knife” is the beginning of the supra-moral attitude of expectancy, waiting to see what the volcano of the id will spew forth, which appealed to Weimar and its American admirers. Everything is all right as long as it is not fascism! With Armstrong taking Lenya’s place, as Mai Britt took Dietrich’s it is all mass-marketed and the message becomes less dangerous, although no less corrupt. All awareness of foreignness disappears. It is thought to be folk culture, all-American, part of the American century, just as “stay loose” (as opposed to uptight) is supposed to have been an insight of rock music and not a translation of Heidegger’s Gelassenheit. The historical sense and the distance on our times, the only advantage of Weimar nostalgia, are gone, and American self-satisfaction—the sense that the sense is ours, that we have nothing important to learn about life from the part—is served. If only one substitutes Mary McCarthy for Louis Armstrong and Hannah Ardent for Lotte Lenya, or David Riesman for Armstrong and Erich Fromm for Lenya, and so on through the honor roll of American intellectuals, this image can be seen in our intellectual history. Our stars are singing a song they do not understand, translated from a German original and having a huge popular success with unknow but wide-ranging consequences, as something the original message touches something in American souls. However, behind it all, the master lyricists are Nietzsche and Heidegger.

Demography, some believe, is destiny. If so, destiny is changing along with everything else. We are fast approaching the point at which a billion people (currently 962 million) will be over the age sixty. By 2050, there will be 2.1 billion people over the age is sixty. Life expectancy at birth is increasing, even in many parts of the less affluent World, according to the World Health Organization. In the last half century—in spite of all their poverty, misery, disease, water shortages and environmental disasters—developing countries have seen average life expectancy shoot upward from forty-one years in the early 1950s to sixty-two by 1990 to nearly eighty years old as of 2020. Meanwhile, demographers at Cambridge University and the Max Planck Institute in Germany tell us that a female baby born in France today has a 50 percent chance of living to age one hundred—which would put her into the twenty second century. The World Health Organization (WHO) reports that Europe, as a region, is not the “oldest” part of the World, while Japan, as a nation, has the highest percentage of people over age sixty. Currently Japan has the highest proportion of elderly citizens of any country in the World. The country is experiencing a “super-ageing” society both in rural and urban areas. It is estimated that in 2022, 41 percent of the Japanese population is above the age 60, 27 percent are age 65 or above, and 14 percent are aged 75 or above. And in Japan, France, Germany and Spain, among people over sixty, one in five will be older than eighty. No country’s health-care system has been designed for this combination of diseases heavily dependent on behavioral and lifestyle factors plus an aging population. It is historically new, and no currently proposed “reform” of health care will be added to deal with it. Nor do we adequately understand the full effects of these changes on taxes, pensions, housing, employment, retirement, finance and other key wealth variables. What is needed is far more drastic than mere reform.

When you are watching television the major thing you are doing is looking at light. This in itself represents an enormous change in human experience. For four hours a day, human beings sit in dark rooms, their bodies stilled, gazing at light. Nothing like this has ever happened before. Previous generations, millions of them, looked at starlight, firelight and moonlight, and there is no doubt that these experiences stir important feelings. There are cultures that spent time gazing at the sun, but there is no culture in all of history that has spent such enormous blocks of time, all of the people together, every day, sitting in dark rooms looking at artificial lights. TV viewing is so important that homes builders are not building large rooms in houses, without windows, so home buyers can have a theater like experience. Television might itself might represent a surrogate moon; a substitute for the original experience for which we, somewhere, continue to long. If true, this might be merely poignant if it were not for some important distinctions between looking at the moon or a fire and looking at television. Television light is purposeful and directed rather than ambient. LCD and plasma TVs are thin and light. LCD stands for liquid crystal display. Liquid crystal is a substance that flows like a liquid but has some tiny solid parts, too. The display sends light and electric current through the liquid crystal. The electric current causes the solid parts to move around. They block or let light through in a certain way to make the picture on the screen. A plasma display has tiny colored lights containing a gas called plasma. Electric current sent through the plasma causes it to give off lights, which makes the picture. LCD televisions will operate between 100 and 200 volts of electricity. Plasma TVs used between 240 and 575 volts. The streams of light glow, and the light projects from the screen into our eyes.

However, it is not quite accurate to say that when we watch television, we are looking at light; it is more accurate to say that the light is projected into we. We are receiving light through our eyes into our bodies, far enough in to affect our endocrine system. Some physicists say that the eye does not distinguish between ambient light, which comes straight at the eye, undeterred, but others think the different is important. There is another hot debate in physics on the question of whether light is particulate matter or wave energy. For our purposes, however, what needs to be appreciated is that whether light is matter of energy it is a thing which is entering us. When you are watching television, you are experiencing something like lines of energy passing from the TV into your eyes and body. You are connected to the television set as your arm would be to the electrical current in the wall—about which there is the same question of wave versus particle—if you had stuck a knife into the socket. These are not metaphors. There is concentrated passage of energy from machine to you, and none in reverse. In this sense, the machine is literally dominant, and you are passive. And this can be bad for your eyes. Blue light from electronics is linked to problems like blurry vision, eyestrain, dry eye, macular degeneration, and cataracts. Some people have sleep issues. Blue light may also damage your retinas. That is called phototoxicity. The amount of damage depends on wavelength and exposure time. Animal studies show even short exposure (a few minutes to several hours) may be harmful. A filter that cuts 94 percent of blue light has been show to lessen damage. There is evidence blue light could lead to permanent vision changes. Almost all blue light passes straight through to the back of your retina. Blue light exposure might raise your risk for certain cancers. One study found that people who work the night shift are at greater risk for breast, prostate, and colorectal cancers.

Nighttime exposure not only causes sleep disturbance, but is also linked to depressive symptoms in animal studies. In one celebrated series of studies, the roots of bean plants were placed in front of a color television set and they grew upward out of the soil. Another set of plants became monstrously large and distorted. Mice which were similarly placed developed cancerous lesions, but these new TVs only emit a small amount of radiation. However, LCD, LED, and plasma TVs still to emit enough radiation at a close distance that it is worth keeping your children and yourself at a fair distance. When plants are affected by artificial light, the chloroplasts usually vary from moving faster, more slowly, sluggishly, or they may leap about crazily, completely out of synchrony with the prior pattern. Humans and animals, which are made up of virtually the same chemical mixture as plants, also react to light in various ways. We receive light through the cells of our skin, but more remarkably, we receive light through our eyes and absorb it into our cell structure. Light effects changes in particular strains of cancer-sensitive laboratory rats. Pink fluorescent produces the highest rates of cancer in rats; natural daylight the lowest. In one experiment involving three hundred cancer-sensitive mice, these were the results: ordinary day light, 97 percent survival rate. All fluorescent 88, percent survival rate. White florescent, 94 percent survival rate. Pink fluorescent, 61 percent survival rate. Cancer was not the only reaction to artificial light. When mice were kept under one particular pink fluorescent for long periods of time, their tails would literally wither and fall off. Under a certain dark blue fluorescent, the cholesterol level in the blood of the mice rose sharply; male mice became obese, although the females did not.

Experiments were done on other animals as well. A filter placed over ordinary incandescent light was found to weaken and rupture the heart cells of chick embryos. A blue incandescent light placed over the cages of chinchillas increased the number of females in the litter; a similar light increased the female population of some fish in a tank. Other light changes caused aggressiveness, hyperactive behavior, aimlessness and disorientation, as well as changes in sexual patterns among mice, rats and other animals. Sounds like reading is a really healthy option to TV viewing.  Neurologists and psychologists had known since the end of the nineteenth century that our brains hold more than one kind of memory. In 1885, the German psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus conducted an exhausting series of experiments, using himself as the sole subject, that involved memorizing two thousand nonsense word. He discovered that his ability to retain a word in memory strengthened the more times he studied the word and that it was much easier to memorize a half dozen words at a sitting than to memorize a dozen. He also found that the process of forgetting had two stages. Most of the words he studied disappeared from his memory very quickly, within an hour after he rehearsed them, but a smaller set stayed put much longer—they slipped away only gradually. The results of Ebbinghaus’s tests led William James to conclude, in 1890, that memories were of two kinds: “primary memories,” which evaporated from the mind soon after the event that inspired them, and “secondary memories,” which the brain could hold onto indefinitely. At around the same time, studies of boxers revealed that a concusive blow to the head could bring on retrograde amnesia, erasing all memories stored during the preceding few minutes or hours while leaving older memories intact. The same phenomenon was noted in epileptics after they suffered seizures.

Such observations implied that a memory, even a strong one, remains unstable for a brief period after it is formed. A certain amount of time seemed to be required for a primary, or short-term, memory to be transformed into a secondary, or long-term, one. The hypothesis was backed up by research conducted by two other German psychologists, Georg Muller and Alfons Pilzecker, in the late 1890s. In variation on Ebbinghaus’s experiments, they asked a group of people to memorize a list of nonsense words. A day later, they tested the group and found that the subjects had no problem recalling the list. The researchers then conducted the same experiment on another group of people, but this time they had the subjects study a second list of words immediately after learning the first list. In the next day’s test, this group was unable to remember the initial set of words. Muller and Pilzecher then conducted one last trial, with another twist. The third group of subjects memorized the first list of words and then, after a delay of two hours, were given the second list to study. This group, like the first, had little trouble remembering the initial list of words the next day. Muller and Pilzecker concluded that it takes an hour or so for memories to become fixed, or “consolidated,” in the brain. Short-term memories do not become long-term memories immediately, and the process of their consolidation is delicate. Any disruption, whether a jab to the head or a simple distraction, can sweep the nascent memories from the mind. Subsequent studies confirmed the existence of short-term and long-term forms of memory and provided further evidence of the importance of the consolidation phase during which the former are turned into the later.

In the 1960s, University of Pennsylvania neurologist Louis Flexner made a particularly interesting discovery. After injecting mice with an antibiotic drug that prevented their cells from producing proteins, he found that the animals were unable to form long-term memories (about how to avoid receiving a shock while in a maze) but could continue to store short-term ones. The implication was clear: long-term memories are not just stronger forms of short-terms memories. The two types of memory entail different biological processes. Storing long-term memories requires the synthesis of new proteins. Storing short-term memories does not. Before the printing press, children became adults by learning to speak, for which all people are biologically programmed. After the printing press, children had to earn adulthood by achieving literacy, for which people are not biologically programmed. This meant that schools had to be created. In the Middle Ages, there was no such thing as primary education. In England, for example, there were thirty-four schools in the entire country in the year 1480. By the year 1660, there were more than 450, one school for every twelve square miles. With the establishment of schools, it was inevitable that the young would come to be viewed as a special class of people whose minds and character were qualitatively different from adults’. Because the school was designed for the preparation of literate adults, the young came to be perceived not as miniature adults but something quite different—unformed adults. School learning because identified with the special nature of childhood. Childhood, in turn, became defined by school attendance, and the word “schoolboy” became a synonym for the word “child.” We began, in short, to see human development as a series of stages, of which childhood is a bridge between infancy and adulthood.

For the past 350 years, we have been developing and refining our concept of childhood; we have been developing and refining institutions for the nurturing of children; and we have conferred upon children a preferred status, reflected in the special ways we expect them to think, talk, dress, play, and learn. All of this, I believe, is now coming to an end, at least in the United States of America. And it is coming to an end because of our communication environment has been radically altered once again, this time by electronic media, especially television. Television has a transforming power at least equal to that of the printing press and possibly as great as that of the alphabet itself. And it is my contention that with the assistance of other media such as radio, film, and records, television has the power to lead us to childhood’s end. Here is how the transformation is happening. To begin with, television is essentially non-linguistic; it presents information mostly in visual images. Although human speech is heard on television, and sometimes assumes importance, people mostly watch television. And what they watch are rapidly changing visual images—as many as, 1,200 different shorts every hour. The average length of a shot on network television is 3.5 second; the average in the commercial is 2.5 seconds. This requires very little analytic decoding. In America, television-watching is almost wholly a matter or pattern recognition. What I am saying is that the symbolic form of television does not require any special instruction or learning. In America, television-viewing begins at about the age of eighteen months, and by thirty-six months children begin to understand and respond to television imagery. They have favorite characters, they sing jingles they hear, and they ask for products they see advertised.

There is no need for any preparation or prerequisite training for watching television; it needs no analogue to the McGuffer Reader. Watching television requires no skills and develops no skill. That is why there is no such thing as remedial television-watching. That is also why you are no better today at watching television than you were five years ago, or ten. And that is also why there is no such thing, in reality, as children’s programming. Everything is for everybody. So far as symbolic form is concerned “Blue Bloods” is as sophisticated or as simple to grasp as “Sesame Street.” Unlike books, which vary greatly in syntactical and lexical complexity and which may be scaled according to the ability of the reader, television presents information in a form that is undifferentiated in its accessibility. And that is why adults and children tend to watch the same programs. I might add, in case anyone is thinking that children and adults at least watch at different times, that approximately 3 million children watch television every day of the year between 11.30pm and two in the morning. What I am saying is that television erases the dividing line between childhood and adulthood in two ways: it requires no instruction to grasp its form, and it does not segregate its audience. Therefore, it communicates the same information to everyone, simultaneously, regardless of age, gender, level of education, or previous condition of servitude. One might say that the main difference between an adult and a child is that the adult knows about certain facets or life—its mysteries, its contradictions, its violence, its tragedies—that are not considered suitable for children to know. As children move toward adulthood, we reveal these secrets to them in ways we believe they are prepared to manage. That is why there is a such thing as children’s literature. However, television makes this arrangement quite impossible.

Because television operates virtually around the clock, it requires a constant supply of novel and interesting information to hold its audience. This means that all adult secrets—social, sexual, physical, and the like—are revealed. Television forces the entire culture to come out of the closet, taps every existing taboo. Incest, divorce, promiscuity, corruption, adultery, sadism—each is now merely a theme for one or another television show. And, of course, in the process, each loses its role as an exclusively adult secret. This caused a golden glow of optimism which warmed religious yearning for fundamental change. And why not? Unwillingly celibate—or guiltily uncelibate—religious were convinced optional celibacy would solve the age-old dilemma, making honest men and women of those called to the service of God but without the concomitant sacrifice of their sexuality. Some confident priests even took the extraordinary step of marrying, certain that Vatican II would vindicate and legitimize their status. However, the Church still seems unsure on its stance on celibacy.  Some believe that public deliberations on celibacy are totally inappropriate and that the Church must preserve the rule of celibacy. Priestly celibacy has been guarded by the Church for centuries as a brilliant jewel, and retains it value undiminished even in our time when mentality and structures have undergone such profound change. A desire [has been] expressed, to ask the Church to reexamine this characteristic institution of hers. It is said that in the World of our time its observation has come to be of doubtful value and almost impossible. However, I believe it is just a sign of the times, everything is becoming less formal and people cannot control the desires of their loins and are ready to give up and engage in carnal desires.

Celibacy is freely chosen as an act of obedience to either a special religious or spiritual gift. The Church Fathers wrote long ago—different times, different mores. If they cannot accept lifetime celibacy, the rule of celibacy bars devout Catholics blessed with religious calling from joining holy orders. The Church values clerical celibacy more highly than the need for priests in desperately undermanned parishes Worldwide. A married priesthood would eliminate most of the harmful deceptions and hypocrisy currently eroding its membership. Perpetual celibacy has detrimental physical and psychological effects, including alienation and bitterness. A religious’s  acceptance of celibacy is passive rather than voluntary. Convincing? Shatteringly so? The sum of these objections would appear to drown out the solemn and age-old voice of the pastors of the Church and of the masters of the spiritual life, and to nullify the living testimony of the countless ranks of saints and faithful ministers of God, for whom celibacy has been the object of the total and generous gift of themselves to the mystery of Christ, as well as its outward sign. The heart and soul assures true celibates that the present law of celibacy should today continue to be firmly linked to the ecclesiastical ministry [and] should support the minister in his exclusive, definitive, and total choice of the unique and supreme love of God. Christ was a lifetime celibate and recommended celibacy as a special gift. Celibacy denotes and also generates great charity, love, and spiritual devotion. Priest “made captive by Christ” come to share his essence, of which celibacy is an essential feature. Priests who face “a daily dying,” or renunciation of legitimate families, will draw closer to God. Celibacy liberates religious from familial demands that would take time away from ministry. Celibacy is not unnatural, for God-given logic and free will can overcome pleasures of the flesh. Solitary religious are not lonely but rather filled with God’s presence. Occasional loneliness replicates the life of Christ, who in the most tragic hours of his life was alone. The lamentable defections of priests are not a reflection on the rigors of celibacy but on the inadequacies of the initial screening process. Rather than warping personalities, celibacy contributes to maturity and psychic integration. The law of priestly celibacy existing in the Latin Church is to be kept it its entirety.

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