Posted by Harry Coin on 3/30/2008, 7:26 pm
The US National Library of Medicine, a Bethesda, Maryland based department of the U.S. National Institute of Health, offers a very important and apropos to our church situation scholarly article in many parts. I encourage folk to read the first half of this part of the article, and also a bit of the section earlier as well:
http://www.nlm.nih.gov/exhibition/cesarean/cesarean_4.html
There you will read of why, for the first time in human history, the Orthodox Church in its episcopate and the Roman Catholic church in general has near zero people in the available pool of men whose choice to be clergy arose from the actual sacrifice of giving up marriage (over against disliking or not desiring to marry a woman in the first place).
Why? Because the population of widowers in their working years has dropped to almost zero.
Most obviously, this demographic fact was not foreseen by those writing the canons of the church. It was not foreseeable as even the dimmest possibility by anyone alive prior to 1880, certainly centuries after Orthdox church discipline as to who might serve as a bishop was last amended.
Neither discretion nor denial can overcome this demographic reality. Widowers who actually gave up a second marriage, actually made a sacrifice to become church leaders, who actually earned the moral respect of those in town as they themselves knew the measure of the suffering and burdens of family life, not as know-it-all students who never married --- These were the men who can, and did, inspire those similarly situated (all married folk) to fully engage the message of the Gospel in the church.
I do not diminish the contrbutions of the many entirely monastic heros of the church. They obviously continue to inspire those similarly situated. But let us count noses in our church using real math, not P.R. math.
I submit that unless the Orthodox Church restores senior married clergy as full voting members of synods in numbers sufficient to police our own episcopal ranks it will continue to dwindle overall.
As we all know, the number of accomplished married men even in our ethnic communities are over-represented in control of the largest businesses in the USA -- but who are not involved in the church as they do not and plainly can not feel as though they can respect church leaders drawn entirely from groups who never knew more than a student about what it means to be married and be a father.
In some ways, we face an echo of 'what isn't assumed can't be saved'. If the leadership is only drawn from the 'ordained young and never married', and not as the gospel says 'from among the people in general'. We can't expect to survive as a church for long.
I encourage those academics among us capable in sociology and anthropolgy to flesh out the apropos population counts over the years. I bet it will show our collective problems began to magnify as the voices of the once-married were lost from the synods.
