By: Lizette Kingwergs (psychologist)

The main bases for formation are:

a) Human Maturity

b) Spiritual Maturity

Starting from here, let’s consider the following questions about celibacy formation:

• It is not about giving advice about the external behavior of chastity: “if there is not human and Christian love there is not human chastity either” (Note: the manifest and the latent; internal motivations).

• Chastity in not the only virtue. The main virtue is Charity.

• It is not about teaching people to behave well (not the external, but the internal). It is about to teach the individual to orient his celibacy to Christ and His Kingdom.

• It is important to strengthen: basic motivations and essential celibacy values.

• Vocation is a decision: free, conscious, responsible and generous choice.

• Every choice has a positive aspect (a kind of personal fulfillment) and a negative aspect (the renounce to other possible forms of personal fulfillment). “Having renounced to physical fatherhood or motherhood, the consecrated man or woman that never becomes a father or a mother in the apostolic field, would be diminished and live frustrated…” , “More fulfillment, less burden of the renounce”,“Less fulfillment, more burden of the renounce”, “what we have to worry about is not that you cannot have another reality, but not feeling fulfilled with the assumed choice”.

• Celibacy is not a state, it is a path and it is dynamic. You do not reach it with your first choice, it is a long and continuous learning.

• The idea of celibacy is not decency (manifestations that show a style of life), it is not abstinence; it is love to Christ and mankind. “Te most regrettable thing is not to find faults in celibacy, but chastity with an empty heart”.

• The motive or reason for consecrated chastity in a Christological sense is the personal love to Jesus Christ and in an ecclesiological sense it is the adhesion to the Church and the devotion to service mankind.

• Due to the above mentioned, it is very important to have a solid spiritual direction, and a real brotherly and communitarian life.


NOTE: This article was taken from Álvaro Jiménez Cadena.

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