The Church, indeed, considers prayer so indispensable to her clergy that, besides the voluntary exercises of piety which their private devotion may suggest, she requires them to devote at least an hour each day to the recitation of the Divine Office, which chiefly consists of the Psalms and other portions of Holy Scripture, the Homilies of the early Fathers and prayers of marvelous force and unction.
Chapter XXX.
Celibacy Of The Clergy.
The Church requires her Priests to be pure in body as well as in soul, and to “present their bodies a living victim, holy, well-pleasing unto God.”[514]
Our Savior and His Apostles, though recognizing matrimony as a holy state, have proclaimed the superior merits of voluntary continency, particularly for those who consecrate their lives to the sacred ministry. “There are eunuchs who have made themselves such for the Kingdom of Heaven's sake. He who can take it, let him take it.”[515] Our Lord evidently recommends here the state of celibacy to such as feel themselves called to embrace it, in order to attain greater perfection.
St. Paul gives the reason why our Savior declares continency to be a more suitable state for His ministers than that of matrimony: “He who is unmarried careth for the things of the Lord—how he may please God. But he who is married is solicitous about the things of the world—how he may please his wife—and he is divided.”[516]
Jesus Christ manifestly showed His predilection for virginity, not only by always remaining a virgin, but by selecting a Virgin-Mother and a virgin-precursor in the person of St. John the Baptist, and by exhibiting a special effection for John [pg 400] the Evangelist, because, as St. Augustine testifies, that Apostle was chosen a virgin and such he always remained.
Not only did our Lord thus manifest while on earth a marked predilection for virgins, but He exhibits the same preference for them in heaven; for the hundred and forty-four thousand who are chosen to sing the New Canticle and who follow the Lamb whithersoever He goeth are all virgins, as St. John testifies. (Apoc. xiv.)