vegete

This film is very enlightening about the sexual conflicts which will of course arise in an environment of imposed celibacy. We know from the facts of the modern church that many priests do not achieve celibacy, and that their sexuality is a force which if ignored or abused will go awry and cause grave trouble for the community. Without getting to those dire consequences, the priest in El Sacerdote recognizes his own apparent obsession with sex (really a normal degree of physical desire coming head to head with religious restriction), and turns to his superiors for help. The efforts to change him, to affirm the counter-instinctual ban on sex, lead through a tour of his childhood and the foundation of a man's life. Sex never wants to go away, and so it becomes a contest of mind over matter, as it were. It is a failure of man if he does not accept his own physical reality, care for it and respect it's mysteries. The macrocosm is our world and universe--the heavens--and how we care for our role in that. The microcosm is our own mind-body existence, the locus of each man's world. The priest finds out that one cannot deny the body, home of desire, just as we do not deny mind, home of the spirit. His tragedy is a giant finger pointing at the church, accusing it quite rightly of being forever stuck in the kindergarten of spirituality, ostensibly deprived of the infinite wisdom that would come from a sexually mature world view.