Dr Peters is doubtless making a great number of clerics very uncomfortable...

As his argument that married permanent deacons are (and have always been meant to be) obliged to continence within their marriages makes its way through the ecclesiastical ether.  Father John Boyle, too, has commented on the questions involved. The Cochini book, by the way, is a wonderful example of theological investigation.

Update on Sunday, January 16, 2011 at 23:47 by Marc

Noticed this exchange between the Reverend Mr Kandra (that's the style I've used and I'm sticking to it), who is a non-transitional deacon and a well-known public Catholic, and Dr Peters.

One has to wonder if perhaps this may prove to be a significant blow of the iceberg Tradition, as it were, against the famously impervious hull of the Titanic of the post-Second Vatican Council 'new church' folks in this country-- those affluent bourgeoises who are happy with their score of ministers of Holy Communion, their insipid rock-folk musicians, their parish bulletin admonitions to 'smile at their neighbors' and 'get to know them' as the pax is exchanged, their chanceries staffed with bureaucrats more interested in pseudo-clerical credentials and privileges than in the service of Holy Mother Church, their newspapers and magazines full of dissent, the worship of Moloch, and the memoirs of self-satisfied relicts of the 1960s.

It occurs to me that the late and most eminent theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar wrote a book called The Christian State of Life which includes a profound discussion of the necessary complements of continence and of celibacy in the life of a believer who chooses the religious or clerical states of life. 

Update on Monday, January 17, 2011 at 14:03 by Marc

I put #deaconscontroversy on Twitter, intending to retweet comments on this business to that hashtag. We shall see; my resolutions anent things etherial are often broken.

Update on Tuesday, January 18, 2011 at 10:24 by Marc

The estimable Father Ray Blake has addressed the question of married priests and what continentia entails for them; "married clergy are not expected to forgo the marriage bed", he writes, clearly referring, I think, to priests.  He continues re permanent deacons:

In the West the revival of the permanent Diaconate, for married men, after the Council and the admission of former non-Catholic married clergy to the priesthood, a concession first granted by Pius XII to certain Lutherans, seems to have been done in ignorance of the historic understanding of celibacy. Most of the Patristic studies of celibacy seems to have been done by men like Roman Cholij after these modern introductions, which is perhaps an interesting practical example of the development of doctrine.

We shall see. I suppose that the good pastor doesn't imply that Dr Peters (who is, after all, a recently named consultor to the Sacred Roman Rota) is incapable and plainly silly.