Illicit Celibacy and the Deposit of Faith

Edgar Davie, born Dec.1, 1933, graduated with Bachelor of Engineering degree Vanderbilt University 1958. He served as 2Lt, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, 1958-60, and studied law at Nashville School of Law 1962-63. Davie married in 1964 and is the father of seven children, all of whom graduated from Catholic schools. He attends St. Ann Catholic Church in Nashville and served as Committee Chairman for VOTF, Nashville, TN, 2002. The initial copies of his new book were presented first to his bishop and to his priest.

His professional career as a Civil Engineer consisted of: Bridge designer for Tennessee Department of Transportation; he concluded his professional career as the first Executive Director of the Tennessee Concrete Association, a nationally affiliated trade and marketing association, charged with educating designers and builders of municipal, state, and federal infrastructure projects. He retired in 1994 to pursue his lifelong desire to become a professional portrait artist. www.PortraitsByEdgar.com

A religious experience in 1980 led to 30 years private study into the historical origins of Christianity as a Jewish sect, and the later beginnings of other Christian denominations, as well as comparative theologies of Islam and non-monotheistic beliefs. He has also written on the composition, source material, and chronology of the New Testament. Writing in 1999 to demonstrate that Catholicism is the visible organized Church left by Jesus, he self published a book Before the Bible: Beliefs and Practices of the First Christians, tracing the Church’s beginnings until Constantine in 325AD. His book concluded that all original Christian doctrines until that time were correct.

In 1982 Davie’s Cursillo group sponsored Fr. Mitch Pacwa S.J.’s first daily radio program, explaining Catholic doctrine to a Protestant audience. Today Fr. Pacwa is Director of Mother Angelica’s Eternal Word Television Network (EWTN-TV)

Only after eighteen years of continued investigation in order to better understand the historical Jesus, and the lives of His apostles, did new concerns arise concerning Church development after Constantine that departed from Christianities’ first teachings. Having initially defended priestly celibacy as a freely chosen discipline, based solely on historical Catholic apologetics, new concerns arose with the advent of modern priestly sex abuse allegations. Having twice experienced pedophilic abuse as a child he devoted two years investigation into clinical and psychological literature explaining the nature, content, cause and effect of pedophilia. These traits are evident in the selection and formation of many clerics who suffer from arrested psychosexual development. The author believes a married priesthood will redress sexual predators of both orientations.

His new historical examination of celibacy led both to a vastly different conclusion regarding the neo-Christian practice of mandatory celibacy for priests and, ultimately, to a new book, Illicit Celibacy and the Deposit of Faith. He now concludes the origin of mandatory celibacy, lost in the fog of history, has been incorrectly imbued into Christian Catholics for 900 years, and has apparently gone unnoticed by generations of Catholic teachers as an unjustified change from our original traditions, left to Christianity in the infallible Deposit of Faith, and of the infallible Ordinary and Universal Magisterium.