Why A Married Priesthood Won't Remedy the Priest Shortage

New Oxford Review ^ | January 1999 | Patricia Dixon

[ThomasMore]

Personally, I think that's absurd. No more probable than a celebate priest breaking the seal. Remember, there's been married priests in the Church since the very beginning. I hope that "marriage" doesn't make someone any less trustworthy in confidential matters. That would be a slap against the holy sacrament of marriage. It all boils down to the person and there ability to keep a vow.

Why would Paul say, "[1 Tim 3:2] Therefore, a bishop must be irreproachable, married only once, temperate, self-controlled, decent, hospitable, able to teach..." and so forth if this was not a trustworthy state in life, even for a bishop?

[tcg]

Thanks for the affirmation

[Kolokotronis]

"Thanks for the affirmation"

You are very welcome, Deacon. May I make a couple of other observations and comments?

You write: "The nature of the Church as both from above and below must be re-presented and work its way into models of governance that recognize that the Church belongs to Jesus Christ; is a communion, and that we have all been invited into its governance through differing kinds of participation. Both the hierarchy and the lay faithful are called to serve. Without sacrificing the great gift of the hierarchy and the irreplaceable role and gift of the Magisterium, the teaching office with some newly concocted "democratic" model, the lay faithful should be invited into the leadership of those areas where they can most fruitfully serve the one work of the Church."

My initial reaction to this is that "democracy" is hardly a "newly concocted...model". In the East, the "syndesmos" of the laity, clergy and hierarchy together define the relationship of the three to each other in the functioning of the Church. All play roles in practically every area of the Church save in actually administering the sacraments, praying the Liturgy and maintaining order and discipline among the clergy and hierarchy, and even there the laity has a role to play in extreme circumstances. In areas of dogma and discipline, the laity has a major role in the East. Nothing, even the pronouncements of a council, can be considered dogma unless the Laos tou Theou, the People of God, accept the discipline or dogma and live it out in their daily lives. In the East, the laity and clergy are expected to participate in councils and actually vote. In some Orthodox Churches, the Church of Cyprus for example, the laity actually votes on the hierarchs. The syndesmos, or partnership (which is really what it is, not democracy, which unfortunately seems to have been translated into theological and liturgical license of late in the Roman Church) has been instilled in us for 2000 years. It is only seldom manifested in actions protecting the "rights" of the laity but more often is reflective of the mutual obligations each owes to the other. The Magisterium, a term we don't use, rests within this sydesmos and is not the sole province of the hierarchy.It manifests itself in the day to day existance of the Church and in the lives of the individuals who collectively make up the Church. Because these considerations have always been true in the East, we have not been innovators in the Faith that the Church always and everywhere has taught and believed. Issues like female ordination to the priesthood or the "role of women" in the Church, or some special "theology" of or for "liberation" or gays or whomsoever simply don't arise, or don't go anywhere. Ordinarily I think I might have said the sooner you switch over to the syndesmos of the pre-schism Church, the better, your problems stem from your ecclesiology, but.... As I think of it, it won't be simple for Rome to bring its Faithful back to the idea of syndesmos. Centuries of conditioning otherwise will make it extremely dangerous to suddenly say to the Faithful, "OK, now you all have a seat at the table with us hierarchs. The responsibility for the Church is now yours as well as ours, where do we start?" The response I suspect would be pandemonium, worse even than what Vatican II has brought about. In democratic, Western societies, there is a certain schitzophrenia in the RC laity, on the one hand in their religious lives "paying, praying and obeying" while living lives of free citizens in a democratic society on the other. The religious/spiritual life should be one and the same with the social or civic life and it can be, even in a democratic society, but not the way the Roman Church is presently structured. In the end, sydesmos is where you need to be. How you get there or when I don't know. One thing I can say, what the Roman Church needs as it goes through the renewal about which you write is absolute faithfulness to Holy Tradition. The "zeitgeist" is a demon and tailoring the Church to what that demon says today is a prescription for destruction. Look at what the zeitgeist, more than once, has done in Anglicanism. This is not to say that the Church turns its back on the world. It is in the world but not of the world. The Church does not exist "today" but eternally, off the timeline so to speak and as members of that Church, the Laos tou Theou, the clergy and the hierarchy, we live, finally, in that eternity.