Posted on 01/25/2005 5:56:05 AM PST by Catholic54321
Australian Catholic priests are urging Rome to overturn its ban on married clergy as the church grapples with a chronic shortage of ordained priests.
The unprecedented submission to the Vatican directly challenges the obligation of celibacy, a prerequisite of the Catholic priesthood, and has reignited a debate within the church that has been simmering since the Middle Ages.
The National Council of Priests wrote to the Vatican's Synod of Bishops last month arguing that marriage should be no bar to ordination and asking the church to consider readmitting priests who had left the clergy to marry.
It also asked the church to extend the right held by thousands of married clergy who converted to Catholicism from other faiths to practise as priests to other married men.
About half of Australia's 1649 Catholic clergy, including 42 bishops and three cardinals, are members of the National Council of Priests, including the Archbishop of Sydney, Cardinal George Pell
The council's chairman, Father Hal Ranger, said the changes were necessary to ensure Catholics had continued access to the sacraments. Vast distances and cultural or lifestyle factors, combined with decreasing priest numbers, meant the opportunity for some Catholics to celebrate the eucharist was "drastically limited". It was important to take decisive action so that Sunday mass and celebration of the sacraments was reasonably available.
"We request that ... the Synod Fathers examine honestly the appropriateness of insisting upon a priesthood that is, with very few exceptions, obliged to be celibate. Priesthood is a gift, celibacy is a gift: they are not the same gift," said the statement, which was written in response to a discussion paper on the place of the Eucharist in Catholic life.
Father Ranger said Australian priests were loyal to Catholic traditions and adverse to liturgical abuse but "we are scandalised when the gnat of abuse is so carefully strained out while the camel of dying communities is being swallowed".
Last month the Sydney Catholic Diocese announced plans to "twin" more than 50 local parishes to overcome falling priest numbers. It came as a survey of more than 300 Australian priests presented to Catholic bishops showed little support for mandatory celibacy and linked celibacy with thoughts of resignation.
A Melbourne priest and statistician has warned that the Catholic Church in NSW faces a dire shortage of priests in the next 20 years as its clergy ages, retires or dies. Father Eric Hodgens predicted the church would have fewer than one-sixth the number needed to conduct Sunday Mass.
Celibacy was the single biggest obstacle to the priesthood, he said, but while admitting married men would make a difference to recruitment numbers it was not the only answer. "The package at the moment is male, full-time, life-long and celibate and I would think that whole package is difficult for most people to embrace," Father Hodgens said.
Cardinal Pell yesterday declined to say where he stood on the issue of celibacy, only that he agreed with much of what had been written by the council, but not all.
"Reflections on the lineamenta [discussion paper] are offered by the executive of the NCP as 'indications of the thinking of many Australian Catholic priests'.
"As a member of the NCP, I would agree with much of what they have written, but not all of it. There are many rooms in the Father's house," he said.
Really?
Then how does one explain the nearly 400 Anglican priests, most married, who have been ordained Catholic priests in the last 25 years? And what about the hundreds of Eastern Rite priests, most married, throughout the world, in full union with Rome?
Through ordination the priest achieves a deeper union with God than a married couple does throught he sacrament of marriage, and the priest's previously consummated marriage becomes moot.
This is theological nonsense.
It is not Roman theology either.
I explained the Anglican and the Orthodox priests in the post you are referring to. Also see the Orthodox view in Kolokotronis' post.
How? Your first sentence was "married priests are a theological impossibility."
That is simply not true. Marriage is perfectly compatible with the priesthood theologically, since there are, and have been throughout the Church's history, married priests.
Women priests are a theological impossibility. Married men being ordained to the priesthood are not.
And, a married priest's marriage in no way becomes "moot" at any time.
The point is the priest's presence in the Divine space is in conflict with the purpose of marriage, -- which is to restore a proximity to the Divine space of the Garden where the three-way communion between man, woman and God was intact.
A priest may remain nominally married as an act of charity to his wife, and it was extended to the Apostles in that spirit. It cannot be but an exception due to a preexisting peculiar circumstance. A man who wants, by rights, to marry and be a priest at the same time is someone who has no understanding of either marriage or priesthood.
There is no theological bar to a married priesthood.
Last post on this thread to you, lest I am accused of "baiting" you.
Historical occurence of married priests is not a theological argument.
Can someone define "baiting"?
Another preposterous theological assertion! Your statement seems to imply that sexual relations are incompatible with presence to the Divine. You need to read what John Paul II, a celibate, has written about the theology of the body.
A priest may remain nominally married as an act of charity to his wife, and it was extended to the Apostles in that spirit. It cannot be but an exception due to a preexisting peculiar circumstance.
It is not "nominal" marriage, but a genuine Christian sacramental marriage. Full, and complete.
A man who wants, by rights, to marry and be a priest at the same time is someone who has no understanding of either marriage or priesthood.
You should be quiet. You are making a total fool of yourself.
It is proof that there IS no theological argument against married priests.
I really cannot comment on what you are saying, save to say that this is not the understanding of the Orthodox Church of the canons regarding the priesthood. I am not well versed enough in Roman theology to know if you are right or wrong in that area.
ping
One further word on the canonical legislation of the Middle Ages. On various occasions, in penitential books, it is said that for a married priest to go on having sexual relations with his wife after ordination would be an act of unfaithfulness to the promise made to God. It would be an adulterium since, the minister now being married to the Church, his relationship with his own wife «is like a violation of the marriage bond».28 This weighty accusation against a lawfully wedded, decent man only makes sense if something is left unexpressed because it is well-known, i.e., that the sacred minister, from the moment of his ordination, now lives in another relationship, also of a matrimonial type — that which unites Christ and the Church in which he, the minister, the man (vir), represents Christ the bridegroom; with his own wife (uxor) therefore «the carnal union should from now on be a spiritual one», as St Leo the Great said. 29[...]
In later times, the separation was introduced between priesthood and marriage. And so the formula unius uxoris vir, in its literal and material sense, is no longer of immediate application to the priests of today, since they are not married. Yet paradoxically, precisely in this lies the interest of the formula. We set out from the fact that in the apostolic Church it was only used for clerics; and so it took on, besides the immediate sense of conjugal relations, a further, mystical sense, a direct connection with the spiritual marriage between Christ and the Church. St Paul was already hinting at this. For him, unius uxoris vir was a covenantal formula: it introduced the married minister into the marriage relationship between Christ and the Church; for Paul, the Church was a ‘pure virgin’, it was the ‘bride’ of Christ. But this connection between the minister and Christ, due to the sacrament of ordination, today no longer requires as human support for the symbolism a real marriage on the part of the minister; so the formula is still valid for priests of the Church, although they are not married. Hence, that which in the past was continence for married ministers, in our own day becomes the celibacy of those who are not. Yet the symbolic and spiritual meaning of the expression unius uxoris vir remains ever the same. Indeed, since it contains a direct reference to the covenant, that is to say, to the marriage relationship between Christ and the Church, it invites us to attach much greater importance today than in the past to the fact that the minister of the Church represents Christ the bridegroom to the Church his bride. In this sense, the priest must be «the husband of one wife»; but that one wife, his bride, is the Church who, like Mary, is the bride of Christ.
It is precisely thus that on various occasions John Paul II expresses himself in his post-synodal Apostolic Exhortation Pastores dabo vobis. By way of conclusion, we quote some of the more telling passages from it.
In n. 12, having said that, as regards the identity of the priest, his relationship with the Church must take second place to his relationship with Christ, the Pope goes on: «As a mystery, the Church is essentially related to Jesus Christ. She is his fullness, his body, his spouse... The priest finds the full truth of his identity in being a derivation, a specific participation in and continuation of Christ himself, the one High Priest of the new and eternal covenant; the priest is a living and transparent image of Christ the Priest. The priesthood of Christ, the expression of his absolute ‘newness’ in salvation history, constitutes the one source and essential model of the priesthood shared by all Christians and the priest in particular. Reference to Christ is thus the absolutely necessary key for understanding the reality of priesthood.» On the basis of this very close union between the priest and Christ, the deep theological reason for celibacy is easier to grasp.
With apologies for the long quote. The emphasis is mine.
Clearly you're not appealing to the tradition of the Latin rite, but to rite-changers or other faiths?
Is this a point of dissent with the magisterium for you?
[from www.tradito.com]
Clerical celibacy has a biblical basis in the evangelical counsel of Our Lord as relayed in St. Matthew's Gospel (19:12), also taken up by St. Paul in his First Epistle to the Corinthians (7:8-9, 25-26, and especially 32-35), and confirmed by St. John in the Apocalypse (14:4-5). It is clear that once the Apostles received the call, they did not lead a married life.
The tradition of clerical celibacy was solemnly proclaimed by the Council of Nicaea, the First Ecumenical Council, in 325. Canon No. 3, unanimously approved by the Fathers, admitted of no exceptions whatsoever. The Council considered that the prohibition imposed thereby on all bishops, priests, and deacons against having a wife absolute. All subsequent councils that have addressed the subject have renewed this interdiction.
Not only would it be a violation of Sacred Tradition to blot out a custom decreed for 2,000 years to be absolutely obligatory, but also one must recognize that clerical celibacy is to be seen not merely as of ecclesiastical institution, but part of what is more broadly known in Catholic moral theology as "divine positive law," initiated by Christ and His Apostles. That is, it is not merely disciplinary in nature.
The Council of Carthage in 390 stated that celibacy of is Apostolic origin.
St. Epiphanius of Salamis (ca. 315-403): "It is the Apostles themselves who decreed this law."
St. Jerome (ca. 342-420): "Priests and deacons must be either virgins or widowers before being ordained, or at least observe perpetual continence after their ordination.... If married men find this difficult to endure, they should not turn against me, but rather against Holy Writ and the entire ecclesiastical order."
Pope St. Innocent I (401-417): "This is not a matter of imposing upon the clergy new and arbitrary obligations, but rather of reminding them of those which the tradition of the Apostles and the Fathers has transmitted to us."
St. Peter Damian (1007-1072) wrote: "No one can be ignorant of the fact that all the Fathers of the Catholic Church unanimously imposed the inviolable rule of continence on clerics in major orders."
There is a reason for this Tradition. The cleric in major orders, by virtue of his ordination, contracts a marriage with the Church, and he cannot be a bigamist. St. Jerome in his treatise "Adversus Jovinianum," bases clerical celibacy on the virginity of Christ.
The universal law of clerical celibacy confirmed by the Council of Nicaea applied, and still applies, to the Eastern Church as well as the Western. It is noteworthy that at that Council, the Easterns (Greeks) made up the overwhelming majority. Previously, the Council of Neo-Caesarea (314) had reminded all Eastern clerics in major orders of the inviolability of this law under pain of deposition.
The Eastern Church began at a late date to violate its own law of celibacy. The Quinisext Council of 692, which St. Bede the Venerable (673-735) called "a reprobate synod," breached the Apostolic Tradition concerning the celibacy of clerics by declaring that "all clerics except bishops may continue in wedlock." The popes refused to endorse the conclusions of the Council in the mater of celibacy, and the Eastern Church planted the seeds of its schism.
The German scholar, Stefan Heid, in his book, Celibacy in the Early Church, demonstrates that continence-celibacy after ordination to the priesthood was the absolute norm from the start -- even for the separated married ordinand -- a triumph of grace over nature, so to speak. The Eastern practice we now see was a mitigation of the rule, not, as the Modernists like to claim, the original practice from which the Roman Catholic Church diverged.
So Christ isn't the backbone of society? If Christ isn't the backbone of a family, it fails. As Catholics that means the central role of the Eucharist in our families, therefore the central role of the priesthood and for those in the Latin Rite, a celibate priesthood.
From my perspective your values are upside down.
Thank you.
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