Priests in England and Wales recently received a copy of "An appeal to the Bishops of England and Wales to ordain priests for our parishes." Married priests, that is. The petition from "Marriedpriests-ew.org" reads:
We, the undersigned Catholics, wish to express our support for our bishops who are preparing the Catholic Church in England and Wales for new forms of ministry and leadership. We request the Catholic Bishops Conference to place the following items on the agenda for their next plenary meeting.
We ask that the bishops:
1. Acknowledge that there is a major crisis in ministry within the Catholic Church in England and Wales.
2. Acknowledge that there is no doctrinal or theological barrier to the ordination of married men. Our church has already ordained married former Anglican priests.
3. Take practical steps toward ordaining suitably qualified married men.
4. Encourage a wide-ranging discussion of the role of women in ministry and in the authority structures of the Church, including the question of women's ordination.
5. Establish appropriate scriptural, theological and pastoral training programmes (campus, distance and online) to prepare suitable women and men for ministry. These candidates should have the recommendation of their parishes and communities, and should participate in mentored pastoral work.
6. Invite priests who have left the ministry to return to active priesthood, subject to negotiation with the local bishop.
In the combox, Fr David Barrett has sent a copy of the "fully corrected and clarified text" that he sent to
info@marriedpriests-ew.org:
Dear petitioners
As a Catholic priest ordained 15 years ago and now doing further studies in Rome I would like to:
1. Affirm my wholehearted support for the ancient practice of celibacy for the presbyterate in the life of the Church
2. Affirm my wholehearted support for the maintenance of clerical celibacy as a necessary sign to the world of the priority of the Kingdom of God and the call of Jesus, of love for Him and for His Church over other earthly ties
3. Affirm my support for celibacy not just as a discipline but as a practice grounded in the example of the Lord Himself, as a way of life that expresses the heart of the priesthood as a complete self-giving for the Church, as Christ gave Himself totally for His one bride - and so affirm that there are good doctrinal and theological reasons for this practice
4. Affirm my wholehearted assent for the Church's definitive teaching concerning the reservation of the sacrament of Holy Orders to men alone
5. Affirm my wholehearted assent to all of the Church's teachings, not as "Vatican policies", but as the teachings of Jesus Christ who gave His teaching authority to the Church's Magisterium
6. Affirm my prayers for those who have left the priesthood to get married, but my disagreement that they should be allowed back to active priestly ministry still married - such a move would be discouraging to those who have tried to maintain the promises they made at ordination and is a sign of a lack of respect to them
7. Deprecate this petition as an attempt to further the culture of dissent in the Church, a dissent whose real nature is a refusal to believe and so is opposed to the full act of faith, and so will do no good but will serve to encourage division in the Body of Christ
8. Acknowledge that there is indeed a crisis in the life of the Catholic Church, but this has been caused by dissent from the teachings of the Church, a lack of thorough Catholic catechesis, a lack of holiness and prayer in the life of the Church, an unwillingness to evangelise culture with the fullness of the Catholic Faith and a growing antagonistic secularism in the world which dissent actually promotes.
Yours in the Faith
Fr David B Barrett
Casa Santa Maria
Via dell'Umilta 30
00187 Rome
Italy
I certainly second that!
11 comments:
Sounds a bit like they've read the Dutch Dominican's booklet...
But it gives us, the laity, an excellent opportunity to agree with you and Fr. Barret, and pester our priests and bishops for proper cathechism! :)
God bless Fr Barrett...I second your seconding.
I see that in para. 4 of their petition, Marriedpriests-ew.org want to "encourage a wide ranging discussion of the role of women in the ministry .. including the question of women's ordination."
Well, there is, and can be, no question of the ordination of women to the Catholic priesthood, so if they want to discuss it, they will have to do so outside the Catholic Church.
Dear Fr Tim
Encouraged by your example I've sent them this e-mail:
Dear Ad Hoc Committee
The crisis within the UK Catholic Church has been brought about largely by liberal dissent and the breakdown of truly Catholic catechetics.
As a priest of 24 years, 22 of those years in parish ministry, the Church needs your solutions like a bullet in the head.
As Fr Benedict Groeschel has said, in psychology a time of crisis is recognised to be the worst time to make far reaching life decisions. So, in the Church, the present time is not the time to be tinkering with the celibacy rules. The number of priests worldwide is rising, but not quickly enough. The problem is the poor level of faith and practice in westernised countries.
I have worked in Ukraine with the Greek Catholic Church. I have taught hundreds of seminarians most of whom would marry before priesthood, so I am not against it in principle. But it brings an entire different range of problems. it is no panacea.
Those who advocate the ordination of women are already not in full communion with the Church, so your proposals 4 and 5 merely encourage false hopes. Pope John Paul II has spoken infallibly about this. It would be wiser to discuss why God has reserved the sacramental priesthood to men, and try to fathom His purposes, whilst encouraging consecrated life and other avenues of service for women.
Your proposition 6 I find abhorrent. It would discourage all of us priests who have at considerable personal cost remained faithful to our vows of celibacy. It would put men who have sadly been unable to keep the most important promise they ever made, in charge of entire communities of Catholics. This would be no example to the young or to married couples perhaps experiencing some tension in their relationships.
I hope that your petition is even less successful than the one in Australia, with its pitifully small 17,000 signatories out of many millions of Catholics. I hope your petition in England and Wales is even more unsuccessful numerically, since it is surely against the will of God for His Church.
Yours faithfully in Christ
Fr Francis Marsden MA PhD (Cantab) STL VF
St Mary's Chorley, Lancs (Archdiocese of Liverpool)
Father, is there a petition circulating for those of us who support clerical celibacy and the male-only priesthood?
Fr. Philip Neri, OP
I think they've missed the boat. They don't seem to have spotted that numbers entering seminary have increased for the last four years in the UK.
Speaking as a faithful Byzantine Catholic and a married layman who is soon to be ordained to the Order of Deacon to serve under a married priest with five children, I resent the small mindedness of those who combine the heretical notion of women's ordination with the venerable tradition of married men in Orders, including the presbyterate - something that has been upheld and praised as venerable in the Catholic East by both conciliar and papal magisterial teaching. This coupled with the restoration of priests who have been unfaithful to their vows to ministry creates the illusion that a married functioning Catholic priesthood - which the Catholic Church has had since the time of the Apostles and has been faithfully preserved by the East - is an issue of dissent, rather than legitimate diversity of practice.
The celibate vocation for the sake of the Kingdom is a beautiful charism given to many, but not to all. The call to marriage is as well. The call to the priesthood in the Latin Church requires a commitment on the part of a man to lifelong celibacy. No such requirement exists universally in the East (save that of being a man!), although a candidate for orders may willingly choose to embrace celibacy if he is single. Although I personally question the wisdom of upholding the Latin discipline at the expense of pastoral care for the faithful, I respect the right of the Latin Church to establish and maintain its own canonical practice.
To the priests in England and Wales who signed this absurd appeal, keep your dissent away from our legitimate discipline!
In ICXC,
Gordo
Fr Marsden - thank you for that!
Gordo - it is not at all established that there was a functioning married priesthood at the time of the apostles. Jesus praised those who left wife, children and lands, and St Paul stipulated that the bishop should not be married a second time. It was at the Council in Trullo in the 7th century that married clergy living as married men were legitimised in the East.
there were aberrations in the West, of course, but the apostolic discipline was of clerical continence.
This is not to decry the many excellent married priests in East and West but let us not invent an apostolic discipline to justify clerical marriage.
Father Finigan,
Very clearly, clerical continence (whether permanent or periodic) was the norm in the apostolic age. Clerical marriage was also pervasive, however, hence St. Paul's list of qualifications for ministry based upon the witness of fathering a household.
If one truly wanted to be a stickler (pun intended) regarding these things, one could argue that continence was at various times also required for the diaconate, and periodic continence for the laity as part of the Eucharistic fast. This is even reflected in the early conciliar magisterium.
Whatever the variance of earlier disciplines in East and West, these practices do not represent apostolic doctrine but discipline. One could argue that the Catholic Magisterium has defined the celibate state as the most fitting for the presbyterate (as evidenced by the fullness of apostolic ministry residing with Bishops who are required to be celibates, even in the East), but such a definition does not preclude married men from serving well and faithfully in the ministry of deacon and presbyter. This too has been upheld by the Catholic Magisterium on numerous occasions. I agree with statements made recently by Christoph Cardinal Schornborn regarding the consideration of older married men of virtue for the presbyterate for the Latin Church. My own opinion is that such men as true "elders" (grace building upon nature) could worthily serve Christ and the Church, and that by excluding them from consideration, some of the faithful will continue to suffer without shepherds and often without regular access to the sacraments.
But returning to the point of the original post, the agenda of these wayward folks mixes the good with the bad and the ugly.
In ICXC,
Gordo
The only reason married priests were allowed during the time of the Apostles was because Christianity was just being established, and God had to call some who were married and some who were not. Over time, this developed into a celibate priesthood, called for by St. Paul as cited by Fr. Finigan.
I'm not sure of the entire history of the Byzantine Rite, although I do know that throughout the world diffrent Rites were established early on. The document here in question is not "narrow-minded" but rather, is directed towards specifically Roman Catholics and the discipline of celbacy that has ALWAYS (other than the very early beginnings) been the practice for Latin-Rite Catholics.
It is further my understanding that in the Eastern Churches, even including Greek and Russian Orthodox (both of them allow a married priesthood I believe), they do not select bishops from married clergy; bishops must be celibate.
Additionally, it is further my understanding that in those rites and other religions where a married clergy is common, priests and deacons must be married before ordination and are not allowed to be married afterward (and then return to Holy Orders, etc.)
Please correct me if my understanding is incorrect. We studied this in class this last semester but my notes are not handy and it was a topic covered very quickly in class.
ATD - I'll post on this.
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