Lack of prayerful discernment is the reason Pope Francis said no to the Amazon synod’s suggestion that the Catholic Church should allow priests to be married. The question of addressing a priest shortage in the Amazon by ordaining older, mature and married men (viri probati) from local communities was one of the issues raised at Read more
Pope Francis’ apostolic exhortation on the Amazon region will be published on 12 February, the Vatican has announced. The document, which follows October’s Synod of Bishops on the Amazon, is highly anticipated for how the pope will respond to the recommendation to allow the ordination of married men to the priesthood for ministry in the Read more
Msg Andrew Wadsworth (pictured), the executive director of the International Commission on English in the Liturgy (ICEL) is defending his social media posts calling liturgical events at the Amazon Synod as “scenes of pagan worship”. “I, Andrew Raymond Wadsworth, do not wish to belong to the new idolatrous Pachamama Church currently being brought into being,” Read more
Catholic bishops are not making full use of Church law, says Cardinal Oswald Gracias. Gracias is one the eight-member Council of Cardinals Pope Francis established in 2013 to help with governing the Catholic Church and reforming its central administration. Women may perform most of the roles currently undertaken by men, he maintains. Noting that while Read more
Catholics, especially in the German-speaking world, were surprised to hear that Cardinal Gerhard Müller, the former Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, once strongly favoured the ordination of married men. Not only in remote areas but also in large city parishes. More recently, on 11 October, Müller told the Tagespost that “not even the Read more
Last week, Vatican Media interviewed Fr. Paulo Suess, a German priest who has served for decades among the indigenous peoples of the Amazon. Fr. Suess is in Rome as an official of the Synod of Bishops on the Amazon, and is regarded there as an expert on the region. The priest was asked about a Read more
Heading into the much-heralded Synod of Bishops on the Amazon, there was considerable speculation about whether the summit would, or would not, endorse married priests, the so-called viri probati, as a solution to the region’s chronic priest shortages. Along the way, there was also a fair bit of chatter about ordaining women deacons as a Read more
Peter Hünermann, one of the world’s leading Catholic theologians and an expert on the Second Vatican Council, says the “Amazon Synod” is an integral part of the process for Church reform that Pope Francis mapped out at the very start of his pontificate more than six years ago. The 90-year-old German priest-professor recently told the Read more
What incenses me the most about the theft of the icon of Our Lady of the Amazon from a Rome church this week is that the person who filmed themselves stealing it, and then throwing it in the River Tiber, genuflects on the way into the church. It is a deep, confident knee-to-the-floor genuflection; the Read more
Ultra-conservative Catholics who stole and dumped “pagan”statues in Rome’s Tiber River and published videos of the theft on social media are guilty of fomenting hate. Vatican editorial director Andrea Tornielli says the wooden figures of nude pregnant women were on display along with other Amazon artifacts at a church near the Vatican. Although some people Read more