Erwin Kräutler, the bishop emeritus of Xingu in the Brazilian Amazon, expressed concern that not a word was said about opening up the Sacrament of Holy Orders to married men and ordaining women to the diaconate.

Many bishops "were and still are" looking for a plausible explanation as to why the two issues were not mentioned.

Some of them thought that the Pope had wanted to avoid a "schism". He had "certainly been under great pressure from the Curia" at the time, Kräutler pointed out.

"That was already crystal clear at the synod sessions and during our talks with the Curia. We found very little understanding for the problems and issues of the Amazon Region which we here experience day by day."

According to notes from the pope included in an article published in the Catholic periodical La Civiltà Cattolica, Pope Francis did not approve a proposal to ordain married men in the Amazon region because the idea was not prayerfully discerned at a 2019 synod of bishops.

"There was a discussion, a rich discussion, and a well-founded discussion, but no discernment. This is something different than just arriving at a good and justified consensus or at a relative majority," Pope Francis said, on the issue of addressing a priest shortage in the Amazon by ordaining so-called viri probati, or older, mature and married men from local communities.

However, just because Pope Francis did not mention the issues of ordaining married men to the priesthood and ordaining women deacons in his post-synodal exhortation, this "certainly does not mean that these issues are off the table," Kräutler underlined.

He recalled that right at the beginning of Querida Amazonia Pope Francis had made it clear that he would not be going into all the issues the Synod had gone into and had asked people to read the final Synod document very carefully.

And the final document, Kräutler pointed out, had underlined how important the permanent diaconate for women was in the Amazon Region.

He personally was convinced that the starting point of every discussion on the priestly ministry could not be the tradition of the Early Church but rather the needs of today.

Sources

The Tablet

Catholic News Agency

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 the 2019 Synod of Bishops on the Amazon.

The Synod's primary purpose was to discuss pastoral strategies for evangelization, catechesis, and pastoral care in the region, which spans several South American countries, and is beset by social, economic, and environmental challenges.

Notes from the pope that were included in an article published last week reveal his thinking about married priests.

"There was a discussion ... a rich discussion ... a well-founded discussion, but no discernment, which is something different than just arriving at a good and justified consensus or at a relative majority," Francis said.

Francis said prayerful discernment became impossible because debate became a parliamentary-style battle between different sides.

Synods of bishops should be opportunities for prayerful reflection, not parliamentary lobbying, he said.

A synod is a "spiritual exercise," a period for discernment of how the Holy Spirit is speaking, and for self-examination regarding the motive beyond positions.

"Walking together means dedicating time to honest listening, capable of making us reveal and unmask (or at least to be sincere) the apparent purity of our positions and to help us discern the wheat that - up to the Parousia - always grows among the weeds."

"Whoever has not realized this evangelical vision of reality exposes themselves to useless bitterness. Sincere and prayerful listening shows us the 'hidden agendas' called to conversion."

After the synod, Francis published his response, in the form of an apostolic exhortation titled Querida Amazonia.

In this, he avoided any reference to married priests. However, he called for missionary clergy to be sent to the Amazon, and for bishops to promote prayers for priestly vocations.

He endorsed the bishops' final document where 128 voted in favour of ordaining married deacons in remote regions, and 41 voted against. It meant that while married priests are off the table in the short term, it remains a live possibility.

"I like to think that, in a certain sense, the synod is not over. This time of welcoming the whole process that we have lived challenges us to continue walking together and to put this experience into practice."

These and other comments suggest the door is not closed on future reforms.

Source

• Catholic News Agency
• The Tablet
• Image: TerryIvy.com

Ours is not a quiet house.

A house of screaming and a house of endless snot, it's also a house of love, grown and multiplied every few years.

In a house of little sleep, my hobby these days is simply to sit down; fellow parents know what I mean.

Just like that loud and beautiful Kelly family gone viral out of South Korea recently, ours is a perfectly normal family, "normal" understood, of course, in relative terms. It's both exhausting and energizing, and I wouldn't trade it for anything.

It is the form and gift of my life, my family.

But here's what's strange about us: I'm a Catholic priest. And that is, as you probably know, mostly a celibate species.

Now the discipline of celibacy, as a Christian practice, is an ancient tradition.

Its origins belong to the very mists of early Christianity: to the deserts of Egyptian monasticism, the wilds of ancient Christian Syria and to Luke's gospel.

You might be surprised to learn, most married Catholic priests are staunch advocates of clerical celibacy.

I, for one, don't think the Church should change its discipline here.

In fact, I think it would be a very bad idea.

For priests, celibacy has been the universal legal norm in the Catholic West since the 12th century and the de facto norm long before that.

Saint Ambrose in the fourth century, for example, wrote about married priests, saying they were to be found only in "backwoods" churches, certainly not in the churches of Rome or Milan.

Yet there have always been, for good reasons, exceptions made, particularly for the sake of Christian unity.

The Eastern Catholic Churches, for example, many with married priests, have since early modernity flourished in the Catholic Church.

Likewise for me, a convert from Anglicanism.

I'm able to be a Catholic priest because of the Pastoral Provision of Saint John Paul II, which was established in the early 1980s.

This provision allows men like me, mostly converts from Anglicanism, to be ordained priests, yet only after receiving a dispensation from celibacy from the pope himself.

The Ordinariate of the Chair of Saint Peter in the United States, established by Pope Benedict XVI to provide a path for Anglican communities to become Roman Catholic, is another instance of the Church making an exception, allowing for the same dispensations from celibacy to be granted to priests.

But these are exceptions made, as I said, for the sake of Christian unity, because of Jesus' final prayer that his disciples be "one."

They do not signal a change in the Catholic Church's ancient discipline of clerical celibacy.

Laity who have no real idea of what priesthood entails and even some priests who have no real idea of what married family life entails both assume normalizing married priesthood would bring about a new, better age for the Catholic Church.

Now you might be surprised to know most married Catholic priests are staunch advocates of clerical celibacy.

I, for one, don't think the Church should change its discipline here. In fact, I think it would be a very bad idea.

Which brings me to my particular bête noire on the subject.

I get that I'm an ecclesiastical zoo exhibit.

On my way to celebrate Mass in Saint Peter's in Rome a few years ago, fully vested in my priestly robes, I had to push my boy in the stroller through that ancient basilica as we made our way to the altar.

He had a broken leg, and Alli had the other kids to manage; and so there I was pushing the kid and the purse through Saint Peter's, wide-eyed tourists' mouths agape at the sight.

It is indeed quite a sight, a life outside the norm.

Even in my own parish, visitors will sometimes sheepishly step forward with curious and concerned questions.

"Are those your children?" they'll ask in whispered tones as if it's something scandalous, as my kids hide underneath my vestments as if it's something normal.

A zoo exhibit as I said, but I'm happy talking about it, it's not a problem.

It's just us: Fr. Whitfield, Alli, and all the kids. A perfectly normal, perfectly modern, joyful Catholic family.

People's assumptions frustrate

They are very few, of course, who refuse to accept me.

Hardened idiosyncratic traditionalists who think they know better than the tradition itself sometimes call it a heresy.

This, of course, is nonsense; to which, when such rare criticisms reach me, I always simply invite them to take it up with the pope.

He's the one they should argue with, not me.

Most of the time, however, people see me as some sort of agent of change, the thin end of some wedge, some harbinger of a more enlightened, more modern church.

Being a married priest, they assume I'm in favour of opening the priesthood to married men, in favour too perhaps of all sorts of other changes and innovations.

This too is an assumption, and not a good one.

Laity who have no real idea of what priesthood entails and even some priests who have no real idea of what married family life entails both assume normalizing married priesthood would bring about a new, better age for the Catholic Church.

But it's an assumption with little supporting evidence. Continue reading

The reality is that priests abuse small boys not because they are gay but because they have the opportunity. Most are not even paedophiles, but rather sexually maladjusted, immature and lonely individuals unable to resist the temptation to exploit their power over children who are taught to revere them as the agents of God.

A church that has tolerated the sexual abuse of tens of thousands of children - a crime against humanity in any definition - needs to face unpalatable truths and to make drastic reforms.

Cover-ups are no longer an option. The magnitude of the crimes is well-established and the evidence of how the Vatican and its bishops hushed them up in order to protect the reputation and finances of the Catholic Church is fully proved.

By insisting upon its right to deal with allegations under medieval canon law weighted in favour of the defendant and providing no effective punishment, the church itself became complicit.

It has allowed abusive priests to confess without fear of any report to police; it has encouraged bishops to withhold information from prosecuting authorities; it has refused to allow Vatican envoys (papal nuncios) to co-operate with government inquiries on the excuse that it is a state and hence they have diplomatic immunity.

The necessary reforms must begin with recognition that child sexual abuse is a crime, not just a sin, and must be reported to and dealt with by prosecuting authorities.

Canon law, with its pathetic punishments of prayer and penitence, and its obligations to keep proceedings secret, must have no part in dealing with allegations of sex abuse.

Nor can the veil of confidentiality any longer be allowed to shroud the confessions of paedophiles, let alone the absolution of one priest by another ("Brother, can you spare a crime?") The confessed abuser must be told to confess to the police or else be handed over to them.

Obviously, there should be zero tolerance for clerics who confess or are convicted. They must be defrocked and certainly not allowed any appeal to the Vatican, which in the past has permitted many to remain in holy orders - the sheep's clothing in which they have often reoffended.

Even in countries where local bishops have announced that public prosecutors will be told of sex abuse allegations, there is always the qualification "only if the victim consents".

It is all too easy for young victims and trusting parents to be counselled that their child's best interests lie in allowing the church to deal with the matter "in its own way" without involving the police. They give in easily to pressure and persuasion that their complaints should be dealt with in secret under canon law.

Abolishing the role of canon law in dealing with sex crimes will take some papal courage, but will be relatively easy, beside the radical changes necessary to stop the abuse from happening in the first place.

The reform most often suggested is to abandon celibacy. This would not be doctrinally difficult - Christ's disciples appear to have been married and the rule was a dogma introduced in the 11th century and almost abolished by 16th-century reformers.

But marriage does not "cure" paedophilia. Continue reading

• Geoffrey Robertson QC is a former UN Appeal Judge and author of The Case of the Pope (Penguin).

But only five of Rome's 11 new priests are Italians, having done their formation at the diocese's major seminary. The other six who will be incardinated into the pope's diocese are non-Italians. They are members of the Neo-Catechumenal Way.

They did their preparation for ministry at the movement's Redemptoris Mater Seminary and will likely be sent abroad to serve in one of its many missionary apostolates or parishes.

The ordination Mass is taking place on the 55th annual World Day of Prayer for Vocations. And in earlier-released message for the occasion, Francis said:

"Each one of us is called - whether to the lay life in marriage, to the priestly life in the ordained ministry, or to a life of special consecration - in order to become a witness of the Lord, here and now."

"In the diversity and the uniqueness of each and every vocation, personal and ecclesial, there is a need to listen, discern and live this word (of God) that calls to us from on high and, while enabling us to develop our talents, makes us instruments of salvation in the world and guides us to full happiness," he said.

In short, the pope focused on all the various types of Christian callings. But he did not say anything about what almost everyone recognizes today as a very real "vocations crisis" in the Church - especially regarding the priesthood.

Some loathe clericalism, others revel in it

There are various aspects to what might be better called a priesthood crisis.

La Croix International recently published two articles that looked at one of those aspects - the clericalist mentality that seems to be a disease (or at least a temptation) inherent in the very ethos of the ordained.

If you missed those articles the first time, please take a look at Joe Holland's "Get rid of the clergy - But keep Holy Orders" and Andrew Hamilton's "Clerical culture produces poor fruit."

Admittedly, these essays are dealing with a subjective element of the priesthood and how it likely relates to the current vocations crisis.

People will debate whether clericalism is turning young men away from exploring a call to priesthood or whether, on the other hand, it is attracting questionable candidates who actually revel in it.

There are other subjective issues relating to the vocations/priesthood crisis that need to be urgently looked at, as well. And, at least on paper, the Congregation for the Clergy has issued guidelines to help bishops and people involved in formation programs to do just that.

While the quality of seminaries and the priests they produce are largely subjective categories, quantity is not.

Objectively, the figures do not lie. It is a fact that the numbers of young men joining the seminary and being ordained presbyters are not keeping pace with the overall increase in the numbers of baptized Catholics. Nowhere.

Not even in Africa, where some people would have us believe the situation is not so dire. And where they believe that the "vocations-rich" African Church will become the protagonist of some new, "reverse evangelization" of the now greatly secularized, established Churches of Europe and the developed world.

They are very wrong.

Stats and the vocation gap

The latest Vatican-published Statistical Yearbook of the Church shows that in Africa there are currently just over 5,000 Catholics for every priest. It's even worse throughout Latin America where the ratio is upwards of 7,000 to one.

Compare that to the Churches in Europe, North America and Oceania where the figure hovers around 2,000 Catholics for every priest.

There are a number of possible steps that could be taken to shorten this widening gap.

But the most likely to be accepted at this time, also for historical and practical reasons, would be to change the criteria for admission to Holy Orders by expanding the pool of candidates to include married men of proven virtue - the so-called viri probati. Continue reading

Well, that's what Christians are kind of for, even if most of us fall rather short of the ideal. But though the liberal/trad categories may indeed be a bit hackneyed - possibly because they're completely and utterly lost on the secular majority — it's not to say that the old agendas aren't still being fought over with gusto.

And right at the top of the liberal shopping list is a married clergy.

According to the Catholic weekly, The Tablet, after a mass earlier this month attended by five priests who left the ministry to marry, a campaigner for married priests made the case for the practice of the Eastern churches in which married priests can be ordained.

In reply Francis said ambiguously that "the issue is in my diary" and "the door is always open but we are not talking about it now as the order of the day". Really? There has been similar noises off, apparently, from the former head of the Vatican apostolic penitentiary, Bishop Gianfranco Girotti.

Now I happen to be against the idea, and I take a really dim view of priests who leave the ministry to marry (the married Anglicans who became Catholic priests are another matter), but my sense of revulsion against this line of argument is on the basis that it's dishonest.

As it happens, for the first millennium of the Church's history, until the Gregorian reforms of the eleventh century, bishops could ordain married men (St Peter was married). Just the once; if your wife died, tough, you couldn't have another.

But what you couldn't do was allow someone already ordained to marry. A nice distinction, I agree, since the upshot was the same, but the line was drawn there. Continue reading

• Melanie McDonagh in The Spectator

Melanie McDonagh is a leader writer for the Evening Standard and Spectator contributor. Irish, living in London.

The controversial Catholic cleric has laid bare his soul in what is a deeply personal and at times highly emotive film charting the extent of his torment in the wake of the Vatican's move to censor him.

The Fermanagh priest opened his heart to the BBC, who followed him during a six month journey when he questioned whether or not he could remain a priest and be true to himself.

The broadcaster, who is known for his liberal stance on issues such as mandatory celibacy, the ban on women priests and contraception, goes further than he ever has before in revealing his true thoughts in the film The Turbulent Priest. But despite his controversial views on the church, the 67-year-old member of the Passionist Order comes across as a man deeply devoted to his parishioners.

Earlier this year it was reported that Fr D'Arcy had been censured by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in the Vatican, and that his weekly newspaper columns were being run past a church censor. The step was taken following an anonymous complaint to the CDF. Continue reading

The finding is the result of a poll conducted by Ireland's Association of Catholic priests (ACP) which has one of its founding members silenced and sent to a monastery for a period of reflection.

The ACP claim a mandate from mass-goers to raise concerns after a survey revealed a disconnect between official church teachings and what ordinary Catholics believe.

Almost 90% of respondents to the poll say priests should be allowed to marry, and 77% are of the view women should be ordained.

Fr Brendan Hoban, of the ACP, told the Independent the group believes in the fundamental teachings of the Church and is not leading any breakaway from Rome.

"We are not dissident priests. There are not 815 dissident priests," he said.

"We (ACP) are reflecting what we are hearing in parishes and have heard in parishes for years."

The poll also found that respondents thought the Church's teaching on sexuality is "irrelevant".

The poll was conducted on behalf of ACP by Amarach Consulting. It polled 1,000 respondents who identified themselves as Catholic, whether or not they practiced the faith. Of those surveyed about 33% said they attended Mass at least weekly.

Sources

• CNS
• The Independent
• Image: IBT