Category: Celibacy

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Priesthood should be open to male, female, married or celibate – Fr Sean McDonagh

The call by the retired Bishop for Derry for the Church to change its position on mandatory celibacy for priests does not go far enough, according to Association of Catholic Priests co-founder, Fr Sean McDonagh.

The Columban priest was responding to comments made on the Church’s policy on celibacy by Dr Edward Daly in his memoirs A Troubled See: Memoirs of a Derry Bishop.

Dr Daly, who was Bishop of Derry between 1974 and 1993, describes celibacy in his book as, “an obligation that has caused many wonderful potential candidates to turn away from a vocation, and other fine men to resign their priesthood at great loss to the church.” Elsewhere Dr Daly writes, “If things continue as they are, a lot of parish communities will not have a priest in a few years’ time, and those that they have will be older, weary and greatly overworked.”

He asks why celibacy should be “the great sacred and unyielding arbiter, the paradigm of diocesan priesthood?”

In his memoirs, Dr Edward Daly said he hoped, “that senior members of the clergy and laity make their views more forcefully known” on the issue of celibacy and he said these were views that were often expressed privately but seldom publicly.

Responding, Fr Sean McDonagh called on the Irish hierarchy to support the retired Bishop’s call rather than going “down the cul de sac” of a married diaconate, which, he warned, would “clericalise laity” instead of looking to a “different kind of priesthood.”

Speaking to UK Catholic weekly, The Tablet, Fr Sean McDonagh commented, “I would go further than that – it should be open to male, female, married or celibate.”

He told ciNews that he was not the first voice in the Church to call for women priests, and referred to Cardinal Martini of Milan’s writings, and biblical scholar, Professor Jerome Murphy O’Connor.

Fr McDonagh also called on the bishops to conduct a survey among the laity to assess people’s level of satisfaction with the new translation of the Roman missal, which he said had been “imposed” by Rome. The Columban missionary told ciNews that a number of women in his congregation last Sunday had voiced their opposition to the new translation and particularly to the use of non-inclusive language.

Fr McDonagh, who is a linguist, urged anyone who is unhappy with the new translation to write to the bishops and outline their difficulties. He added, “The anecdotal line is that everyone is happy with it.” But he said, “People should tell the truth about what has happened. People were not consulted on it.”

“I would like to see, within a year or a year and a half at the most, a really good survey done to find out what people really think of it.” The survey, he said, needed to include all age groups.

Referring to Vatican II, the ACP co-founder said its basic insight had been that the liturgy is for everyone and that the Church should be facilitating participation. “If you are starting to use archaic language, you are not facilitating partnership and participation for a lot of people – why do that?” he asked.

Referring to the fact that just 200 students out of 55,000 who sat the Leaving Certificate studied Latin, Fr McDonagh asked, “What has Latin got to offer?” and he suggested to ciNews that the proponents of the new translation are “operating out of a world that doesn’t exist.”

He queried whether they were intent on returning to pre Vatican II approach “when the laity were basically an audience and could not participate because they did not understand or speak Latin?”

Fr McDonagh said the new translation demonstrated “incompetence” in the decision to follow a literalist translation rather than use dynamic equivalence.

Full Article HERE!

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‘Disobedient’ Austrian Catholics preach message of reform

Disgruntled Roman Catholics in Austria have not only been breaking bread at their weekly masses – they have also been breaking with tradition.

A total of 329 priests – one in ten of all priests in Austria – are openly supporting the call for reform that they say is needed to breathe life back into the church.

The movement calls for male priests to be allowed to marry, ending the church’s celibacy rule. The would-be reformers also want women to be able to enter the priesthood and urge greater acceptance of divorce.

The group wants women, as well as men, to be ordained
Rather than simply appealing for reforms, the group has declared it will break ecclesiastical rules by giving communion to Protestants and remarried divorced Catholics. It will also allow lay people – men and women – to preach and to lead head parishes without a priest.

The dissidents’ main spokesman is Father Helmut Schüller, who claims that a shortage of priests makes reform essential. In the entire southern state of Carinthia, not one single priest will be ordained this year.

“We’re presenting suggestions for how we can continue, when we have no replacements,” said Schüller. “How we can find people from our own ranks – for example our own parish members who can simply continue on? We’ve been thinking about this for years.”

It might be too early to call it a schism but unlike the congregations in Austrian churches, the number of “disobedients” is on the increase.

Moral justification

One woman, a religion teacher who wished to remain anonymous, claims she has right on her side when she breaks church law.

“One can only change a law by breaking the law,” she said. “When we come to a law that is spelt out the way it is now – that does not address our requirements and our rights but actually restricts them – then I believe I have the right to violate it.”

Schönborn has said that Catholics should stick to the rules
Head of the Roman Catholic Church in Austria, Cardinal Christoph Schönborn, says he is shocked by the open call to defy church doctrine. In a letter he told the rebels they should leave the Church if they do not wish to play by the rules.

Calls for a more liberal church are not new in Austria, says religion commentator Markus Veinfurter, who claims there are no signs that the establishment will listen. “They are all raising the same issues,” said Veinfurter. “But there is no movement in the church whatsoever, as far as the hierarchy is concerned.”

A public opinion poll shows most Austrians, 76 percent of those surveyed, support the priests’ demands and their disobedience.

“Where does it lead?” said Veinfurter. “I think people will go on leaving the Church, people, even those from the innermost part of the church will lose their allegiance. Maybe in a few years time the bishops will be on their own.”

Full Article HERE!

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Bishop of Derry calls for end to celibacy in Catholic church

On Bloody Sunday in 1972 Father Edward Daly faced down the Parachute Regiment responsible for shooting dead 13 unarmed Derry civilians, waving just a white handkerchief as he protected the wounded from the army’s bullets in the Bogside. Now 39 years later the retired Bishop of Derry is confronting an even more powerful force than the Paras: the Vatican.

Dr Daly, who was the Bishop of Derry for 20 years during the Troubles, has become the first senior Irish Catholic cleric to call for an end to celibacy in the church. His intervention in the debate over whether priests should be allowed to marry is highly significant because he is still one of the most respected figures in the Irish Catholic church at a time when faith in the institution has been shattered by the paedophile scandals involving clergy.

Challenging centuries of Catholic theocracy, Daly has said that allowing the clergy to marry would solve some of the church’s problems.

The number of Catholic priests in Ireland is in sharp decline as older clergy die and very few young men take up a celibate life. In some parishes the church has transferred priests from Poland and the developing world to fill the gap.

“There will always be a place in the church for a celibate priesthood, but there should also be a place for a married priesthood in the church,” Daly writes in his new book A Troubled See, Memoirs of a Derry Bishop, which will be launched at Magee College in the city on Wednesday.

“I think priests should have the freedom to marry if they wish. It may create a whole new set of problems but I think it’s something that should be considered,” he says.

“I’m worried about the decreasing number of priests and the number of older priests. I think it’s an issue that needs to be addressed and addressed urgently.”

While Daly accepts he might be out of step with current Vatican thinking he points out that he is “not engaged in a popularity contest”.

He says that during his time as a bishop he found it “heartbreaking” that so many priests or prospective priests were forced to resign or were unable to get ordained because of the celibacy issue.

Many young men who once considered joining the priesthood turned away because of the rule, the 74-year-old cleric argues.

Daly became a recognised figure around the world in 1972 when he was seen waving a bloodied white handkerchief in front of British paratroopers in Derry during Bloody Sunday.

The sight of the priest during the army massacre in the city became one of the most iconic images of the Northern Ireland Troubles.

Daly was also a fierce critic of the IRA’s armed campaign and a strong supporter of the peace process kickstarted by the likes of his friend and confidant, the Nobel peace prize winner John Hume. In the book the former bishop praises Hume who he says is “one of my great heroes”.

He had first-hand experience of the Battle of the Bogside in 1969 and took part in the civil rights demonstrations in the city prior to the Troubles erupting. Daly also played a part in the campaign to free the Birmingham Six. His tenure as Bishop in Derry spanned the years 1974 to 1993 and included some of the worst atrocities of the Troubles.

He accepts that admission of married men to the priesthood could well create new problems and issues for the church.

“However, under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, major decisions must be made,” he adds.

In his book he also denounces the paedophile priests whose crimes and the cover-up by the Catholic hierarchy has dramatically reduced the church’s respect and influence in Ireland. He is “heartbroken and appalled” that fellow clergymen were engaged in “such horrible criminal acts against the most vulnerable”.

Catholic priests have been unable to marry since the Gregorian reforms in the 11th century made celibacy compulsory. Historians have contended that the move was partly for spiritual reasons, but was mainly to ensure estates held by clerics would pass back to the church upon their deaths rather than to offspring.

However, in recent years Pope Benedict XVI has made allowances for married Anglican ministers to transfer to the Catholic church after a number made the move in protest at controversial Anglican issues including the ordination of women priests, and acceptance of ministers in same-sex relationships.

The County Fermanagh-born cleric now works as a chaplain in Derry’s Foyle hospice.

Vatican’s view

Bishop Daly’s proposal will meet with dogged silence in the Vatican, but widespread understanding in the Roman Catholic church.

The view from the top is clear. Last year, when the scandal over clerical sex abuse was at its height, the archbishop of Vienna, Christoph Schönborn, suggested part of the problem might be priestly celibacy. His comment was all the more interesting, coming as it did from a conservative theologian andformer star pupil of Pope Benedict. But in case anyone thought his musings had Vatican backing, the pope went out of his way a few days later to praise celibacy as an “expression of the gift of oneself to God and others”. Three months later, he reinforced his defence of the status quo, describing celibacy as a “great sign of faith”.

The debate over whether to admit married men to the priesthood, however, is one not even the pope can stifle. Two developments have refocused attention on the issue in the last couple of years – and one is partly attributable to Benedict himself. The first is the continuing sex abuse scandal, which on Tuesday acquired new life when the US-based Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests asked the international criminal court to investigate the Vatican for crimes against humanity. The first senior figure to argue the case for a link between an unmarried priesthood and sex abuse was the bishop of Hamburg, Hans-Jochen Jaschke, who in March 2010 told a newspaper interviewer a “celibate lifestyle can attract people who have an abnormal sexuality”.

The other development has been the welcoming into the Catholic church of traditionalist Anglicans, unable to reconcile their faith with the ordination of women or the consecration of openly gay bishops. Their incorporation has been made easier since October 2009 when Benedict issued a controversial ordinance allowing them to retain much of their identity, liturgy and pastoral arrangements.

The reordination into the Catholic church of married Anglican priests has pointed up the fact that priestly celibacy is not a doctrine, but a discipline. In 1970, the decline in priesthood vocations persuaded nine leading theologians to sign a memorandum declaring that the Catholic leadership “quite simply has a responsibility to take up certain modifications” to the celibacy rule. Extracts from the document were reprinted in January. Not least because one of the signatories was the then Joseph Ratzinger, now pope Benedict.

Full Article HERE!

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Sex, Celibacy, and Priesthood: A Bishop’s Provocative Inquisition

Sex, Celibacy, and Priesthood is a pastoral review of the research, sexual activity, and celibacy among Roman Catholic priests. It features heart-wrenching, anonymous, and candid self-disclosures about the sexual behaviors of heterosexual, gay, and bisexual priests. It explores the meaning of celibacy in accordance with Roman Catholic Church teachings, doctrine, and canon law. It is an honest, raw, and frank study of current perspectives on celibacy in light of priestly sexual behaviors. This new book allows for Roman Catholic priests to speak out in their own voices about their struggles and conflicts between celibacy and their sexual activities.

Seminaries, formation teams, religious superiors, pastoral care counselors, spiritual directors, therapists, and anyone fascinated or concerned about the sexual scandals within the rank and file of the Roman Catholic Church will find Sex, Celibacy, and Priesthood a candid and transparent study.

In a time when most people are disgusted with the sexual scandal cover-ups, smokescreens, and a veil of secrecy provided by many Roman Catholic bishops and their apologists, Sex, Celibacy, and Priesthood tells the truth and encourages us to think imaginatively and compassionately about an issue of crucial importance to the Roman Catholic Church at this time in history.

About The Author:
The Most Reverend Lou Bordisso is Bishop Emeritus within the Old Catholic faith tradition serving the Diocese of California, American Catholic Church. He is a religious with the Order of St. John Vianney (OSJV) providing pastoral and spiritual care for both ordained clergy and lay ministers.

Prior to being received into the Old Catholic faith tradition and the Diocese of California, Bishop Bordisso was a Roman Catholic vowed religious. Bishop Bordisso has served as Presiding Bishop for the American Catholic Diocese of California and as Provincial for the Order of Saint John Vianney (OSJV).

Like the vast majority of the clergy in the Old Catholic/Autocephalous tradition, Bishop Bordisso is bi-vocational. Bishop Bordisso has been licensed as a marriage and family therapist for over two decades.

Bishop Bordisso is program host for the public and community access television and online broadcast, “Political Inquisitions” which addresses ethics, morality, spirituality, and politics, interviewing political and community leaders about a variety of distinguished topics.

http://tinyurl.com/42scx5x

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One man’s long and lonely crusade against Vatican opposition to married priests

RITE AND REASON: ONE NIGHT in 1952, a German boy of 19, in the throes of a youthful romance, became overwhelmed with the certainty that God wanted him as a priest. In the following days he felt he could not pray “Thy will be done” if he refused the call.

And yet during those same days he found himself weeping uncontrollably, “shadowed with darkness because, for the sake of the priestly vocation, I had to accept the renunciation of marriage”.

Heinz-Jurgen Vogels stayed with his vocation all the way to ordination, for the call had taken place “with such inner force that it carried me over the threshold of priesthood, yet only to drop me burnt out immediately after that.”

The couple of years that followed Vogels’s 1959 ordination were years of unrelieved depression, inability to function in his priesthood, leading him eventually to the brink of suicide.

“Only years later was I able to recognise that my subconscious, at the ordination, had concluded: ‘Now, finally, the door to marriages has closed; now there is no longer any rescue for my desire to have feelings for the other half of humankind, which is, however, part of my nature.’”

The crisis came in his little Cologne room overlooking the Rhine: “The abandonment in the colourless grey room was felt so greatly that I stopped again and again at the washstand, and took the razor blade to cut open the arteries in my wrist. Only with extreme effort could I return it to the glass plate. The window, the Rhine, the rail tracks, everything attracted me almost irresistibly.”

Vogels was sent to a rest home for a while and then resumed duty, living with an understanding old parish priest in a village in the Eifel mountains.

“It was a time of long conversations in the evenings, seated in comfortable armchairs. Yet it should take another five years before the fog was dispelled.”

It happened after a pilgrimage to Kevelaer: “It may sound strange that during my prayer I found rising in my soul the dear wish: ‘Oh would I be allowed to use sexuality!’”

And then came the revelation in a verse from St Paul’s first epistle to the Corinthians: “Have we perhaps not the right to take a wife along with us, like the other apostles . . ?” (1 Cor 9:5) – the word “mulier” being open to interpretation as “wife” as well as “woman”.

That linked up with the sudden realisation that there were already married priests in the Catholic Church – all the Eastern Catholic churches in union with Rome had their married priests, and even here in the West, Protestant pastors could become Catholic priests and then live openly with their wives and families.

The rest of Vogels’s life has been a one-man crusade to convince the authorities in Rome to abolish compulsory celibacy. This story is told in his extraordinary book, Alone Against the Vatican , now available in English.

Unfortunately the publishers have chosen a less striking title, Catholics and their Right to Married Priests , with the subtitle, Struggles with the Vatican . It’s readily available in paperback from Amazon and is also on Kindle eBooks.

Those struggles make for a fascinating story. The first declaration of his views in a sermon led to such a rumpus that he was diagnosed with “endogenous mania”, church authorities holding that anyone with such views had to be round the bend. But Vogels stayed sane, dangerously so, grew as a theologian and disputant and gradually his crusade developed.

Inevitably came marriage to Renata, plus a challenge to Vatican authorities to declare his marriage invalid, which they declined to do.

All these years later, Vogels is still fighting his case, alone against the Vatican. The kernel of his argument is that the gift of priesthood and the gift of celibacy are separate, and only rarely are bestowed on one person.

Hence the horrors that we see around us here in Ireland, when attempts at staying celibate fail. Vogels even has the support of Vatican II, which declared that celibacy “is not required by the very nature of priesthood”.

This fascinating book is just Vogels’s latest salvo. But what comes out most clearly is the steadfastness, devotion, support, indeed heroism, of Renata. She, indeed, is the best of all arguments for what a helpmate could be for a priest.

http://tinyurl.com/3wg5lqs