www.byzcath.org Forums News & Events Church News Pope to hold summit on married priests

Originally posted by Just a Pilgrim:
The press typically gets the wrong end of the stick again. If it's been said once it's been said a thousand times - priests will never be allowed to marry and continue their ministry, it will only ever be a question of whether or not to ordain married men.

Personally I'm sypathetic to ordaining married men, but I understand completely Rome's reason for not doing so at the moment - concede on this and liberals/modernists will use it as a wedge issue to further a feminist/homosexual agenda.

Sorry, pilgrim. Not making the enormous leap in logic from ordaining married men to caving in to the feminist and homosexual agenda.

Radical feminists and homosexuals will make anything a wedge issue. This is a disciplinary issue, not a theological one. Their opinions and agenda should not matter a wit in this regard.

Originally posted by Father Anthony:
I am sorry to say this, but I think that dragging in those that are homosexual and making them the fall person in almost every news release or new thread on the forum as of late is not cutting it. We (the administrators) are getting a lot of complaints from many posters, representing a cross section on the forum because it seems as of late, this is what apparently is happening. If you want to discuss the issue, do so without blaming any one group without substantiating it. If not the topic can not be discussed and the discussion becomes just wild speculation, which may lead to the thread being closed. The complaints are not only of posts in this section, but also in many other sections as well. The bringing in of one particular group or another is becoming obsessive.

In IC XC,
Father Anthony+
Administrator

Pope Presides Over Celibacy Summit

Pope Benedict XVI presided over a summit Thursday on the celibacy requirement for clergy, spurred by a married African archbishop who has been excommunicated from the Roman Catholic Church.

The Vatican insists that the policy itself was not open for discussion, but that the meeting was called to examine the implications of the "disobedience" by Zambian Archbishop Emmanuel Milingo.

The pope met with top officials in a three-hour closed-door session, and a statement on the talks was to be released later Thursday, the Vatican said.

Milingo incurred automatic excommunication in September when he ordained four married American men as bishops in defiance of the Vatican.

He already had drawn the Vatican's ire in 2001, when he took a South Korean woman as his wife in a group wedding ceremony of the Unification Church of the Rev. Sun Myung Moon.

The prelate is thinking big in his campaign to have the Church to drop the demand that clergy be celibate. He is hoping to draw some 1,000 married Catholic priests to a Dec. 8-10 gathering in the New York City area.

The Holy See had stressed that the summit on Thursday would not open up debate on the celibacy requirement, but would instead examine requests for dispensation made by priests wishing to marry and requests for readmission by clergy who had married in recent years. It cited no numbers.

A Vatican meeting of bishops from around the world last year rejected suggestions that the celibacy requirement be dropped for priests. Proponents argue that allowing men to marry in the priesthood could help relieve a shortage of clergy in many parts of the world.

A leader of a U.S. organization of married priests said Wednesday there were about 100,000 married priests worldwide. Stuart O'Brien, a board member of the Massachusetts-based Corpus, said he did not expect any changes to come out of the Vatican summit on Thursday, even though "Milingo has their attention."

Referring to an estimated 25,000 men who left the active priesthood in the United States to marry, O'Brien said in a telephone interview from the U.S.: "I don't think that Rome will ever open the door to them."

Louise Haggett, head of the advocacy group Citi ministries (for Celibacy is the Issue), contended that while decades ago, priests seeking dispensations "usually received it within a year," since the 1978-2005 papacy of John Paul II the waiting time has stretched to years.

"There are a lot of priests today who don't even bother to put in a request," Haggett said by phone from her base in Maine.



When Milingo was excommunicated, several Vatican watchers said the Holy See was worried about the possibility that the archbishop, with the power to ordain bishops and priests, could start a schism.

The Vatican requires celibacy of priests ordained under the Latin rite, although married men can become priests in the Eastern rite. The Vatican has also accepted some married Anglican priests who came over to the Catholic fold.


"What I think will eventually happen is that they (the Vatican hierarchy) will change, and they will allow (married) men of virtue to be ordained, older men, maybe deacons, who have proven themselves in parish work," O'Brien said.

Several bishops at the Vatican gathering last year raised the possibility that married men of proven virtue, known in Latin as "viri probati," could be ordained, but that idea was ruled out.

� 2006 Associated Press.