Quite a few groups have been advocating married priests for sometime, but one gets no idea of their membership numbers from their websites.
Wikipedia tells us that a so-called International Federation of Married Catholic Priests, date of founding not stated, was dissolved in 2008 and
changed to a more common reform-based group with a new name and with members other than priests. An organisation with that name currently
exists [under CORPUS, one of the groups featured in the banner whose goals include women's ordination, allowing priests to marry, and
increased lay participation in church affairs].
Note the banner component in German - I got to it inadvertently through a link provided by a New York Times article about how women can find
priests to marry (as unlikely as the subject may be), and the link was www.rentapriest.com. Clicking on it brought me to what is shown above.
The banner reads 'Priests for a bigger penis - rent-a-priest.com', and features an article entitled, 'Get a bigger cock with pills'. Can anyone
really take the site seriously?
Today, Marco Tosatti writes about the seemingly imminent prospect of married priests, with 'viri probati' as quite probably, the wedge whereby
the church of Bergoglio can then move on to making priestly celibacy optional rather than mandatory.
Married priests?
No longer just a hypothesis
By Marco Tosatti
Translated from
November 4, 2017
Is the long march of [Brazilian] Cardinal Hummes to arrive at the ordination of viri probati [married men of proven Christian virtue] finally about to end? In recent days there has been an intensification of news, signals, rumors and calculated ‘indiscretions’ to indicate that the question will be on the agenda of a Special Synodal Assembly on the Amazon region to take place in Rome in 2019.
This synodal assembly has been spoken about in recent months – the impression given all this time, however, is that the viri probati idea in itself would be realized this year
[at least ‘experimentally’] in some part of Brazil’s vast Amazonia province.
Since there has never been an official statement, we cannot tell if having it on the agenda of the 2019 synodal assembly is a form of postponement, just as it is not possible to say
whether the choice of Rome as a venue for the assembly is out of a desire for more control of the synod, or give a more ‘noble’ setting to what is after all, a ‘regional’ assembly. [But aren’t all synodal assemblies held in Rome, if only because the pope, whoever he is, is the ex officio presiding officer of each such assembly? The previous regional assemblies - on the Netherlands (1980), on Europe (1991), on Africa (1994), on Lebanon (1995), on the Americas (1996), on Asia (1998) [all under John Paul II], on Africa (2009) and on the Middle East (2010), under Benedict XVI – were all held in Rome. I expected better from Tosatti.]
For many years, Cardinal Hummes, who was Prefect for the Congregation of the Clergy from 2006-2010 under Benedict XVI, and a Grand Elector in the Conclave that elected Bergoglio pope, has been pushing for the ordination of 'mature married men of solid faith' in the zones and communities which, due to their farflung locations and the shortage of priests, have virtually no access to sacramental life. He has been visiting many of the dioceses in Brazil’s Amazon region to convince the bishops to write the pope in order to consider the employment of
viri probati. But some health problems have made him unable to do this except for about 10 dioceses.
Recently, however, sources at the Brazilian bishops’ conference made it known that they were ‘sure’ a permission would be arriving from the Vatican by Christmas to ordain such
viri probati experimentally to help relieve the priest shortage in the Amazonia.
[I’ve raised these practical questions before. Surely, it’s not as simple as drawing up a list of candidates who are willing to leave their families and become priests in the jungle, and then ordaining them on the spot, as it were. Don’t they have to undergo the requisite seminary training of at least four years before they can be ordained priests? Or does the Hummes project simply envision a brief cursillo, say 6 months, and an apprenticeship of another 6 months in an actual parish – to ‘train’ the candidates simply to say Mass and preside at the sacraments, without having to undergo the theological, ecclesial and philosophical training that seminarians get?
In which case, why not do that for younger men everywhere who feel the calling to become priests, or those of them anyway who think that a one-year cursillo-cum-apprenticeship such as one might do for vocations like plumbing, tailoring, what-have-you, is all they will need to become priests! Because short of an abbreviated training-apprenticeship period, Cardinal Hummes and the Amazonia would have to wait four years (i.e., till 2022 if the ad experimentum phase is approved this year, or till 2025, if it takes the 2019 regional assembly to propose the viri probati so the pope can decree it) to get their first viri probati priests in place! Assuming they can attract enough candidates, that is.]
A Spanish-language site published a very interesting article a few days ago reporting on the work of the plenary assembly of the Congregation for the Clergy. As you know,its prefect – who was named by Bergoglio soon after his election, having dismissed Cardinal Mauro Piacenza from that office without cause – is Cardinal Beniamino Stella, a career diplomat and said to be one of the grey eminences beind Bergoglio.
The blogger “Germinans Germinabit” wrote:
The Congregation for the Clergy has made a report on the questions discussed at its ordinary reuninon-assembly On May 30-June 1, 2017. Among the many questions, the principal ones appear to have been that about deacons who have been widowed and could then be admitted to the priesthood, as well as that about viri probati who could similarly be admitted to the priesthood “but keeping their right to go on living more uxorio [i.e., conjugally] with their own wives”.
[Now that’s a new twist which has never before been discussed about viri probati: the expectation was they would be willing to leave behind their old lives in order to become priests because they no longer had any family responsibilities to provide for. If this is the thrust of the viri probati move now being pushed by this pontificate, that certainly would be another indication that it is preparing the way for making priestly celibacy, in general, optional rather than mandatory.]
Further:
“As a complement to the various aspects of [priest] formation discussed with regard to the Ratio [priestspeak for the document 'Ratio Fundamentalis Institutionis Sacerdotalis', entitled in the English version as 'Spiritual Formation in Seminaries', prescribed in 1980 by the Congregation for Catholic Education], one must also underscore the situation of ‘traditionalist’ seminarians who create not a few problems – first for their ‘formators’, and then after ordination, for the diocesan bishops.
One issue that must be the object of careful discernment is that ‘rigidity’ which the Holy Father often speaks about, indicated by attachment to an image of the Church in the past, their appearance and external presentation [how they are seen in public] but especially visible in the liturgy. Not rarely, such indications can reveal narcissistic and vain personalities who would tend to escape from the implications of pastoral realities and find refuge in the forms of the past which they themselves have never experienced and which does not pertain to their life”.
[How can you describe just how scornful and dismissive the Congregation for the Clergy is of aspiring seminarians who do not fit the Bergoglian mold???]
This passage, if it is authentic as I think it is, seems to be a photograph of the actual situation which hass been confirmed by many to be the [anti-tradition] perception in many places.
It seems that authorities in the ‘Church’ today, do not welcome vocations from persons who show no sign of progressivism or of lack of interest in Church tradition. Obviously, they find themselves with declining vocations, and are seeking to fill in the growing void by proposing other solutions. [And do they think that proposals like enlisting viri probati and the implied brief training-apprenticeship to become a priest are any solution at all?]
Not by chance, a few days ago, the Movimento Internazionale dei Sacerdoti Lavoratori Sposati (international movement of married working priests) criticized a statement by the Archbishop of Milan, Mons. Delpini, as reported by
Il Giornale.
"[We must] encourage men who consider themselves qualified to become permanent deacons," he wrote in a letter to his diocese, “which means adults
who have already defined their state of life in matrimony or in the choice of a celibate life, but who in their manner of being husbands or celibates, show the signs of vocation for a specific service to the Church if they become part of the clergy”. [They would still require formation to be deacons, won't they? I can see the celibates-by-choice probably open to that, but how many married men who have to support a family and have no independent means will take three years off to train to be a permanent deacon? The Church or some sponsoring organization would have to grant them scholarships to cover not just the cost of seminary training but also to support their families!]
In fact, however, that movement seems to already be counting its chickens early in how it reports on its website about the 2019 synodal assembly.
“That’s a classic proposal that will not resolve the priest shortage crisis which is global,” the movement commented. “The remedy?
Welcome back married priests into the church.”
[Tens of thousands of priests left the Church in the late 1990s-early 2000s in order to get married. It's not as if all of them, or even a significant number of them, would choose to go back to being a priest and hope to raise a family on what a priest earns!]
It is well known that many bishops – especially in Germany, and probably in Belgium and the Netherlands, too – are in favor of the
viri probati ‘solution’ and certainly
do not welcome vocations form those who would be ‘attached’ to Church tradition in any way.
We do not know what this pontiff will decide. According to Bishop Krautler – a German bishop who has served in the Amazon region for decades and one of the leading exponents of the Hummes proposal – the pope told him a year ago that
he did not want to decide on this question by himself.
[Yeah, right! So he made a big show of calling two synodal assemblies back to back no less which he thought would support him in his bid to overturn John Paul II’s reaffirmation of the sanctity of the Eucharist in Familiaris consortio, and when they did not, he went ahead anyway and promulgated that exhortation from hell called Amoris Laetitia.] So the synodal assembly on the Amazon region would be the ideal venue to deal with it. 2019 however is two years away
[synodal assemblies are generally held in October] – not soon enough for those who want the
viri probati proposal implemented now.
Certainly, we cannot rule out an ‘unexpected’ acceleration of the process via an imperial act of the pope.
On the priest shortage (from Wikipedia, duly sourced):
Worldwide, the number of priests in 1970 was 419,728.[2] In 2012, there were a total of 414,313 priests.
While the total number of priests worldwide has therefore remained about the same since 1970, the Catholic population has nearly doubled, growing from 653.6 million in 1970 to 1.229 billion in 2012. In 2012 the global number of candidates for the priesthood also showed its first decline in recent years.
The number of parishes with no resident priest pastor has grown from 39,431 in 1970 to 49,153 in 2012. The number of parishes without a priest does not include the thousands of parishes that have closed or merged for lack of priests.
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 04/11/2017 21:21]