Brendan Hoban: Celibacy should not be intrinsic to priesthood    

Western People 13.2.2024

Archbishop Charles Scicluna is a busy man with three heavy responsibilities. His day-job is archbishop of Malta but he doubles as a secretary of the Vatican Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith and trebles as one of the Catholic Church’s leading investigators of clergy sexual abuse. While the Malta position keeps him at home some of the time, the Vatican role involves a short hop over the Mediterranean to Rome and the wider international role has him hopping all over the world.

Scicluna was in the news most recently for suggesting that the Catholic Church should reconsider its long practice of mandatory celibacy for priests. It could, he told the American paper, the National Catholic Reporter, ‘be something worth discussing’ and that it is ‘something the church at the highest authority will have to decide’.

So far Pope Francis has declined to move on that pointed request. However, there are straws in the wind: at the 2019 synod on the Amazon, that proposal received a two-thirds majority vote for approval; a similar proposal was included in the final synthesis document of the 2023 Synod on synodality; and further discussion on the topic is expected this coming October when that synod reconvenes.

More pertinently, Scicluna is a trusted ally of Pope Francis and some commentators have suggested that this may be a kite-flying exercise on the pope’s behalf to access the support for revisiting the Catholic Church’s one thousand year practice of mandatory celibacy for priests. But, whatever its source, at a time when priest numbers are ‘going through the floor’, Scicluna’s prompting is attracting attention.

A recent letter to the prestigious English Catholic paper, The Tablet, signed by six priests from the diocese of Portsmouth, suggests that its time that the English bishops, on behalf of English Catholics, petitioned ‘the Roman authorities to ordain married men’. The priests make two main points. One, closing parishes due to a priest shortage and creating larger conglomerations is effectively destroying parish communities. And, two, in every parish community, there are faithful and qualified married men who could, after a short time of preparation, be ordained as priests. The situation, the priests argue, is now urgent and they feel sure that the people would support such a move.

What’s being suggested is a limited response to the mandatory celibacy problem – the ordination of married men to fill the gaps that arise as clergy numbers decline – and because in England, as so many former Protestant clergy have converted to Catholicism and are now working as Catholic priests in English parishes, Catholics there are ‘well used to married priests now’.

While some believe that such a move has the long-term benefit of eventually freeing up the Catholic priesthood to a personal choice for celibacy, not all are convinced of this strategy. Others are insistent that a long-term gradualism is an inadequate response to the present crisis and that change is needed now with the emerging present reality for the Catholic Church of a ‘no-priest, no Mass, no Mass, no Church’ scenario.

There’s a gathering consensus that the Catholic Church just cannot afford to wait for change to emerge over the course of a few centuries and that this is one situation where kicking the can down the road is a distraction rather than a solution. And, it goes without saying that, generally Catholic women will be unhappy (or maybe more accurately outraged) at the implied diminishment of ordaining ‘married men’ to fill the present yawning gap and by implication a further side-lining of the ordination of women priests, now widely regarded as a touchstone of recognising and respecting the role of women in their Church.

That said, the stop-gap measure suggested by the six priests may have some purchase in sustaining priest-less parishes. It creates some movement in the present logjam. It breaks the mental block of the priesthood/celibacy axis. It demystifies and demythologises priesthood. It is priests saying what priests have always wanted to say but often hadn’t the courage to own – that celibacy is not intrinsic to priesthood – and it introduces into the priesthood/celibacy debate, a normalising of the lived life of priests as married men (and women).

Above all, I think that in the short term it helps sustain parishes. A week or two ago, on Mid-West Radio’s Faith Alive! programme I interviewed the newly appointed rector of the Church of Ireland parish of Ballina. Rev. Alex Morahan, a native of Louisburgh, was ordained a Catholic priest, worked for years on the missions in South Africa and gradually became disillusioned with mandatory celibacy. He later married his wife, Maggie, and they have a daughter, Megan.

During the interview, as Alex described the group of seven parishes and seven churches under his leadership, he paid glowing tributes to the three ordained local ministers (OLMs) who work with him in a voluntary capacity in serving their parishioners: Reverend Caroline Morrow (in Killanley/ Castleconnor); Reverend Karen Duignan (in Easkey and Kilglass); and the Reverend Clive Moore (in Crossmolina and Ballycastle).

As the united parishes present an unwieldly and unnatural unit, the four OLMs working together – though identified with specific parishes – help to bring a local presence to their work and a personal connection to their parishioners both of which are greatly appreciated. Listening to the Reverend Alex describe how satisfactory the group dynamic is working, it struck me that the same formula would make some short term sense for Catholic parishes.

It certainly makes more sense than one priest trying to serve seven parishes.