- Feb 5, 2002
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Well, there they go again. Pope Francis spoke of celibacy, the commercial media reported it, and they got it wrong.
(Chronic failures by commercial news outlets to report happenings in the Church fully and accurately is why Our Sunday Visitor, OSV News, Catholic News Agency, America and others were founded and see themselves still today as having a mission.)
First, what did the pope say? He did not announce an end to priestly celibacy. He said that celibacy, or the choice not to marry, is not essential to the priesthood. Nobody in Church authority ever said that it was. The priesthood was established by the Lord and comes to a man in the Sacrament of Holy Orders, whether he is married or not.
Many Catholics forget that everything with which they are familiar in the Roman rite does not pertain, and has never pertained, universally or always in their Church. Millions of good, devoted Catholics worship according to the other rites of the Church, originally, because of historical developments, centered in the Middle East and Eastern Europe.
In many of these Eastern rites, priests are married. Ukraine has been much in the news. Ukrainian Catholic priests often are married and are active as priests, with the full blessings of this pope and of popes going back many centuries.
Celibacy, or the choice never to marry, is a requisite for being ordained as a priest in the Roman rite, historically based in Western Europe, and brought by Western Europeans to places like this country.
Critics of the Church, or of celibacy, say that St. Peter was married. He was. The Gospel mentions his mother-in-law (cf. Lk 4:38). Was Peter married when Christ called him to be an apostle? Was he a widower? Nobody knows. Were the other apostles married? The New Testament is silent. One guess is as good as another.
Scholars believe St. Paul was not married.
Continued below.
www.oursundayvisitor.com
(Chronic failures by commercial news outlets to report happenings in the Church fully and accurately is why Our Sunday Visitor, OSV News, Catholic News Agency, America and others were founded and see themselves still today as having a mission.)
First, what did the pope say? He did not announce an end to priestly celibacy. He said that celibacy, or the choice not to marry, is not essential to the priesthood. Nobody in Church authority ever said that it was. The priesthood was established by the Lord and comes to a man in the Sacrament of Holy Orders, whether he is married or not.
Many Catholics forget that everything with which they are familiar in the Roman rite does not pertain, and has never pertained, universally or always in their Church. Millions of good, devoted Catholics worship according to the other rites of the Church, originally, because of historical developments, centered in the Middle East and Eastern Europe.
In many of these Eastern rites, priests are married. Ukraine has been much in the news. Ukrainian Catholic priests often are married and are active as priests, with the full blessings of this pope and of popes going back many centuries.
Celibacy, or the choice never to marry, is a requisite for being ordained as a priest in the Roman rite, historically based in Western Europe, and brought by Western Europeans to places like this country.
Critics of the Church, or of celibacy, say that St. Peter was married. He was. The Gospel mentions his mother-in-law (cf. Lk 4:38). Was Peter married when Christ called him to be an apostle? Was he a widower? Nobody knows. Were the other apostles married? The New Testament is silent. One guess is as good as another.
Scholars believe St. Paul was not married.
Continued below.
Why priestly celibacy? Because Christ wanted it that way
Pope Francis recently commented about the possible need to make exceptions to the norm in the Roman rite of ordaining only unmarried men to the priesthood. Some in the secular media took his comments totally out of context, writes Monsignor Owen Campion: “celibacy for priests in the Roman rite...
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