The Vatican’s just-announced effort to recruit unhappy Anglicans away from a church that has embraced female priests and elected an openly gay bishop provides the Catholic Church with a way to deal with its shortage of priests – without allowing Catholic women to be ordained and without ending the celibacy rule.
If Anglican clergy and seminarians are among those who convert, the Vatican potentially gets more married men in its ranks of priests while continuing to forbid Catholic priests and seminarians to wed.
In fact, this very thing has been happening on a small scale for years. Since the early 1980s, dozens of former Episcopal priests, a good many married with children, have become Catholic priests in the United States. Published reports put the number at about 200 by now.
effort to recruit unhappy Anglicans away from a church
One more (with feeling): Pope Benedict is responding to requests made by Anglicans and those with Anglican roots (TAC, primarily). To say that he is “luring”, “poaching”, “recruiting”, or whatever Anglicans is simply untrue.
As usual, this pastoral effort is met with the nasty bigotry and anti-catholic media fervor of the secular news media.
Mr. Rocdrick shares some incorrect data. And his assertion that the clergy abuse scandal in the Roman Catholic Church could have been avoided if only priests could be married is astonishingly naive.
Published reports that I am aware of put the number of former Episcopal priests who have converted to Roman Catholicism and subsequently received Holy Orders at about 100.
Secondly, Mr. Rodricks would have us believe that this permission of married priests in full communion with the Holy See is a radical, sudden novelty. The fact is that there are other uniate Churches, such as the Eastern Rite, who have had married priests for much, much longer than there have been former Episcopal married priests who have come to Rome. Current priests and seminarians are well aware of that fact. What’s surprizing is that Mr. Rodricks doesn’t seem to be.
Thirdly, it is ludicrous to suggest that a pedophile priest, who has a history of molesting pubescent boys, wouldn’t have committed such acts if only he could have been married. Isn’t it safe to say that someone who is frustrated with celibacy would much rather sneak off to a motel to have an affair with a woman, than molest a 14 year-old boy? I am personally not aware of any data or reports that would support the claim that celibacy [i]causes[/i] child molestation.
The irony is on you, Mr. Rodricks.
I do not think that it is the celibacy requirement that causes persons to become child molesters. I think it is the celibacy requirement that attracts persons to the Catholic priesthood who do not wish to be either gay or pediphiles to the priesthood as a way to escape an identity that they do not wish to embrace. Of course, an argument could be made that not having a legitamite way to be a sexual being ie repression could cause some people to do bizarre things that they would not otherwise do.
Emerging data (I’ve posted this here before) shows that among all professions with access to kids, the offense rates are about the same. The celibacy requirement tends to skew the Catholic priesthood towards homosexuals; estimates of homosexually oriented priests range from 20% to 50%, and hence, most of the molestation is against boys . Of course, no one wants to acknowledge that the Catholic problem is homosexual in nature, since most of those “boys” are sexually mature young men.