The Vatican is welcoming Anglicans to return to Catholicism centuries after their ancestors left. The Vatican said it will permit married Anglican priests to become ordained Catholic priests. John Allen, senior correspondent for the National Catholic Reporter, talks with Steve Inskeep about how this week’s announcement calls into question a long-held Catholic tradition of celibacy in the priesthood.
The press/ liberals are going to keep flogging this “question” in the hopes that all the talk about it might actually advance their sexual agenda in the Church. We’ve had married priests in the Catholic Church – in the Eastern churches – for centuries and yet this has not precipitated any crisis with the requirement of celibacy for priests in the Latin Rite.
I will be interested to see if the Apostolic Constitution, when issued, allows this Anglican body to call and ordain new priests (in addition to the converted existing Anglican priests) who are married. If so, this might have a larger impact than the Eastern Catholic rites, since the language and culture of this body will be the same as the larger population.
[i][b] IF [/b][/i] the Apostolic Constitution permits married men to be ordained as diocesan clergy (beyond than the anticipated influx of Anglican clergy) I see no way this can not undermine Rome’s longstanding demand on its Latin Rite clergy to be celibate.
Comparisons to the uniate Eastern Churches are not really relevant for several reasons. Most of the Eastern sui juris churches are smaller than the TAC alone, they mainly exist in parts of the world with limited numbers of Latin Rite Catholics, and in places like N. America where the Latin Rite is normative the Eastern Catholics have been forced to adopt the Latin discipline.
Conservative Catholics have been falling all over themselves in a mad rush to reassure everyone that this is not going to be camel’s nose under the tent flap. But I think it is. These will be WESTERN (not Eastern) clergy that are going to be admitted to Holy Orders after being married, probably following the discipline of the Orthodox Church dating to the Council of Trullo. And they would be working in countries with large populations of Latin Rite Catholics and clergy. I just don’t see anyway that this will not undermine Rome’s insistence on universal celibacy for all ranks of the clergy in the Latin Rite.
In ICXC
John
#3, according to [url=http://www.usatoday.com/news/religion/2009-10-22-catholic-anglican-priests_N.htm]this link[/url] which Kendall posted, Cardinal Levada has indicated that the new structure will not have married priests after the current converts retire or pass away. New priests will be celibate with the possible exception of those already in formation for the Anglican priesthood today if they are married now.
#4 Katherine,
But it is an open question as to who counts as a “current” convert. Imagine the year is 2109, and there is a married priest in a parish that breaks away from TEC in 2110, and the parish goes Anglo-Catholic, slowing moving towards accepting Latin theology. This parish might be able to enter en masse into the Catholic Church, in say 2120, under this Anglican structure. So there might be some married priests of Anglican heritage within the Catholic Church for some years to come.
#5 – do you really think there will be a TEC in 2109? Or any Anglican body not part of a larger church by then?
#5, it’s an interesting idea, but hardly a prescription for a continuing tradition. Essentially, within one generation the Anglican/Roman priesthood will be celibate, with very few exceptions.