In the interview published on Thursday, the Pope stressed that removing the celibacy rule is not the answer to the Catholic Church’s priest shortage.
In his first major interview to a German weekly, Die Zeit, Pope Francis not only expressed his opinion on ordaining married men as priests, he also said that celibacy can be considered for discussion since it is a discipline of church.
In the interview published on Thursday, the Pope stressed that removing the celibacy rule is not the answer to the Catholic Church’s priest shortage. But he expressed an openness to studying whether so-called ‘viri probati’ — or married men of proven faith — could be ordained.
He said the Church may consider ordaining married men who could potentially then work in remote areas faced with a shortage of priests. “We must think about whether viri probati is a possibility,” said Francis for the older married men who are already involved in the Church’s businesses. “Then we have to decide what tasks they can take on, for example in remote communities,” he added.
Many in the Church believe that, given the lack of priests in many places, a new path to ordination should be opened up. They think that in addition to priests who take a vow of celibacy, older married men with a long commitment to the Church could also be considered.
Pope Francis in May 2014 had said that “there are married priests in the Church”, citing married Anglican ministers who joined the Catholic Church, Coptic Catholics and the priests of some Eastern churches.
The Church, and notably the current Pope’s predecessor Benedict XVI, had previously said that celibacy was not a matter of inflexible church dogma unlike, for example, the resurrection of Jesus Christ. However, Pope Francis said allowing priests in training to choose whether or not to be celibate was “not the solution”.
The viri probati proposal has been around for decades, but it has drawn fresh attention under history’s first Latin American pope in part to his appreciation of the challenges faced by the church in places like Brazil, a huge Catholic country with an acute shortage of priests. Brazilian Cardinal Claudio Hummes, a long-time friend of Pope Francis and former head of the Vatican’s office for clergy, is reportedly pressing to allow viri probati in the Amazon, where the church counts around one priest for every 10,000 Catholics.
(with agency inputs)
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