Vatican City, Jan 8, 2024 / 12:13 pm (CNA).
A Vatican official has said that he thinks the Catholic Church’s priestly celibacy requirement in the Latin rite should be revised.
Archbishop Charles Scicluna, who serves as the archbishop of Malta and is an assistant secretary at the Vatican’s Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, said in an interview published Jan. 7 that the Church should “think seriously about” changing the Western discipline.
“If it were up to me, I would revise the requirement that priests have to be celibate,” he said, according to a captioned Maltese-language video interview by the Times of Malta.
“This is probably the first time I’m saying it publicly and it will sound heretical to some people,” he added.
The 64-year-old archbishop said that the Church should learn from the Eastern Churches, which allow married men the option to get ordained to the priesthood.
“Why should we lose a young man who would have made a fine priest, just because he wanted to get married? And we did lose good priests just because they chose marriage,” he said.
Scicluna, who has personally handled multiple investigations into clerical sex abuse on behalf of the Vatican’s doctrine office, made the comments when asked about Catholic priests in Malta who have secret relationships and have fathered illegitimate children.
“This is a global reality; it doesn’t just happen in Malta. We know there are priests around the world who also have children and I think there are ones in Malta who may have too,” Scicluna said.
“A man may mature, engage in relationships, love a woman. As it stands, he must choose between her and priesthood, and some priests cope with that by secretly engaging in sentimental relationships,” he said.
Scicluna, who was a delegate at the Synod on Synodality assembly last fall, added that he has previously spoken openly in Rome about his views on priestly celibacy.
Priestly celibacy discussed at Synod on Synodality
The requirement of priestly celibacy was openly discussed at the 2019 Synod of Bishops on the Pan-Amazon region, but in the end, Pope Francis chose not to mention celibacy in his postsynodal apostolic exhortation.
The topic came up again during the 2023 Synod on Synodality assembly at the Vatican in October. The assembly’s synthesis report has asked whether it is necessary to maintain the discipline of priestly celibacy in the Latin rite of the Catholic Church and called for the question to be taken up again in the next assembly in October 2024, noting that “different assessments were expressed” on the topic during the first synod assembly.
Pope Francis on priestly celibacy
In an interview for a book published in October, Pope Francis pushed back against the idea that changes to Church practice such as introducing female deacons or optional priestly celibacy would help boost vocations.
Asked about women’s ordination bringing “more people closer to the Church” and optional priestly celibacy helping with priest shortages, Pope Francis said he does not share these views.
“Lutherans ordain women, but still few people go to church,” Pope Francis said. “Their priests can marry, but despite that, they can’t grow the number of ministers. The problem is cultural. We should not be naive and think that programmatic changes will bring us the solution.”
“Mere ecclesiastical reforms do not serve to solve underlying issues. Rather, paradigmatic changes are what is needed,” he added, pointing to his 2019 letter to German Catholics for further considerations on the issue.
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Those who are for optional clerical celibacy like Malta Archbishop Charles Scicluna have the greatest Catholic theologian, St. Thomas Aquinas, on their side. In Summa Theologiae II-IIa, 88, 11, the angelic doctor stubbornly opposes those who saw the clerical celibacy requirement as part of divine law. St. Thomas contended that the celibacy requirement for Catholic priests was merely Church law that could be reversed at any time by papal or conciliar authority.
🌹thanks be to God- the Light of Christ continues to shine for the””Dark minds” who misrepresent Christ’ – & then we reap the whirlwind 😇🙏✝️🌹
Here in the U.S. in this year National Eucharistic Revival, it is good to reflect and pray on the deprivation of the Eucharist on the part of the majority of Catholics worldwide. This deprivation is mainly due to the lack of priests who are to lead communities of the faithful in the Eucharistic sacrifice. Not many young men are encouraged to enter the seminary with what they perceive to be an archaic, unnatural and pagan (women as sources and causes of impurity through sex for those offering ritual sacrifice) original basis of this celibacy requirement when it was first universally imposed by Lateran II in 1139. Only more recently was this original anti-women root of clerical celibacy whitewashed and spinned with a more Christo-centric modern rationale: the imitation of Christ in love and service.
Good to hear some clarity from Pope Francis, and yet, would he defer to Synod 2024 which he highly esteems? Or, remain silent, burdening his successor with a bunch of loose ends, so to speak?
Because the Council of Trent (A.D. 1545-1563) was convened too late (for difficult reasons) after Luther first took the microphone of history (1519), the upshot was that many priests had taken concubines in the intervening years–in what the red hat Scuclina today terms “sentimental relationships” (as if the euphemism “irregular” is already old hat). During and after Trent, Pope Pius IV waffled between warnings and other inadequacies in implementing its decisions. And, while the successor Pope Pius V “was a man of different temper,” and despite the conciliar anathemas, a parallel sub-culture of exemptions persisted clear up into 1630.
An eminent American historian (regarded as “anti-Catholic”), unsympathetic to celibacy, wrote in detail:
“[….]The numerous cases of members of the religious Orders, of both sexes, who left their houses and contracted marriage among heretics, subsequently seeking return to the Church, illustrates the confusion of the period, while the benignity with which their supplications were admitted indicates how impotent was the Holy See to enforce the rules amid the exigencies of the struggle between orthodoxy and heresy in the lands remaining under the Roman obedience” (Henry C. Lea, LL.D., [d. 1909], “History of Sacerdotal Celibacy in the Christian Church,” London, 1867/1932).
Yes, celibacy is a discipline rather than a doctrine, but WHY is it that in the “exigencies” of our struggle today with radical Secularism, and with the dismantling of marriage itself as an exclusive and total commitment, and even of binary human sexuality as a reality, that face-time Scuclina calls upon priestly concubinage to propose–even over the apparent and sound papal objection, not only a “blessing” but even the dismantling of Holy Orders as also a total commitment?
Yes, why not trigger more decades of confusion and worse? Another synodal nail in the coffin of ecclesial “structure, organization, and leadership”…and vocation.