Tomorrow’s priests.
Rocco Palmo, who writes the blog Whispers in the Loggia, noted two recent pieces in Commonweal on the subject of the future of the priesthood in the United States, our editorial and Paul Stanosz’s Continuing the Conversation article. (The Stanosz is available to registered users only. If you haven’t yet signed up, it’s a brief process–and free.)
While Rocco seems to think the pieces are worth reading (they are)–he refers to the Stanosz article as “heady”–he targets a section of the piece for its “grave lapses of argument.” Here’s Rocco:
Regrettably, it must be noted that the piece does its point the
disservice of not placing the ordination of women and married men out
of bounds, at one point condescendingly accusing the church’s teaching
and discipline on admission to orders of being “intransigent” — as if,
with the wave of a wand, Tradition could change and all our problems
would be solved.
In a word, hardly.
Despite these grave
lapses of argument, however, it doesn’t mean that a discussion of what
makes quality — and an increased emphasis in its favor — cannot be
had whilst simultaneously adhering to the parameters of Tradition with
the utmost reverence. In fact, even if it means taking a short-term hit
in terms of numbers, an unassailably qualitative approach would
manifest a more substantive esteem for the priesthood and a greater
recognition of the vocation to it, which is in itself a path to growth.
With time, said investment would serve to restore more credibility in
the church than any excess of fleetingly superficial flourishes. Some
places have learned this by heeding it, others have experienced its
truths the hard way.
History teaches us that, if anything, the
church has received its greatest momentum and most enduring nourishment
not from massive crops of candidates, but from those singular, intrepid
souls for whom the teaching of Christ and the exercise of his
priesthood provided the grace and strength to build upon the already
considerable gifts of a sound nature. Luckily, through the ages, the
witness of these is something that’s transcended waves of ideology,
scandal and other forces of difficulty and thankfully, in the unsung
heroism of so many of our priests, it remains with us today.
In
light of that, we owe it to our past and our future to build on the
great riches — spiritual, academic, pastoral and human — that’ve been
given us, as opposed to casting our hopes on a cheap fix. In the
recruitment and tending of candidates, the external criteria mark only
the beginning of the responsibility and challenge of sound priestly
formation.
Here’s the part of Stanosz’s piece to which Rocco is responding, the third-to-last paragraph of the article:
The well-being of any organization relies on its ability to attract the
best and brightest to its leadership ranks. This clearly isn’t
happening in the U.S. Catholic Church. The admission of women into the
clergy by other denominations has raised the overall aptitude of their
seminarians, but Rome has ruled out this possibility for Catholics.
While one wonders what effect optional celibacy would have on the
number and quality of men entering the Catholic priesthood, Rome has
been intransigent on that option too. The Vatican appears to prefer
modestly gifted celibate men over brighter, more capable women or men
who want to marry.
Two things come to mind. One: the Catholic Church already has a married priesthood. There’s no reason discussing this should be “out of bounds.” Second: it’s not clear to me how describing Rome’s position on these issues as “intransigent” is “condescending,” or how this implies Stanosz believes “all our problems could be solved,” as Rocco summarizes, “with the wave of a wand.”
The quality of the Episcopal clergy, which accepts women and openly gay men, has continued to decline. The academic quality of Protestant clergy as a whole is declining (see Jackson Carroll’s “Protestant Pastoral Ministry at the Beginning of the New Millennium,” available online). Protestant churches have many empty pulpits; those who graduate from divinity schools do not want to go into pastorates.
The declining prestige of the clergy is attracting less-qualified applicants. The religious and sociological changes seem to affecting all types of Christians, The Latin Rite decisions not to ordain women at all, not to ordain homosexuals (a rule completely ignored in the US), and to ordain married men only rarely do not seem to be the cause of less-qualified seminarians.
Lee, before anybody could possibly comment on your sweeping generalities about Episcopal priests, you will need to:
1. List the criteria are you using to judge the quality of the Episcopal clergy.
2. Explain how that quality has declined in observeable terms.
3. Connect this decline with the ordination of women and homosexuals.
I look forward to your response.
I don’t know anything about Rocco Palmo (haven’t seen his blog and don’t care to), but he seems to take an undue and, thus, unfortunate swipe at women’s capacity to serve in the priesthood.
And then we have this reference to Tradition with a capital ‘t.’ As if those who came before us have thought, written, said, and done all that need be thought, written, said, and done for the benefit of the Church.
Change is a part of life, and our Church (whether because of, in spite of, or regardless of Vatican II) is not immune to it.
To Rocco Palmo: Get used to it!
Rocco is dead wrong. As everyone knows, the Roman Catholic church already has married priests. One of my professors many years ago was a convert from the Episcopal Church. He was a marvelous teacher. Finally after many years he was ordained thanks to one of JPII’s better ideas. I imagine he gave great homilies.
The way we are heading, there will not only be too few presbyters, many of them will be ill qualified. I do not think that using married presbyters is a panacea, but it is worth trying. But it would take planning and imagination. Anyone notice a problem there?
In the meantime the Pope seems to have decided that Extraordinary Ministers of Holy Comunion–once known as Eucharistic Ministers, but O dear, someone found that presumptuous, I guess–can no longer purify the sacred vessels. What is all this about? I have recently been reading a life of Marie Antoinette and all this reminds me of the etiquette of the French court before the revolution. Really! Again, recently someone said lay homilists could be used if no priests were available. If only whoever it was had said “priests capable of preparing and delivering a decent homily”.
My word, by admitting women to the priesthood the overall GRE scores of the candidates would go up!?! What a great argument for ordaining women. We should do so immediately!
The quality of priests and Protestant ministers is indeed a source of concern. I would argue that there is a connection between both developments.
I would submit that both occurred because of the feminization of the clergy. In both traditions this was prepared intellectually by styles of theology which over-emphasized the experiential and emotional dimension of faith. The result was a new personality type attracted to ministry and another personality type was repelled by it. The wounded healer, e.g.
I will put this bluntly and I sincerely apologize to those who might take offense: Who can blame a young man who does not wish to spend his years in formation, and indeed his ministry, having aggrieved women and homosexuals as his professional peers?
Folks, folks: why do so many in the Latin Rite always overlook the fact that there are MARRIED Eastern Rite priests, and have been so, for eons! it’s not only those who have jumped the Tiber to avoid women priests and whatever in the Episcopal church who now serve the Catholic Church!
If I were a priest of any of the Eastern Rites, this would only confirm to me (once again) that my Rite is not viewed as being Truly Catholic by the larger sister in the West.
To paraphrase Joe above: Get Used To It !!!!!
… and Get Over It !!!!!
I have to admit that I do read Rocco Palmo’s blog now and then. I don’t know what he is really like, but Palmo’s online persona is that of a sweet, innocent, somewhat star-struck and uncritical admirer of clerics and their world. He is a diligent reporter, who seems to work his beat 24 hours a day, and to have few other interests. But I suspect the real key to his success is that many of his fans seem to be (not surprisingly) clergymen, who find him a discreet resource when they want to “leak” a piece of news they think important without risk to themselves. His clerical gossip column could not exist without the support of the community on which it is focused. So it really isn’t surprising that he should fail to register the force of the Commonweal pieces on a sad situation about which his most avid readers are in deep denial..
For a different take on the general subject here’s a McBrien column on a new book by Donald Cozzens about clerical celibacy that has been discussed on the Commonweal listserve:
http://www.the-tidings.com/2006/1124/essays.htm
We should be careful as to how we describe qualified. Give me a good pastor anytime to an educated one. As Greeley has pointed out too many of them are thugs going right up to the Vatican.
Jesus clearly prefers good or humble over wise and learned of this world.
Educated is helpful and useful. Good nurtures and redeems.
Give me pastors who care and give all day. Unfortunately we have created peacocks who like to strut in long robes and devour the house of widows, as Jesus said.
Augustine, Jerome and the Gregory’s set this bad example in the fourth and fifth centuries. They fought over rich women.
So!
We can have good women, good gays and good heteros.
A quick comment. There seems to be much hand wringing of late regarding the startling increase of seminarians with a ‘high’ theology of the priesthood. I don’t understand the concern. It has never been the teaching of the Church or its theologians that the priesthood should be viewed merely in functional terms. The dreaded ‘ontological change’ confered by ordination is FOR THE SAKE of service. It is a conformity to Christ that allows the priest a deeper identification with Jesus’ self emptying love. A high theology of the priesthood is not incompatible with one focused on governance and collaboration with the laity. Rather one, if understood rightly, should lead to the other. This reflects the opinion of the vast majority of the seminarians with whom I’m familiar.
Aprpos what Jimmy Mac wrote: “If I were a priest of any of the Eastern Rites, this would only confirm to me (once again) that my Rite is not viewed as being Truly Catholic by the larger sister in the West.” this is what I posted in the Commonweal group when a similar point came up
This is Cardinal Ratzinger (as he was then):
“In the Orthodox Churches we have, on the one hand, the full form of the priesthood, the priest monks, who alone can become bishops. Alongside them are the “people’s priests”, who, if they want to marry, must marry before ordination but who exercise little pastoral care but are really only liturgical ministers. This is also a somewhat different conception of priesthood.”
( The Canon of Criticism – http://catholiceducation.org/articles/religion/re0633.html )
“who exercise little pastoral care but are really only liturgical ministers” I think that sounds very much like “our priests are better than yours”
My father as well as my wife are originally from an Orthodox Church. So I have relatives who are Orthodox and I attend a fair number of Orthodox services in connection with various functions (marriage, baptism etc). My experience does not bear out the comment that they “exercise little pastoral care but are really only liturgical ministers”.
I am also told that in their Church, Bishops are not permitted to hear confession, since they are not married. And married priests are preferred as parish priests.
Well, now this is interesting:
http://whispersintheloggia.blogspot.com/2006/12/hummes-married-priests-someday-maybe.html
Isn’t that sort of talk supposed to be out of bounds?
I always hate this discussion of women priests and married priests and homosexual priests and who is innately qualified to be a priest and who is rendered incapable by the nature of their birth.
It’s ridiculous.
If the priesthood is in trouble, then why aren’t we looking at the governing body that is actually responsible for the quality of the priests recruited and their formation? That would be the Church, would it not?
When a sports team has a losing season, the first person who has to own up to it is the coach. The person responsible for training the players, keeping them functioning as a team, making sure they understand the plays and game strategies so they can be effective on the field – that’s all the responsibility of the coach.
If the business is failing, it’s the manager who takes the heat. Planes crash and it’s the pilot’s performance that is examined. Ships sink and it’s the captain who goes down with it. Geez, even in politics the person who was elected eventually takes the fall when things go wrong.
Why is this not so with the priesthood? Hundreds of priests molested children, brought shame to the Church, and undeserved hatred upon the innocent priests and the focus is no longer centered on the people in authority who let this happen on their watch, but on homosexual men who may want to answer Christ’s call to service.
There is political infighting, bickering, petty vindictiveness and ambition evident throughout the seminaries, the diocese, and the Vatican that would wear down the most humble of servants, but again the focus is not on those who have the power to curtail this mindset. Instead, the concern is that women might decide to jump into the fray and demand equal rights. You want to know the real fear of women in the priesthood? Men who worked for years to get to the top of the clerical ladder will now have to make room for newcomers and lose out to someone whose main qualification is their breasts.
I happen to agree that married priests and women priests should be outside the boundaries of discussion because the very first thing we should be discussing is fixing the priesthood we have now.
I’m a woman and the last thing I’d want to do is become a priest. Not because I think I’m inherently unqualified, but because who in their right mind would want to work for a bunch of guys who wouldn’t think twice about hanging your ass out to dry to preserve their own power and ambitions?
Show me a priesthood that genuinely rewards those who serve it best in humility and compassion. Show me a priesthood that would immediately sweep out any person who brought harm to children and to the others that serve. Show me a priesthood that encourages a higher standard of behavior from its members and not just a higher expectation of admiration. Show me that much and then maybe we can talk about the rest.
As a regular reader of Whispers, I’d say there’s something to Rock’s wish to maintain a certain credibility in ecclesiastical circles by keeping women and married men off his discussion list. I think we all know (or should assume) his stance on celibacy is for mainstream Roman rite clergy, not refugees and switchers from other traditions.
Raising the issue of women priests, unfortunately, does set the issuer somewhat outside the bounds of communication, if one wants bishops and circumspect clergy to be part of the discussion. That is a sociological fact. It’s also sexism, but as is true with addicts, you can’t force a realization like that from the outside. Serrenity prayer, take effect.
On the other hand, those who forward the notion that a priesthood/ordained ministry is somehow less hefty once opened to non-celibate males seem to rely more on a subjective judgment rather than actual statistics or a scientific approach. Can they blame that brand of logical ineptitude on the women amongst them? Probably not.
A discussion point still in bounds, but probably just as uncomfortable for Catholic prelates is the quality of the overall formation. Manly types may mourn sharing classroom space with radical feminists and homosexuals, but they should also realize that they can’t purge their parishes of them, much less their lives. Worse yet, unless a neo-trad priest wants to spend his spare time praying in his bedroom recliner, he’ll need to deal with all sorts of messy people and situations in his life. In other words, a deisre for such a “pure” learning environment is likely a sure sign of immaturity which, if it doesn’t get him bounced out of seminary, will surely cause a lot of pain to some group of people, including himself, later in his life.
A good case can be made for closing down diocesan seminaries next semester, if not today.
No, GRE scores do not good priests make. And I accept that Roman Catholic priests cannot be women or I would not have converted.
However, if I thought Sean H. and mlj’s attitudes about women reflect those of the Church, I would hustle on back to my priestess friends real fast.
The women Episcopal clergy I know are not “aggrieved” nor have they infected the Episcopal clergy with some kind of feminization, whatever that is.
In fact, those vestments have a way of leveling the sexual differences between male and female priests.
While Episcopal women priests are not priests in the Roman Catholic sense, I have nonethelss found them to be good spiritual counselors and pastors in the same way our nuns are/
To disparage that part of their work is unfair, unChristian and unCatholic.
While reading the various threads, it occurred to me that maybe, just maybe, this situation will be rectified over time by practicing Catholics attending not only “bona fide” RC parishes but also affiliating formally or otherwise with unofficial parishes of folks who are Catholic by faith but have illicit albeit validly ordained clergy attending to their religious and spiritual needs. Would such a mixture of practice eventually change the official Vatican policy from the inside out? Would the informal overcome the formal?
I do take offense at the :feminization” comment here.
I remember the days in criminal justice/law enforcement when the good old boys network reigned.
Over the years i worked side by side with women and gay professionals and their sex or orientation was not a basis to judge their performance.
Of course, Rome will tenaciously try to hang on to the traidition of celibacy for men only.While it’s nice to say theoretically that service is what ordination is all about, one should look toward that as a first criterion for orders. Unfortunately, I find many of the new clergy seem more disposed to bein glike “The Gents” described in Paul Dinter’s “The Other Side Of the Altar.”
Nor should clergy be dummies or mediocrities for that matter. The service to their folk desrve more, but the staistics cvited in the Commonweal editorial are a real cause for concern.
The recent sewminary visitations, if reported accurately, sem focused more on keeping gays out.
The two major points above seem secondary and that’s a bleak picture.
but it all stems from desperately hanging on to a tradition meant to maintain power, not service.
The shift away from priests or pastors of high intellectualualism (that, is, whatever the quality, emphasis on abstract docrtinal principles) has nothing to do with feminization. It has to do with the fetishizing of personal emotion by our society. For a somewhat far afield analogy, think of the current movie, “The Queen,” and how absolutely befuddled she is at the emotional outpouring upon the death of her daughter-in-law. She who grew up in a family that was adulated because they kept the stiff upper lip while their home was being bombed — no crying, no outpouring allowed there — could not fathom how her fellow citizens had changed. Well, so have we.
We expect different things from our our authority figures now, including priests and ministers. Though I maintain that it helps greatly if they are able to move beyond empathy, empathy seems to be a paramount virtue, above and beyond whatever it used to be.
Evangelical and so-called megachurches are the hallmark of this emotionalism, that’s why they’re popular, and they are not led by females, I mean, they are as anti-female as the Catholic church, by and large. And yet they are all about stoking the personal relationship with God, using popular music to bring God “closer” to people. About reducing God to our size. That’s not feminine, that’s something altogether different and it makes me wander when mlj last set foot in a non-mainline Protestant service.
I thought that among other things parish priests were supposed to be able to teach, above all in the homilies they deliver. That means that they must not only have good communication skills, but must also know what they are talking about. I have encountered a few who do not. They need a solid background in theology, church history, and scripture. Homilists who spread fairy tales abuse the credulity of some and readily disabuse the initial good faith of others who know a fairy tale when they hear one. Yes, it is important to be good and caring. Yes, we do not want careerists with the gleam of mitres and silks in their eye. But a certain degree of intellectual integrity ids also indispensable.
On the subject of married priests. The Bishop of Rome attaches high priority to reunion with the Orthodox. This will put a large number of married clergy in communion with Rome. This is something devoutly to pe prayed for, is it not?
Jean,
I would be fascinated to hear what you think my attitudes about women are based on a few comments.
As to the topic at hand, I apologize for the sarcasm in my earlier post, but I admit that I found the comment in the article on ordination of women boosting GRE scores positively stupefying. So what! The reason for not having priestesses is not that women aren’t smart enough or administratively capable or good enough leaders. It certainly isn’t because they aren’t holy enough either. Even if we were to have conclusive evidence that women genetically made the best theologians and were holier than men, that would have nothing to do with this issue. When I read arguments like Paul Stanosz’s I wonder if he thinks we are ordaining priests or hiring an accounting firm.
I won’t get into the anecdotal experience I have had dealing with priests of both the pre JPII generations and the JPII generations (there are good and bad in both I am sure, and I have not seen the blundering dopes that Stanosz and the editors of Commonweal posit), but I have to ask what was so great about what the Church was doing before the “downslide” in quality? Certainly the seminaries of the 60′s, 70′s and early 80′s weren’t producing dedicated priests on the whole – they left the priesthood in droves. For all the talk of quality, you need only look at the Jay report on priest abuse to see when the most egregious cases were ordained. Will the Chuch be better if we have priests with high IQ’s and low morals, or PhD’s that leave the priesthood when it suits them? I am not saying you can’t have both intelligence and holiness and constancy, but I think evaluating the quality of priests based on test scores and degrees is shortsighted and wrong.
Give me a John Vianney or Joseph of Cupertino over a Charles Curran or Andrew Greeley any day of the week.
To answer your question seriously, Sean, I think the problem is that the process of identification and selection of “capable” men cannot be divorced from the larger educational context in which that formation occurs. It’s one thing to say that you want men who are holy and intelligent, this is obviously true, but the whole process by which intelligent people are identified, nurtured, and propelled towards opportunities to advancement, turn on things like test scores, whether we like it or not (and mostly, I don’t like it, even though I was a blazing success at it). Harvard rewards test scores (among other things), but so do true Catholic schools, and to be honest, it’s hard to fathom a process that would be fair and that would not, to some degree, take grades or test scores into account. What is happening, I imagine, is that the true Catholic schools try to maintain standards among a highly self-selected applicant pool. But you can see how, over time, the gap between the “average” potential seminarian and the “average” Ivy League graduate could become very wide indeed by the narrowing of those interested in pursuing the priesthood. And perhaps this is not an inevitably bad thing, but for ill or good, it is a narrowing of the kinds of people who form the pool. If it were any other profession, we would not see this as a good thing, in fact, we would see it as a problem, and we should not blind ourselves to its problematic nature for the Church because we don’t like the most obvious potential solutions.
To suggest a different analogy: if you look at nursing as a profession, there is a persistent fear that, without artificially imposed discriminatory selection process for medical schools, “all the smart women” will become doctors and leave nursing behind. I don’t know if this is true, but the nursing profession in general views that potential as a bad thing for nursing as a profession and has tried very hard to counteract that perception and has used various means to attract women “who could have become doctors.” Maybe a different skill set is important for nurses than for doctors, but nobody considers it a good thing that very smart women would reject the profession out of hand, even if many of them should because they don’t have the personal skills necessary to be good nurses. I hope that makes sense.
It’s about time for a priest to jump in on this discussion.
We can talk about this all day, but _Ordinatio Sacerdotalis_ from May 1994 reinforced how women will not be ordained as priests within our Church because, in the words of Pope John Paul II, they cannot be ordained as priests. Our present pope also added his own reflection.
http://www.ewtn.com/library/CURIA/CDFREPLY.HTM
Whether I or anyone else likes it or not does not change the way things are and cannot change what will be. The three words you will rarely, if ever, hear from the Vatican are: “We were wrong.”
At the same time, I ask everyone here to pray that all priests take their callings with the utmost seriousness and that we always demonstrate faith, intelligence, and compassion. Pray that our mistakes are few and that we offer compassion without preference.
I’ll be honest. All this talk is not easy for me to accept because there are moments when speculation, theology, and inspired ideas can change things for the better within our Church while there are times when speculation repeats the ugly parts of scholasticism. I am not trying to act like a “Rome has spoken.” dictator here, but I do say that the Vatican has defined its terms to the point where going against any of them would undermine its entire authority. Our comments here are like throwing cotton balls at a thick steel door.
About qualified candidates: Vocation directors for both dioceses and religious orders like to see good transcriots, test scores and such, but often there is, for the most part, tremendous profiling on one side or the other. We can make cracks about how some men can’t get into the LCs because they part their hair in the other direction, but dioceses and orders of all stripes fall prey to profiling rather than seeing whether a man is genuinely called to the priesthood.
That was “transcripts”.
The point should be nailed home that before and after Vatican II, the criteria for pastors is conformity with Rome or holy obedience as Rome likes to tout.
So conformity is more important than goodness or service. In the seminaries what is pounded on forever is the “set apartness” of the pastors not the need for service.
Of course, education helps but it should never be more prominent than service. But it usually is.
The “royalty” of the priesthood is the problem but it does attract many. Rome will lose its influence it it stresse service while its power is assured with stressing obedience.
Incidenetally, Sean H, you are right to say that “Give me a John Vianney or Joseph of Cupertino over a Charles Curran or Andrew Greeley any day of the week.”
However, “over a Fessio or Neuhaus” might be more necessary.
Father O’Neal:
If I understand you correctly, you are talking only of the unlikelihood that a Bishop of Rome will declare that women my be presbyters. Since you are telling us your views on that matter, perhaps you will tell us your views about the prospects for married men being ordained. Certainly a change of policy here would not bring everyting tumbling down. It is true that during his cardinalate Joseph Ratzinger made some disparaging remarks about the married clergy among the Orthodox. But as we can see from his more recent performances, he is a man quite adept at saying now this and now that, even when this and that may seem to an ordinary mortal to be rather at odds.
Rather than respond with comments from Pope Benedict, I offer a link to the statement released today from Cardinal Claudio Hummes OFM, Prefect of the Congregation of the Clergy.
http://212.77.1.245/news_services/press/vis/dinamiche/a6_en.htm
The dicastery that met in the Vatican during the middle of last month entertained the question, but many news reports can be obtained to show that priestly celibacy was reaffirmed.
As for Eastern Rite priests, Roman Rite bishops in the United States sought provisions as long ago as 1897 that Eastern Rite priests serving within the United States could not be married or, if they were widowed, could not have their children with them.
Concerning other married priests, I would not expect any quick movements because it has been only 25 years or so since we ordained men who were first ordained within the Anglican Communion. Anyone with a bit of sense about “Tempo Vaticano” knows that 25 years is far soon to make a massive shift in policy since that first group of Anglicans is still in probation period, so to speak.
Finally, I would not be surprised that because George Stallings and Emmanuel Milingo have been linked to the mid-November meeting concerning celibacy, quite a few Vatican folks readily associate the issue with these men.
Bill,
I’m in seminary. They don’t teach us that we are set apart and need not serve others. They don’t teach us that we are royalty. They don’t teach us that conformity is more important than goodness. Where are you getting this stuff?
Perhaps it’s worth mentioning in this context a brief piece in the most recent (Winter 2006) issue of “Church” entitled “Reader Feedback: Thoughts on a Paid, Full-time Diaconate.” Two of the four responses are by deacons, one is by a woman lay minister, and the fourth is by apastor emeritus. I trust that the editors of “Church would not have published just these four if they were all atypical. None of these four is happy about the present diaconate scene. Overall, it appears that the Church leaders have paid too little attention to the preparation of the deacons. Furthermore, the leaders don’t seem to know how to treat the deacons. Could this be that deacons, many of whom come with wives, don’t fit easily into the clerical club, a club that has routines for making assignments, for recreating together, for entertaining complaints, etc., into which deacons, especially married deacons and deacons still employed in some non-ecclesiastical occupation, can’t readily be inducted? If therre’s anything to this suspicion of mine, what does it say about this kind of club?
Fr. O’ Neal,
Cardinal Hummes , in his clarification, actually repeats his main point that the requirement of celibacy for priests is a matter of discipline, not dogma.
He goes on to mention various points that have been raised against a change, without subscribing to them, and mentions also the discussion at the dicastery at which doubts were expressed that changing the discipline would result in a reversal of the decline in numbers seeking to be ordained.
This sounds like a good man under great pressure who is determined to give as little comfort as he can to those who wish him to unsay his very sensible remarks.
As to the1897 provisions sought by the Roman Rite priests in the U.S. that you cite, they are appalling. What business was it of theirs to force widowed Eastern Rite Priests to choose between bringing their own children up and leaving the priesthood?
Hello, Susan.
Oh, sure. I agree with you that celibacy can, at best, receive the term of “discipline”, but it will stick, or at least be made to stick.
As for the Eastern Rite priests ruling, I need to find a more extensive copy of such a decree. Also, if the information I have sought is correct (and post here if it is incorrect), Eastern Rite Catholics did not have a bishop to speak on behalf of their specific rite and the customs therein until the past few decades, if ever. The one exception was that of Ukrainian Catholics, and such a diocese was not formally established until 1913. In brief, the Eastern Catholics had to abide by the Roman Rite rules and the bishops who enforced them.
The Code of Canons for the Eastern Churches was promulgated in 1990. It helped define terms and protect Eastern Rite Catholics from acts such as those presented above.
I was interested in the seminarian’s comment. I’m sure thereare no courses in “conformity 101 and 102″, but it would be interesting to know how much questioning is permitted and also the range of reading in courses.
What really caught my eye was that was the that they were not taught “not to serve others.” That double negative seem far removed from the Biblical exhiortations.Since there’sdsome consensus here that service is vital and since a number of inteligent folk are concerned about the shape of the coming clergy, maybe some scrutiny rather than defense might be helpful.
This morning I heard a brief homily on St. Ambrose. The homilist, ordained for a little more than a year, told his audience that St. Ambrose had baptized St. Augustine and St. Jerome. Actually no one knows who baptized St. Jerome, but there is no reason to think it was St. Ambrose and some good ones to think it was not. Someone may say, “Anyone can make a mistake”. That is true. But it is an important part of humility to know what one does not know.