Question 1 : Is a celibate, male Catholic priesthood called for in scripture or otherwise dictated by God, or is it primarly based on dogma and associated tradition(s).
Question 2: What, in practical terms, are the real world chances of the Vatican agreeing and/or allowing for non-celibate married priests?
Question 3: Could the American Catholic Church, as a means of damage control and financial survival, go it’s own way and allowed married priests without being deemed non-Catholic and apostate by Rome?
1) Celibacy is not found in Scripture (unless one takes Paul’s “but better to marry than to burn” phrase as a grudging permission for the overheated to marry while those who are more “pure” refrain).
It is an ancient (but not a consistent) tradition.
Some of the specifics were discussed in Running out of priests a couple of weeks ago with some additional information in the Why can’t priests have sex? within the last few days.
2) The current administration (John Paul II and his best friends in the Curia) will never allow it for the Roman Rite. What will happen after JP II’s death is anyone’s guess.
(All sorts of people can come up with odd answers regarding new popes; they are often wrong.
John XXIII was supposed to be a do-nothing “caretaker” pope until the politicians could get the “real” pope lined up to replace him at his imminent death. He sprung Vatican II on them and Paul VI was not the successor the politicians had allegedly “picked.”
John Paul II was supposed to be the pope who would sign all sorts of concordats with the U.S.S.R. giving away the RCC’s moral authority to oppose “godlees Communism.” Instead, he is often credited with having provided the impetus to the Poles to drive the first cracks into the fragile Soviet hegemony.)
Guessing what “the church” or “the next pope” will do is fun, but is generally fruitless.
3) No. The current discipline of the Roman Rite is celibacy.* To directly ignore that discipline (ignoring that the U.S. bishops are not nearly so “liberal” that they are really enthused about the idea, anyway), would be to cause a schism. (Note that both the schism between the Catholics and the Orthodox and between the Catholics and the Anglicans had a lot more to do with politics than dogma.)
- That discipline is not fixed, however. John Paull II has already accepted married priests: Anglican Communion priests who have fled *that church because it has ordained women have been accepted into the Roman Rite.
In brief: there’s nothing in Scripture that requires priests to be celibate (at least one of the 12 Apostles was married), and there’s no absolute, infallible Catholic doctrine that requires celibacy. It’s a practice that COULD, in theory, be changed immediately, if the Pope so decreed.
John Paul II will never change that policy, but a future pope might.
As for question #3, Tom is absolutely right, as usual. Even if AMerica’s bishops were convinced that celibacy isan archaic practice, and even if they secretly WANTED to defy Rome, they’d never dare DO so.
Priests were allowed to marry until about the 12th century. In fact, there have been 39 married popes, and 3 popes who had sons who later became popes (Anastasius I, Saint Hormidas, and Sergius III). Two of the sons were later declared saints (Saint Innocent I and Saint Silverius). In 1139, pope Innocent II made a decree or something (I’m a little sketchy on the details here), and made married priests send their wives and children away. Effectively declaring their wives whores and children bastards.
This decision was not revistited until 1980 when pope John Paul II had a look at the issue. Since then, married protestant ministers who want to become catholic priests have been allowed to bring their families with them.
More information can be found here and here
As for question 2 - It’s a posibility. In 1563 when the catholic church debated the issue of celibacy for the clergy, it was acknowledged that celibacy was a church tradition rather than a law of God, but the decision was not overrulled at the time. This leaves a door open for future change.
Would it be accurate to say, then, that current policy is that priests can be married, but they can’t get married?
I’ve had the feeling for the past couple of decades that there might develop an informal schism between American Catholics and the Vatican. Call it the American Catholic Church. It started over little things like not allowing altar girls, but recent developments like the revelations about pedophile priests have upped the ante. Already there are reportedly groups looking into and supporting the idea of married priests here in the US. If the Vatican won’t allow such liberal leanings, I suspect that parishes may stage a quiet revolution and adopt them themselves.
There are other issues as well – divorces vs. annulments, birth control and abortion, euthanasia. The Catholic Church has always tried to be a monolith, with everyone everywhere adhering to the same rules and beliefs, but it has also been subject to the tidal pulls of local feeling. There’s a tremendous investment that would be required to intentionally break away from Rome, but the current shortage of priests combined with the much-ballyhooed sexual misconduct and cover-up might be just the thing to persuade people to fill their priest quotas with nontraditional pastors.
The OP asked whether a celibate, male Catholic priesthood called for in scripture or otherwise dictated by God, or is it primarly based on dogma and associated tradition(s).
The answer is that celibacy is based neither on scripture nor on dogma, but, within the Latin rite only, on tradition and discipline. The Latin rite includes most Roman Catholics, but there are other rites, fully Roman Catholic, which have married priests. Even withing the Latin rite married priests are permitted in some limited circumstances.
An exclusively male priesthood is universal throughout the Roman Catholic Church. Many Catholics would argue that it is founded in scripture; others would disagree.
On question 2, I agree with tombdebb. It’s not really possible to predict if or when the attitude to celibacy might change.
On question 3, if any section of the church were to move on its own here and start ordaining married priests, they would not thereby become non-Catholic or (necessarily) apostate, but they would become schismatic. Unless some accommodation were found very rapidly, a complete breach with Rome would be inevitable and, even for a Catholic strongly committed to the ordination of married men, this would be an extremely painful and undesirable outcome.
The ban on priests being married dates back to the late 11th century. According to one account I read, it was a strictly pragmatic answer to the problem of priests’ families inheriting church property. Another issue was that monks (who had a long tradition of celibacy) were considered to be “better” than priests who worked in the secular world.
I don’t think American Catholics at this point are ready to sever their ties with the Roman church over the issue of married priests, or even a combination of married priests, woman priests, birth control and divorce. In 50 years, who knows what the Roman church’s position will be on these issues.
I don’t think anybody’s going to get up an explicit movement to sevcer ties, and make it all public. There aren’t going to be any announcements, or these nailed to the door. I suspect it’s going to happen very quietly, and everyone will ignore that it’s happening until it virtually has.
Slight sidetrack: every RC priest swears an oath at his ordination which makes him directly responsible to the Pope and gives him no latitude to go against the teachings of the church whatsoever. There is certainly some leniency in how this is interpreted and enforced (or else the church would implode) but theoretically no priest (and this includes the bishops on up) can make a decision which is not in line with the teaching of the church, no matter what the Bishops Council says. For a cite I can recommend the excellent, if a little agressive ‘The Vicars Of Christ’ by Peter de Rosa, a former Jesuit and professor of theology at Christ College, Dublin. So the chances of there being some revolution are close to zero.
In Germany Eugen Drewermann, a priest and theology lecturer, was excommunicated in the early 1990’s for speculating that the Miracles might not be literal truths, and Ute Ranke-Heinemann (sp?) was relieved of her post as professor of theology at the university of Tuebingen for commenting on the basis of women’s role in the church. Having been to Catholic boarding school myself I may be a little biased, but the stealth with which all this was done is reminscent of a third world despot taking the troublemakers out back and quietly having them shot.
I don’t like the hypocritical attitude of the Congregation of Faith (that condemns “liberals” while making special allowances for schismatics such as LeFebvre and company) any more than you appear to, but the actions taken against Drewermann and Ranke-Heinemann were no more “stealthy” than the actions taken against Hans Küng or Richard McBrien–and for the same reasons.
The RCC reserves the right to determine who will speak in the name of the RCC and theologians are always going to find their comments under analysis. (This is particularly true for theologians teaching at universities founded and chartered under the aegis of the RCC.) The four theologians mentioned here were not simply thrown out when they made a wrong comment. Each published speculative material that they held to be valid teaching of the church. When challenged by the Congregation for going beyond teachings to speculation, they insisted on continuing to publish. In the cases of Küng and McBrien, (I am less familiar with the cases of Drewermann and Ranke-Heinemann), they specifically insisted in the secular press that they were correct and had a right to publish whatever they wanted.
In this they were correct–as private citizens. To the extent that they continued to publish those opinions while holding RCC-authorized chairs of theology, they were going against the will of the RCC. Therefore, the RCC took away their “chairs.” They are still free to believe whatever they wish. If they choose to publish their thoughts, they must understand (as the RCC certainly does) that they will be perceived as spokespersons of the church, and must continue to moderate their language even in their “private” publications. Drewermann, having been relieved of his “chair” continued to publish his thoughts and was later removed from his duties as a priest so that he would not appear to have the consent of the RCC when he preached. (I have never heard that he was excommunicated, although he may have been.)
Küng, McBrien, and Ranke-Heinemann appear to have “accepted” the decision of the RCC and stopped publishing–although Küng and McBrien, at least, continue to make their presences felt, speaking at various gatherings and providing “commentary” (usually in the form of “private” letters that are released to the press) on the actions of the hierarchy.
There are, in addition, numerous theologians (and not a few bishops) who have pushed the limits of what the Congregation of the Faith would approve, simply being careful to not cross a line that will get them censured.
How does this affect the possibility of future schisms? Simple: these people have not gone into hibernation or cloistered themselves. They are still in frequent communication with a great many other people of similar thought. In addition, there are several movements throughout the world in which the local churches have opposed Vatican statements. The Dutch Church has been threatening schism for years. The Austrian Church has been in an uproar over the handling of pedophilia (which reached the office of the Archbishp of Vienna) for several years.
The main problem with predicting a schism by the U.S. church is that it is more likely that the people will simply fade away, leaving a community of those who are simply less inclined to schism.
On the other hand, Austria and the Netherlands have already gone through their “falling away” losses and if they get mad enough, the remaining people may, indeed, choose to break away. (If a “vow to the pope” was sufficient to hold people in place, we’d have never seen the Reformation.)
Sex is bad and naughty and not very holy.
Been through enough Catholocism to see this.
You are correct Tom, both Drewermann and Heinemann had their chairs removed, and Drewerman was forbidden from performing any of the sacraments. I guess my point really is that the Church has all the time in the world and can effectively smother debate by taking its time and waiting for interest to fizzle out. And as you (kind of) pointed out, after a while those who love the church and try to reform it from within simply give up and leave. That makes another schism unlikely.
How the church gets to decide a professorship at a publicly funded university is a whole different rant.
Europe or the U.S.? In most cases in the U.S., the schools are Catholic colleges. In Europe, different rules apply (but, then, different rules apply across a number of church/state issues: several Scandinavian countries still support their official churches with taxes; the charters to any European universities simply derive from the founders–often the RCC).
Every priest, brother, and sister in the U.S. reports, ultimately, to a bishop, abbot/abbess, or community superior. When the Congregation of Faith declares that they may no longer teach as Catholic theologians, the Congregation drops a note to the specific bishop, abbot, or community superior and they simply re-assign the person to another job. The theologian in question has every civil right in the U.S. to ignore the order (if they are teaching at a public facility), but that immediately puts them outside the church rules and the church then has the right to take ecclesiastical action against them.
These folks know the rules of the game and they make their choices. I find Ratzinger (and, by extension, JP II) to be rather hypocritical in their selective enforcement, but then, they would probably be scandalized at how swiftly I’d have chucked out the LaFebvre bunch (and how very closely I would begin monitoring the activities of the Pius X gang). It would be hypocritical of me to have cheered the decision to excommunicate Fr. Feeney for his refusal to back down on the claim that only Catholics can be saved if I now claimed that the RCC could not enforce the same rules against people whse views are more nearly (though not the same as) mine.