by Joe Fitzpatrick

We live in a time of transition in the Catholic Church. The certainties of yesteryear are gone. We no longer think we are the one true church, and the rest must learn from us. We have become aware of the changes in our own history and there appears to be a widely shared judgment that the Holy Spirit wishes our church to change. There are those who refuse to change and condemn Pope Francis and this notion of synodality which he has introduced. Because we must attempt to make our church more relevant, more helpful to people, I would like to offer my thoughts on priesthood, and advocate changes that would make priests more responsive to the needs of people today. My argument is not about falling numbers or ageing priests, but about relevance and purpose.

Celibacy

There was an interesting letter in The Tablet recently in which the writer recounted being examined by the celebrated Canadian Jesuit Bernard Lonergan who asked him ‘Cur celibatio?’ – why celibacy? He replied with a theological and spiritual defence of celibacy. Lonergan disagreed and said it was ‘res economica’ – it was about money. (Exams at the Gregorian University at that time were oral encounters in Latin across the table from each other).

There were practical advantages in favour of celibacy – it made transferring a priest from one parish to another quite easy; there was no wife to consult, no children’s education to bother about and, in most cases, no mortgage to re-negotiate. But the epistles to Timothy and Titus advise presbyters to be faithful to one wife (1Timothy 3: 2 and Titus 1: 6). For more than the first Christian millennium priests, bishops and Popes married and had children. It was not until around 1130 AD that a powerful Pope Innocent 111 imposed celibacy as a condition for ordination. He wrote: ‘Who does not know that conjugal intercourse is never committed without itching of the flesh and heat and foul concupiscence whence the conceived seeds are befouled and corrupted?’ These sentiments were repeated by the First and second Lateran Councils, and celibacy became mandatory in the Western Church from the twelfth century onwards.

Joe Fitzpatrick is a former priest of the Motherwell Diocese and author of The Fall and the Ascent of Man: How Genesis Supports Darwin.

Photo by Michel Grolet on Unsplash