12/11/2023 0 Comments St rita catholic community![]() ![]() Now being married certainly helps my priesthood, the insights and sympathies gained as both husband and father are sometimes genuine advantages. One need only look to the clergy shortage in many Protestant churches to see that opening up clerical ranks doesn't necessarily bring about spiritual renaissance or growth at all, the opposite being just as likely.īut more importantly, calls to change the discipline of celibacy are usually either ignorant or forgetful of what the church calls the "spiritual fruit" of celibacy, something largely incomprehensible in this libertine age, but which is nonetheless still true and essential to the work of the church. But it's an assumption with little supporting evidence. Laity who have no real idea of what priesthood entails and even some priests who have no real idea of what married family life entails both assume normalizing married priesthood would bring about a new, better age for the Catholic Church. The Ordinariate of the Chair of Saint Peter in the United States, established by Pope Benedict XVI to provide a path for Anglican communities to become Roman Catholic, is another instance of the Church making an exception, allowing for the same dispensations from celibacy to be granted to priests.īut these are exceptions made, as I said, for the sake of Christian unity, because of Jesus' final prayer that his disciples be "one." They do not signal change in the Catholic Church's ancient discipline of clerical celibacy. This provision allows men like me, mostly converts from Anglicanism, to be ordained priests, yet only after receiving a dispensation from celibacy from the pope himself. ![]() I'm able to be a Catholic priest because of the Pastoral Provision of Saint John Paul II, which was established in the early 1980s. Li kewise for me, a convert from Anglicanism. The Eastern Catholic Churches, for example, many with married priests, have since early modernity flourished in the Catholic Church. Yet there have always been, for good reasons, exceptions made, particularly for the sake of Christian unity. ![]()
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