VATICAN CITY — Pope Benedict XVI has denounced priests who have questioned church teaching on celibacy and ordaining women, saying Thursday they were disobeying his authority to try to impose their own ideas on the church.
Benedict made the rare and explicit criticism from the altar of St. Peter’s Basilica in his homily on Holy Thursday, when priests recall the promises they made when ordained.
In 2006, a group of Austrian priests launched the Pfarrer Initiative, or pastor initiative, a call to disobedience aimed at abolishing priestly celibacy and opening the clergy to women to relieve the shortages of priests.
Last June, the group’s members essentially threatened a schism, saying the Vatican’s refusal to hear their complaints left them no choice but to “follow our conscience and act independently.”
They issued a revised call to disobedience in which they said parishes would celebrate Eucharistic services without priests, that they would let women preach, and they pledged to speak out publicly and frequently for female and married priests.
So far, neither the Vatican nor the archbishop of Vienna, Cardinal Christoph Schoenborn, have imposed any canonical penalties on them.
Don’t just denounce them, excommunicate them. Once you become a dissident as a Catholic, you remove yourself from the Catholic Church. Jesus prayed in John 17 that all his followers would be perfectly one, as Jesus and the Father are one. That’s why Catholic teaching pertains to every Catholic, all around the world. You disagree with one of those teachings, you are disagreeing with Jesus, and you are no longer part of the Catholic Church. No one should know that more than a Catholic priest.
Since I’m a non-Catholic Christian, I guess I’m still a heretic. Only one person comes between me and God and he left 200 years ago. Certainly I don’t include the long list of Popes.
Well congratulations. Problem solved. Except you have to overlook the fact that the Pope has no clothes. Papal infallibility my foot. It has become an excuse for flabby thinking and increasingly necrotic symptoms in the church. Open your eyes to what goes on around you, even here.
It’s interesting to me that priests, who have a vocation to humility and service to the flock, instead want to spread discord and disobedience in addition to deserting their flock in order to grab power away from the very authority they agreed to be subservient to when they took their vows. Nobody is forced to be a priest. You come to it willingly. Accepting a vocation as a priest and then demanding a rule change in this manner is just wrong.
No you don’t get it. Any change in priestly celibacy is verboten always, under any circumstances as well a s ordination of women. What else fuels the traditional dysfunction and perversion that has so damaged the church and its blighted clergy. The need to change this insanity is overwhelming.
The rule about celibacy is just a rule. It can be changed, and exceptions can and are made. But, overall, the teaching authority of the Catholic Church has maintained that a celibate life is most appropriate for the priesthood and religious. Female ordination has been declared out of the question and this is considered an infallible proclamation by most scholars.
One of the reasons most Protestants don’t buy “infallibility”.
Jesus said that the gates of hell would never prevail against his church. That means that his church could not possibly ever teach in error. Infallibility is just a logical extension of that prophecy of Jesus. If you don’t believe that Catholic teaching is infallible, then you are rejecting the words of Jesus, which are written in the Bible, which Protestants consider to be their supreme authority in matters of faith.
Great to hear that the Pope is determined to keep the Catholic Church stuck in the middle ages by denouncing the value of women. Makes you wonder why any thinking, self-respecting woman would buy into this particular denomination. You’re going to give your faith and money to some fat, old white guy who wants to keep you repressed and suggests that your beliefs and ideas are somehow less useful then some fat old white guys? Makes me wonder if the Pope gets a discount on a membership at Augusta National.
Just once, for fun, it would be cool to hear this guy take a strong position on pedophiles wearing collars and protecting one another under His watch, but for some reason, that doesn’t ever seem to happen.
About time some clerics are challenging this secular (not sacred) policy. The only reason priests were mandated to be celebate about 100 years ago was that priests controlled a lot of wealth. They usually died before their wives so the widows began accumulating wealth of the Church. Follow the money.
Reality: In the US, specifically the Mobile (Alabama) Archdiocese, there are quite a few married Catholic priests. In a forgotten experiment by John Paul II, these men who had been serving as Episcopal priests, were accepted after a year of seminary into the Catholic Church to serve as associate pastors at larger parishes, along with their wives and families. They didn’t have to divorce their wives…. Clearly Benedict XVI needs to learn from John Paul II.
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Also, there are a number of other Eastern Rite priests in the Catholic Church who are allowed to marry.
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And of course, many widowed men have gone into the priesthood.
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Clearly, all these men have no problems serving as priests. JP2 had the right idea. These men have set the example. The church already has married priests. Expand the concept to help in large parishes. There still would be a bishop or senior priest who would hold to the vow….