Book Reveals New Pope's Views on Celibacy, Abuse Crisis

By David Gibson
USA Today
March 20, 2013

http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2013/03/20/pope-francis-celibacy-sex-abuse/2004151/

Pope Francis, shown here greeting Argentine President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner, opposed Argentina's same sex marriage law and briefly suggested civil unions instead.

Before he became Pope Francis, Argentine Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio offered clues to his views on celibacy, on the sexual abuse crisis and on civil unions.

He advocated a zero-tolerance approach to clergy abusers in a 2012 conversation with a leading Latin American rabbi. Bergoglio, then archbishop of Buenos Aires, criticized bishops who attempted to protect the image of the church by covering up abuse and shuffling predatory priests among parishes. The archbishop called that "a stupid idea."

"You cannot be in a position of power and destroy the life of another person," Bergoglio told Rabbi Abraham Skorka, rector of the Latin American Rabbinical Seminary. The book-length dialogue with the rabbi will be published in English in May. The passage was translated by Aleteia, a website promoting Catholic evangelization.

He told Skorka that when a bishop once asked him what he should do with priests suspected of molesting children, "I told him to take away the priests' licenses, not to allow them to exercise the priesthood any more and to begin a canonical trial in that diocese's court."

But where he was unconditional on treatment of abusers, Bergoglio sounded more open to change on the tradition of priestly celibacy. Currently, only Eastern Rite Catholic churches allow married priests.

"For now, the discipline of celibacy stands firm," Bergoglio told the rabbi. But because this is "a matter of discipline, not of faith. It can change."

The conversation between Bergoglio and Skorka will be published by Image Books and will be titled On Heaven and Earth. In it the two men discuss topics such as fundamentalism, atheism, the Holocaust, abortion and homosexuality.

And Bergoglio got personal: He described his own struggle as a seminarian when he was "dazzled" by a young woman he met at a wedding.

"I was surprised by her beauty, her intellectual brilliance...and, well, I was bowled over for quite a while. I kept thinking and thinking about her. When I returned to the seminary after the wedding, I could not pray for over a week because when I tried to do so, the girl appeared in my head. I had to rethink what I was doing."

He decided to continue the path to the priesthood but said "it would be abnormal for this kind of thing not to happen."

However, the future pope said that if a seminarian -- or a priest -- falls in love or has a child with a woman, he counsels them to leave and support his family, to "go in peace to be a good Christian and not a bad priest."

The Rev. Thomas Reese, a Jesuit -- like Pope Francis -- and an analyst for the National Catholic Reporter, wrote that Bergoglio's conditional language on priestly celibacy is "remarkable."

Reese said phrases like "for the moment" and "for now" are "not the kind of qualifications one normally hears when bishops and cardinals discuss celibacy."

According to ABC News, Bergoglio also briefly floated the idea that the church support civil unions in a failed effort to hold off Argentine's legalization of same-sex marriage in 2010.

His spokesman at the time, Federico Wals, told Argentina's Infonews in 2010: "What we are asking is that the laws are respected. We believe that we must propose more comprehensive civil union rights than currently exist, but no gay marriage," according to the network website.

But the idea was quickly shot down by the national bishops' conference, Pope Francis' authorized biographer, Sergio Rubin, told the Associated Press.