IRELAND
Irish Examiner
By Sarah Mac Donald
Friday, October 26, 2012
One of Ireland’s best-known priests has revealed the anguish the Church’s requirement of mandatory clerical celibacy has caused him.
Fr Brian D’Arcy admitted: “I would have been a much better priest had I married.”
Marriage would have provided “a companion, a closeness, a friend, someone to call home” as well as requiring “making sacrifices for somebody else,” he told BBC NI. “At the end of my life, I don’t have a home. Ideally religious life is supposed to be a type of home. It isn’t, not now anyway.”
In a BBC documentary, he says he contemplated leaving the priesthood in the wake of his disciplining by the Vatican.
Last April, it emerged he had been told by the Vatican watchdog, the Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith, that he must submit his writings and broadcasts to an approved Church censor before publication.
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