PHILIPPINES
The Manila Standard
November 09, 2017
By Florencio Fianza
It is possible that in the not too distant future, we will be seeing married priests administering to the Roman Catholic faithful in this country.
Brazilian Claudio Cardinal Hummes, who is a friend of Pope Francis, requested the Pope to lift the ban on the ordination of married men specifically for Brazil which is the largest Roman Catholic country in the world.
The request is for the church to consider “vin probati,” the ordination of married men with proven great faith. Brazil, just like many other countries around the world, is suffering from a shortage of priests having only one priest per 10,000 faithful. It is thought that the ordination of married men might alleviate this acute problem.
This however, is not the only problem facing the Catholic Church today. There is the matter of sexual misconduct by priests which has caused tremendous damage to the prestige and reputation of the church as the guardian of faith and morals in the last couple of decades. At the moment, Australian Cardinal George Pell, formerly the third most powerful official in the Vatican, is undergoing criminal trial for child sexual abuse in his native country.
In the so-called Eastern Catholic Church, where priests are allowed to marry, the problem of sexual misconduct is not often heard of. Allowing priests to marry or ordaining married men with proven great faith might therefore go a long way in lessening this problem of the Catholic Church. It is like solving two huge problems with a single shot.
The issue of married priests has always been a contentious problem of the Church right from the very beginning. Right from the start, priests were allowed to marry. Seven popes in antiquity were in fact married starting with St Peter. The apostles were also married. But there were Church leaders who questioned not only the practicality of married priests but also whether marriage was damaging the purity of the church. Matters like married priests not sleeping with their wives the night before celebrating the holy mass started being required. Other subjects such as material things being evil and that a person cannot be married and be perfect at the same time started to take root in early Church teachings.
Note: This is an Abuse Tracker excerpt. Click the title to view the full text of the original article. If the original article is no longer available, see our News Archive.