Frågor som måste konfronteras

Vänner,

The Tablets ledare frågar hur många biskopar som är beredda att försvara pliktcelibatet till priset av att katolicismen försvinner. I Österrike är frågan akut. Prästernas medelålder närmar sig 70 år och prästkandidaterna är alldeles för få.

Gert Gelotte

Questions that must be faced

If the Holy Spirit guides the Catholic Church, how would the need for a change of direction be manifested? The question is raised by growing evidence that the institution of the male celibate priesthood is in crisis in many parts of the Catholic world. Until now, the only response of the Church’s hierarchy is to hold the present line come what may – while praying intensely for an increase in (celibate) vocations. What if they do not come? What would be the meaning of a refusal to grant what the prayers are asking for? One result might be a major realignment of Catholic demographics, with Massgoing numbers heading for collapse in the West but increasing in places like Africa. Would that be the will of God?

Unless the Church is prepared to ask such questions, the situ­ation can only become gradually more desperate. A group of Catholic German politicians has stirred a controversy in that country by appealing to the Vatican for a rethink on celibacy. Cardinal Karl Lehmann has defended them – equally sharply – from sharp criticism by Cardinal Walter Brandmüller.

Meanwhile a large group of European theologians has called for an end to the celibacy rule; and a survey of Catholic priests in Australia has sent a stark warning that the present situ­ation in the Catholic Church there is unsustainable, with the average age of priests approaching 70 and the number of candidates nowhere near replacement level. Of those who took part, a large majority favoured celibacy becoming optional. Meanwhile, as many of the Australian priests were well aware, the ordinari­ate for convert Anglican clergy is about to become a channel through which will flow an increasing number of male married priests who are not required to sign up to celibacy as a condition of their ordination into the Roman Catholic priesthood. If that, too, is the will of God, is the ordinariate a pilot scheme with significance for the wider Church?

The Catholic Church is an institution with a strong bias towards the status quo, but which also has a capacity for rapid change. As the Second Vatican Council demonstrated, it is possible for a critical mass of opinion to gather around a reform agenda and then to win over the majority, in a very short space of time.

How many bishops in the West would regard the decline of Catholicism to vanishing point as a price worth paying for keeping celibacy? How many, indeed, would regard celibacy as a contributing factor in the culture of clericalism which has caused such mayhem over child abuse? By and large, the Church has not accepted the linkage usually suggested in the secular world – that celibacy causes sexual repression which can explode in ­paedophilia – but it surely knows that the instinct of a power­ful, all-male and celibate brotherhood to unite to protect a fallen colleague lay behind a great deal of what went wrong.

The abolition of compulsory celibacy would not by itself cure clericalism, though it may diminish it. And financial resources being what they are, Catholic dioceses would be able to afford rather fewer married Catholic clergy than the cheaper celibate variety. But these are questions to be debated and prayed over, not swept aside as if they did not exist. God cannot begin to answer them until they are properly asked. (The Tablet)