Will there be New Kinds of Priests?
There recently has been talk that the next Synod of Bishops might engage with the question of certain categories of married men being admitted to a new kind of priesthood, presumably as part of a wider discussion on the Church’s ministries.
The idea to ordain married men of proven virtue — so-called viri probati — to the priesthood has been mooted periodically for many years as a solution to the shortage of priests in many parts of the world where the faithful have very rare access to the Mass.
It was last raised at the 2005 Synod of Bishops on the Eucharist, and rejected.
Such Mass-deprived regions exist even in South Africa, where some remote mission outstations don’t have Mass for many weeks because there are not enough priests to celebrate them. In some parts of Africa and South America, isolated church communities don’t have Mass for many months.
Bishop Fritz Lobinger, the retired bishop of Aliwal North in the Eastern Cape, has written extensively on the question. In his 2008 book Every Community Its Own Ordained Leaders, he wrote: “It is not right that [communities which most weeks have access only to the Liturgy of the Word, not the Mass] remain limited to such an incomplete faith life. Although it is already several decades that this has been happening, we should not accept it as something we cannot change. It must be changed.”
In several books and articles, Bishop Lobinger, who now lives in Mariannhill, proposed that groups of lay leaders within a community would be trained and formed on a continual basis by a local animator priest, whose function would be similar to that of an overseeing bishop.
Of these, small groups of men of proven character — viri probati — would be ordained to preside over the life of their faith community and its liturgies while continuing with their professional and family lives.
Although they would be ordained to the clerical state and incardinated into a diocese, they would not assume the role of the priest-in-charge. In other words, while they would be sacramentally ordained priests, they would not be clerics.
They would not be replacement priests who come into a community from outside, but men from the local community itself, who are known and respected by the people, and who work voluntarily as a team without remuneration to build up their community into a truly Christian fellowship that ministers to itself.
Bishop Lobinger emphasised that this model provides a solution to a specific problem and would not be applicable universally. He also cautioned prudence in developing such a model, proposing pilot projects on diocesan levels.
Should the viri probati question form part of deliberations at a Synod of Bishops, this would serve as a signal that the Church is now looking to employing southern solutions to southern problems, rather than imposing them from a European worldview.
No doubt a revived proposal for viri probati priests, or the version of the concept outlined by Bishop Lobinger, will be met by strong opposition.
There will be concern that allowing some married men to become ordained priests could strengthen the case for relaxing the obligatory celibacy for Latin-rite clergy (there are married priests in the Catholic Church’s Eastern rites).
The discipline of clerical celibacy, in any case, is not tied to any Church teaching, and the obligation — which has been in canonical force for less than half of the Church’s history — can be adapted or reformed.
Indeed, by admitting married Anglican ministers to the Catholic priesthood in terms of Pope Benedict XVI’s 2009 apostolic constitution Anglicanorum coetibus, the Catholic Church acknowledged that the celibate, unmarried state is not indispensable to the Latin-rite priesthood.
The institution of some form of viri probati priesthood would not be a novel innovation. Indeed, it would revive an office that existed already in apostolic times — it is attested to in the First Epistle of Clement in 80AD.
The Church teaches that the Eucharist is the summit of the Church’s life. It is unjust when groups of Catholics are deprived of its regular celebration by dint of their location and the shortage of priests.
An open discussion on how to address this injury is long overdue.
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