Benedict slams plan for married priests
A strongly worded attack by Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI on the prospect of allowing some married men to become priests has exposed the perils of having a “parallel papacy” within the Vatican, insiders said Monday.
In a move that has shaken the Catholic Church, Benedict has co-authored a book in which he says he can no longer stay silent on the idea of addressing the chronic shortage of priests by letting married men become ordained.
The book, in which Benedict, 92, defends the principle of celibacy, has been interpreted as an attack on Pope Francis and the latest salvo in a war between traditionalists and reformers.
There were fears when Benedict resigned that by assuming the title of emeritus pope and choosing to live within the Vatican, that he would become the focus for enemies of Francis.
The issue of married priests was discussed by a synod or extraordinary meeting of cardinals and bishops in October and Pope Francis is expected to announce his response soon.
But Benedict pre-empted Francis by co-writing a book with a conservative cardinal, Robert Sarah from Guinea, in which they argue that priests cannot serve both God and a family.
“Since serving the Lord requires the total gift of a man, it does not seem possible to carry on the two vocations simultaneously,” they write in From the Depths of Our Hearts: Priesthood, Celibacy and the Crisis of the Catholic Church, published in French on Wednesday and in English next month.
“The ability to renounce marriage so as to place oneself totally at the Lord’s disposition” is central to being a priest, they say, so Catholics should ignore the “theatrics, diabolical lies and fashionable errors” swirling around the issue.
The book has raised fundamental questions about Benedict’s role as emeritus pope and to what extent he has become a lightning rod for conservatives unhappy with Francis’s reformist agenda. “It’s an imprudent and ill thought-out intervention which undermines Francis’s authority,” Austen Ivereigh, a Vatican expert, said.
Critics said Benedict should not have the title emeritus pope or to dress in the white papal cassock. Instead he should have been called Emeritus Bishop of Rome and persuaded to live away from the Vatican. Ivereigh added: “The effect has been to create around Benedict an alternative papacy.”
Some in the Church point out that celibacy is a tradition, not dogma, and that there are wings of the Catholic world in which priests are married, including conservative Anglicans who defected to Rome under a move that began under Benedict’s papacy.