Pope hints openness to married priest proposal
VATICAN CITY >> On the heels of a landmark call by Amazon region bishops for married men to become priests, Pope Francis on Sunday exhorted Catholics to be open to fresh ways of evangelization, saying the church must “open new roads for the proclamation of the Gospel.”
He also cautioned against self-righteousness, in an apparent slap at conservative critics who fear he is weakening the church’s foundations.
Allowing married men to be ordained in remote Amazon areas with severe shortages of priests would chip away at the church’s nearly millennium-old practice upholding priestly celibacy. It would also help the church compete with evangelical and Protestant churches that have been increasingly winning converts there.
A three-week-long Vatican gathering, or synod, on the special needs of Catholics in that South American region featured a vote by a majority of the more than 180 synod bishops who proposed the ordination of married men with established families to help minister to the region’s farflung faithful, where some Catholics don’t see priests for months, even years.
Francis expressed gratitude that the bishops spoke with “sincerity and candor.” He has said he will put his response in writing by year’s end.
Addressing the public in St. Peter’s Square, Francis said he and synod participants felt spurred to “leave comfortable shores” in seeking new ways to carry out the church’s core mission to spread the Catholic faith.
Francis has often praised celibacy for priests. It the Argentine-born pontiff embraces the appeal from bishops on his native continent, it is not clear whether that might trigger an erosion of the celibacy rule elsewhere.
Ordaining married men, even in limited circumstances, risks deepening the antipathy in strongly conservative church circles toward Francis, whom they deem to be dangerously progressive.
Francis said he and the bishops “felt spurred to go out, to leave the comfortable shores of our safe ports to sink into deep waters — not in the swampy waters of ideologies, but in the open sea in which the Spirit invites us to throw out the fishing nets,” he said, referring to Gospel writings about fishing for the souls of people.
In prepared remarks, which he didn’t read, he appeared to hint at the appeal for married priests when he encouraged being open to “new things.”