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'Priests must be celibate'
17/11/2006 14:13 - (SA)
Vatican City - The Vatican on Thursday reaffirmed the requirement of celibacy for priests, essentially rebuffing a renegade married archbishop who is leading a high-profile crusade for the Catholic Church to allow priests to marry.
"The value of the choice of priestly celibacy, according to Catholic tradition, has been reaffirmed," the Vatican said in a brief statement after a three-hour meeting of top Vatican prelates who joined Pope Benedict XVI for "reflection" on the issue.
The pope had convened the meeting to examine "the situation created by the disobedience of Monsignor Emmanuel Milingo," the Vatican had said earlier in the week when it announced the summit.
Archbishop Milingo, from Zambia, incurred automatic excommunication in September when he ordained four married American men as bishops in defiance of the Vatican. He already had drawn the Vatican's ire in 2001, when he took a South Korean woman as his wife in a group wedding ceremony of the Unification Church of the Reverend Sun Myung Moon.
As he steps up his campaign for married priests, Milingo is hoping hundreds of married priests will celebrate Mass with him in a hotel near Newark, New Jersey, at a three-day gathering in early December, said one of the married men he ordained, the Reverend George Augustus Stallings, jnr, based in Washington, DC Priests' spouses are invited, too, to the gathering.
More determined than ever
Referring to the December meeting of married priests, Stallings said that the Vatican "was trying to cut us off at the junction."
"We're more determined than ever" to press the campaign for married priests, Stalling said, while insisting that Milingo did not want to "rupture the unity of the Church."
When Milingo was excommunicated, several Vatican watchers said the Holy See was worried about the possibility that the charismatic archbishop, with the power to ordain bishops and priests, could start a schism.
Milingo sent a letter to Benedict two weeks ago to appeal for openness from the Vatican on married priests, Stallings said.
The Vatican said summit participants were briefed "on the requests to receive dispensation from the obligation of celibacy that have been made in recent years and on the possibility of being readmitted to the exercise of the ministry of priests who now meet the conditions required by the church."
The Vatican did not cite any figures, but there are estimated to be at least 100 000 married priests worldwide, with about 25 000 of them in the United States.
The Vatican requires celibacy of priests ordained under the Latin rite, although married men can become priests in the Eastern rite. The Vatican has also accepted some married Anglican priests who came over to the Catholic fold.
- AP
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