Archbishop Charles Scicluna, a senior Vatican official and advisor to Pope Francis, suggests that the Roman Catholic Church should “seriously think” about allowing priests to marry. Scicluna noted that priests were allowed to marry in the first centuries of the Church.

by PjeterPannos

20 comments

  1. Oh no. Here we go again. Wasn’t this one of the reasons of the Great Schism in Christianity??. It won’t lower the number of pedophile priests though.

  3. End Nikolaism! End Simony! End the overbearing power of Emperor Henry IV. Reform now!

  4. They must stay as celibate and not diddly do the children. It’s not that complicated.

  6. As a matter of fact priests in Orthodox Christianity can marry, and do tend to live a pretty regular life with their families.

  7. Scicluna is right. What he may have omitted is the celibacy of priests was to prevent their patrimony to not leave the holy institution he’s in, like a mafia racketing his own members before doing the same later with fidels through the selling of indulgences.

    If they want to evolve on this point, they can always follow the same line than the Orthodoxes. Better than nothing.

  8. Men who become priests in the early church, and still in the othodox and eastern catholic church, are allowed to be married. After being ordained they cannot marry.

  9. Maybe allow female priests too? In for a penny, in for a pound 😁

  10. What they wanted to say was that Catholic Church should officially allow pedophilia.

  12. It should be noted that the reason why the catholic church decided to mandate celibacy among their priests in the first place was not for theological reasons, but rather because they didn’t want to have to keep dealing with the children of priests making inheritance claims towards church property. These days, that obviously wouldn’t be an issue but back in the day, it wasn’t uncommon for the second-in-line nobles and the likes to become priests, so there were often influential, sometimes even royal families behind these inheritance claims who had the power to enforce them and the church sure as hell didn’t want mundane lords to take over their benefices.

    Of course, they also found a bit of theological justification within various letters from St. Paul because that dude had loads of unresolved issues, but that literally was never what it was all about.

  13. IIRC, the issue was in pre-medieval Europe, married Christian priests and Bishops were leaving Church lands to their offspring.

    There was no immediate central authority for the Catholic church then, asides from the nominal Papal authority that barely extended far from Rome for day to day policy.

    Here’s an interesting article with more background

    https://www.independent.ie/irish-news/we-dont-have-children-but-we-have-had-fun-trying-the-lives-of-married-priests/38650382.html

    > In Britain and the United States, Anglican ministers who convert to Catholicism are often ordained as Catholic priests and serve in parishes with their wives and children. If married former Protestant clergymen can become priests affiliated to Rome, does the ban on married Catholics seem like an anomaly?
    >
    > The American Catholic priest and blogger Father Dwight Longenecker started his career as an Anglican clergyman **before converting to Catholicism.**
    >
    > He was ordained in 2006 with his wife Alison and their four children in attendance. He was allowed to become a priest under a Vatican rule change from the time of John Paul II **permitting married men who had been ordained in the Anglican or Lutheran churches to receive a dispensation from the vow of celibacy.**

  14. I think these type of heavily top down changes are no longer possible to do in the church these days.

    Because of media and literacy, ironically, changing their messaging won’t be received well by their congregation. The Catholic Church could get away with this in the year 1200, or 1600, or even 1963. Now, I think it’s impossible. The church will split in two or three, or disappear down the line

  16. As an outsider, I am watching with curiosity what will happen.

  17. Priests are allowed to marry in orthodox church. And western parts of the church had the same belief before its separation in the great schism.
    Come back to the roots.

  18. This was allowed until 1123 AC, so more than 1/2 the time that the church has been around priests has been able to marry.

    Fun fact: the maronites (catholic subdivision) are the only ones currently allowed to get married because when the 1123 decree was issued, one of the cruzades was happening so by the time they got the news it was already too late to “implement” and they just let them be.

    Btw, the real reason why they stopped allowing married priests is because the church was rich as fuck and the priests were just looking into getting money for their family and not the community. So at the time it was a good idea.

  20. This should at least partially solve two of the Church’s biggest problems:

    1. Decline in priests
    2. Child abuse scandals

    If you also consider that celibacy has only been a formal rule for less than a millennium and that the Church often turned a blind eye for centuries after that, this definitely isn’t an unreasonable proposal.

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