Congregation for Clergy chief says Church should not be afraid of declining vocations to priesthood
ARS, France (Zenit.org) – The prefect of the Congregation for Clergy is proposing that the support of priestly celibacy may be one of the most effective means to combat modern secularisation.
“In a world which is gravely secularised, it is ever more difficult to understand the reasons for celibacy,” Cardinal Mauro Piacenza told a three-day colloquium last week in Ars, organised by the Society of John Mary Vianney and the Ars Shrine that centred on the theme Priestly Celibacy: Foundations, Joys and Challenges.
“However, we must have the courage to ask ourselves, as the Church, if we wish to resign ourselves to such a situation, accepting the progressive secularisation of society and of culture as an unchangeable fact, or if we are prepared for a task of a profound and real new evangelisation at the service of the Gospel, and thus of the truth of man.
“I hold, according to that meaning, that the reasoned support of celibacy and adequately evaluating its worth in the life of the Church and the world might represent some of the most effective means to overcome this secularisation.”
“What else could the Holy Father Benedict XVI mean when he says that celibacy shows that ‘God enters into the reality of our time?’
“The reduction of celibacy to a mere ecclesiastical law, common in some environments, is to be absolutely overcome in light of the papal magisterium,” Cardinal Piacenza pointed out.
“It is a law only because it is an intrinsic demand of the priesthood and of the configuration to Christ that the sacrament determines.
“In this sense, formation for celibacy, above and beyond every human and spiritual aspect, must include a solid doctrinal dimension, because it is with difficulty that one lives that which one does not understand.”
The Cardinal’s comments came the same week that news broke that Pope Benedict XVI put his name to a document as a young priest in 1970 calling for the Church to seriously investigate the obligation to priestly celibacy, as reported in the German newspaper Die Sueddeutsche.
The memorandum, which was sent to the German Bishops, read: “Our considerations regard the necessity of a serious investigation and a differentiated inspection of the law of celibacy of the Latin Church for Germany and the whole of the universal Church.”
According to the Sueddeutsche, the document said if there were no such investigation, the Bishops’ conference would “awaken the impression that it did not believe in the strength of the Gospel recommendation of a celibate life for the sake of heaven, but rather only in the power of a formal authority”.
The Cardinal noted that “the debate concerning celibacy, which is reignited periodically over the centuries, does not contribute to the serenity of the younger generations in coming to an understanding of the sacraments of life.”
“We must not betray our young,” he said.
“We must not lower the level of formation, nor, in fact, what the faith proposes.
“We must not betray the holy people of God, which awaits saintly pastors, such as the Curé of Ars.
“We must be radical in the sequela Christi (the following of Christ).
“Let us not be afraid of the fall in the number of clerics.
“The number decreases when the temperature of the faith is lowered, since vocations are a divine affair and not a human one, and they follow the divine logic, which is foolishness from a human point of view.
“Faith is called for.
“Celibacy is a question of evangelical radicalism.
“The essential question, then, is not to direct the debate so much to celibacy as to the quality of the faith of our communities.
“Could a community which lacks great esteem for celibacy, as an awaiting for the Kingdom or as a Eucharistic yearning, be truly said to be alive?”
“We must not allow ourselves to be conditioned or intimidated by a world without God, which does not understand celibacy and that would like to remove it.”
“On the contrary, we must recuperate the reasoned understanding that our celibacy offers as a challenge to the world, placing its secularism and agnosticism in profound crisis and crying out, through the centuries, that God is present and active.”