Fr. Sistare asks the obvious questions in response to changing the requirement for priestly celibacy.
Question: Who will financially support the married priest’s family (not happening on current weekly collections!)? Question: Where are these families supposed to live…in a rectory with a celibate priest? Question: What sort of unity will exist in the presbyterate if some are married and others are celibate?
Just a few questions some should ponder before they jump to so called quick solutions!
This coincides with at thought I had recently of creating a new petition for priestly celibacy for advocates of this discipline change.
| Holy Father, we believe that now is time to open the priesthood to married men.
Many parishes are closing because of the priest shortage and allowing married men to join their celibate brothers in ordained ministry will provide additional millions of Catholics access to the Mass and the sacraments. Making this extraordinary change now will demonstrate that Church leaders listen to the sensus fidelium (the Vatican-II-Spirit-inspired beliefs of the faithful). It will demonstrate that the Church can respond boldly to one of the major challenges that we, the people of God, face together. It will provide much needed hope to many Catholics who feel a deep sense of betrayal and alienation because of the scandal of clergy sex abuse of children and its coverup by many church officials. If this request is followed we will be able to expand just as fast as the Orthodox and Anglicans are currently expanding. Sign the petition: Because I fully support a married priesthood here is my credit card information so a suitable amount can be deducted each month to ensure the priest can support his family. This money will be used for buying/renting appropriate housing since the rectory will not be suitable. Health care, groceries, Catholic schooling and higher education and enough money to sufficiently supply a hopefully large Catholic family. In addition married Bishops will need a sufficiently large allowance so that they make take their families on Ad Limina visits and other occasions. If a Pope decides to get married please deduct a sufficient amount to make over the Papal apartments and to provide his and her popemobiles for Holy Father Family outings.
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Please pray for me. I am a Ukrainian Greco-Catholic Priest ( as is my younger brother, Fr. Ivan). We come from a line of married Eastern Catholic priests that goes back over 350 years. That is as far as the documentation exists. Our wives and children do not have an easy life, but our families are blessed with incredible joy. My wonderful wife, Halyna, and I became one flesh through the Holy Sacrament of Matrimony. The next day I was ordained to the sub-diaconate, later to the diaconate and to the priesthood. The bishop who ordained me to the priesthood was our late patriarch, Josyf Cardinal Slipyj, who spent 18 years in Siberian Concentration Camps for his fidelity to the Pope of Rome. The Soviet Secret Police offered him the position of Patriarch of Moscow (Head of the Russian Orthodox Church)if he would only renounce the Pope, but he never did.
Before going to Siberia, when he was rector of the Lviv Seminary, Cardinal Slipyj was opposed to the ordination of married men to the priesthood. During his many years of persecution he changed his views when he saw the many priests who carried the cross of torture and persecution for the faith, together with their wives and children. He also saw how many holy priests of the Orthodox Church also suffered together with their wives and children (or, as it happened often, separated from their wives and children who were tortured and sufferd in other prisons and labor camps. Certainly, some left the Catholic Church and served in the state-controlled Orthodox Church out of fear for their families. Some celibates did the same out of fear for their own lives. Cardinal Slipyj forbade us to judge anyone for how they acted under persecution. He said, simply: ” You do not know how you would have reacted under such duress!Thank God that you did not have to face it.”
Did the parishes I served over the years pay me a just wage? No. Did the Lord provide enough for us always? Definitely, yes! In the Ukrainian Greco-Catholic Church (largest of the Eastern Catholic Churches), the majority of the clergy have always been married. We have never interrupted this Divinely-instituted Apostolic Tradition. We have a strong monastic clergy with vibrant vocations. The married priests and the celibates (who freely chose their celibacy even though they had the option of ordination after marriage) live in love for each other, in respect and solidarity of the one priesthood.
Because of certain physical conditions and surgeries that have left me in constant pain for over 25 years, I have received the Sacrament of Holy Annointing. I have the great grace of having received all seven sacraments. in the eyes of some of your readers i am probably a repulsive creature. That I am, because of my sin, not because the Catholic Church has administered all of the sacraments to me, a sinner. i can tell you one thing for sure. My long-suffering wife keeps me alive to serve as a priest. More than any other human being ( except, of course the Most Holy Mother of God and Our Lord, who is, of course not just a human being , but the perfect God-Man) I know no one who does more to keep my priestly ministry going, day to day, than my beloved wife Halyna, God’s wonderful gift. She shares in my priesthood because we have, by the Grace of God,become one flesh. Our children saw less of me than some children saw of their fathers at times. But my children received the blessing of a priest �their father� every night. They are remembered in all my prayers, in every Mass. I love them so very much. And they love me enough to “share” me with others. And when I make a wrong choice and am not present to them, the Lord rushes to stand in my stead, loving them better than I ever could and ever will be able. Did my parishioners, my seminarians ( I teach), my spiritual directees, and all the many thousands whom I have tried to serve� did they get less of my attention than they deserved? Yes, I am sure, because I am a sinner, not because I am a husband and a father. in the Eastern Churches we use the Greek word, “mysterion” for sacrament. Truly, it is a mystery, how God can increase the feeble human heart to love not only one’s wife and children by virtue of the sacrament of Holy Matrimony, but also the whole human race, by virtue of the sacrament of the Priesthood. It is all a mystery, isn’t it? So be it. God’s Love will not be limited by human reason.
Pray for me, brothers and sisters. I am a sinner and a priest. I am a husband and a priest. I am a priest, and my children call me “Father.” It is amazing. God is so very good. God is so very, very merciful and good. Let us love one another and respect each other’s ancient and apostolic ways. In the Byzantine Divine Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom,we pray, just before exchanging the kiss of peace and singing the Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed: “Let us love one another so that we might be of one mind in professing the Father, and the Son and the Holy Spirit, Trinity one in substance and undivided.”
If I have offended anyone, please forgive me. if my existence and that of my family and of thousands of priestly families like us offends you, please forgive us and pray for us. God loves you more than you can imagine!
Andriy, sinner-priest