A summit of Roman Catholic bishops meeting at the Vatican recommended Saturday that Pope Francis allow the ordination of married men as priests in the Amazon region, which would lift a roughly 1,000-year-old restriction and potentially revolutionize the priesthood.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It is the first time a grouping of bishops convened by a pope has endorsed such a historic change to the tradition of a celibate priesthood. The proposal is limited to remote areas of South America where there is a scarcity of priests but could set a precedent for easing the restriction on married priests throughout the world.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
If Francis, who has already signalled an openness on the issue, accepts the bishops\u2019 recommendation, he will turn the remote areas of the Amazon region into a laboratory for a Catholic Church looking to the global south for its future, with married priests and indigenous rites mixing with traditional liturgy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The final document of the summit, noting that many of the faithful in the Amazon region have \u201cenormous difficulties\u201d in receiving communion and seeing a priest, proposed to \u201cordain priests suitable and esteemed men of the community,\u201d who had already had \u201cfruitful\u201d experiences as deacons and who \u201creceive an adequate formation for the priesthood, having a legitimately constituted and stable family.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cNo priest is ordained without first being a deacon,\u201d Cardinal Michael Czerny said at a news conference Saturday night. He characterized the entirety of the proposals as a great \u201cpastoral change\u201d for the church.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Liberal supporters said the change would address the unmet needs of a far-flung community and they expressed hope it would lead to similar changes elsewhere. Conservative opponents called it a threat to the tradition of the priesthood, another troubling sign Francis was willing to dilute the faith to pursue a more inclusive, but less pure church.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A summit of Roman Catholic bishops meeting at the Vatican recommended Saturday that Pope Francis allow the ordination of married men as priests in the Amazon region, which would lift a roughly 1,000-year-old restriction and potentially revolutionize the priesthood. It is the first time a grouping of bishops convened by a pope has endorsed such […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":73222,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[87],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-73221","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/73221","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=73221"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/73221\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":73223,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/73221\/revisions\/73223"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/73222"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=73221"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=73221"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=73221"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}