Jesuit Says Church Must Consider Married Clergy

The head of one of the most prestigious Jesuit schools in the United States said declining numbers of men entering the priesthood means that the Roman Catholic Church must consider having a married clergy and ordination of women.

Father Timothy Healy, president of Georgetown University, said: “The sharp drop in vocations to the priesthood and to the religious life indicates to us that we must either adapt by having a married clergy or ordaining women, or we are going to have to take seriously the stirring words of the Second Vatican Council on the empowerment of the laity.”

Healy made his comments at graduation exercises at Fairfield University, a Catholic university in Fairfield, Conn., on Sunday. The remarks were made available in Washington on Tuesday.

“Like most great signals to the church, this one means change, and that always means a certain amount of hope,” Healy said.

It also means the church will have to make choices, he added.

Healy made it clear that at least for the moment, he believes that the church will adopt the “empowerment-of-the-laity” option. The expression can mean a number of things, but it could involve more frequent use of a 1973 order allowing qualified lay persons to distribute Communion.

But by mentioning the possibility of ordaining married men and women as priests, Healy added an influential voice to those recommending a break with tradition in order to respond to the declining number of those entering the priesthood.

Healy’s challenge to the Fairfield graduates was also a challenge to the wider church, especially the Vatican bureaucracy, that it not foreclose change in the church.

Addressing also the Vatican attempts to apply church law to stifle dissent in the U.S. church, Healy called on the graduates “to make your voice, America’s voice, heard within the church as it has never been heard before” in challenging the Vatican.

“The American church can teach the universal church that justice must be seen to be done, as well as done; that openness renders both reasonable and loving even the most rigorous application of law, and that when secrecy and administrative ease do violence to any individual, justice is no longer served.”

The Vatican has sought to crack down on dissent, in cases ranging from the censure of Archbishop Raymond Hunthausen of Seattle to the stripping of moral theologian Charles Curran’s license to teach theology, to threats to oust two nuns from their religious order over their views on abortion.

“Too frequently in recent years,” Healy said, “the Roman curia . . . (has) made of the law a Procrustean bed into which reality and people must be cropped to fit.”