Priests Must Be Celibate, Pope Insists

Pope John Paul II on Tuesday insisted on priestly celibacy in Brazil, where thousands of Roman Catholic priests have left the ministry to marry.

Since arriving Saturday in Brazil, the Pope has deplored doctrinal weakness among Brazilian Catholics and the rapid growth of evangelical “sects,” blaming both partly on a shortage of priests in Catholicism’s most populous country.

But he rejected proposals of “optional celibacy” or marriage for priests as a way to relieve the shortage. “Follow the path that Jesus Christ opened, embracing voluntarily and joyfully the gift of priestly celibacy,” John Paul told seminarians in this capital.

By some calculations, almost 5,000 priests in Brazil have left the clergy to marry. About 3,000 of them belong to an association that has appealed the church’s celibacy law.

In the northeastern city of Natal, the Pope’s first stop on a 10-day tour of Brazil, he told a gathering of priests: “The church does not recognize as acceptable the attempts and pressures to reintegrate into the priestly ministry those who left it for married life. This will not be the path to get around the grave scarcity of priests in Brazil.”

Celibacy, instituted during the Middle Ages, has become a divisive issue in the Brazilian church. One prominent archbishop, Cardinal Aloisio Lorscheider, has called the rule an “anachronism.”

The lack of priestly vocations in Brazil has eased somewhat in recent years despite the celibacy law. According to the church’s Center of Religious Statistics and Research, the number of seminary students preparing for the priesthood has climbed from 3,167 in 1979 to about 6,000 today.

But of nearly 4,000 priests ordained in the 1980s, only about 1,500 remain in the ministry. The main reason given for leaving is marriage. Brazil has 14,000 priests, or about one for every 8,000 Catholics. In the United States, the ratio is about one for every 1,000.