Pope Considers Letting Priests Marry

Pope Benedict SVI met with a panel of top Vatican officials on Thursday to examine the implications of the "disobedience" of an archbishop who installed four married men as bishops. Archbishop Emmanuel Milingo of Zambia was excommunicated from the church in September for appointing four married American men as bishops. The panel met to discuss whether or not the church should abandon the celibacy requirements for priests seeking to marry or who have already married.

The Vatican said in September that Milingo and the four married men he ordained—the Rev. George Augustus Stallings Jr. of Washington; Peter Paul Brennan of New York; Patrick Trujillo of Newark, N.J.; and Joseph Gouthro of Las Vegas—were "automatically excommunicated" because of the church law forbidding married men to serve as priests. The Holy See added that it would not recognize the ordinations of the four priests, and would not recognize any ordinations of those men in the future.

Milingo’s first confrontation with the Vatican happened in 2001, when he married a South Korean acupuncturist who as chosen form him by the Rev. Sun Myung Moon of the Unification Church. His marriage was part of a group wedding held in New York. He later renounced his marriage after gaining an appeal from Pope John Paul II a few months later.

In June of this year, Milingo disappeared from his home outside Rome, and a month later he resurfaced in Washington, D.C. He said he had reunited with his wife and was now focused on championing the cause of married priests worldwide. He created a new advocacy group called "Married Priests Now."

The Catholic Church requires that priests ordained under the Latin rite remain celibate for their entire lives. Milingo says the Catholic Church’s laws regarding celibacy are archaic now, and that instead the Church should embrace more than 150,000 married priests around the world in order to underscore the sanctity of marriage and also to assuage the growing shortage of clergy in the church.

The Vatican said that Thursday’s meeting will not open a general public discussion of the issue of celibacy for priests, but instead would only study requests for dispensation made by priests wishing to marry. The group also examined requests for readmission to the church by priests who had married in recent years.

The Synod of Bishops rejected suggestions last year that the mandatory celibacy requirement for priests be removed. However, with the excommunication of Milingo, the issue has been brought back to the forefront of discussions about changes the Catholic Church may be considering in the near future.