Advent Group - Supporting Priests & Religious since 1969
Priest says celibacy should no longer be compulsory
- Written by: The Tablet
Broadcaster and newspaper columnist Fr Brian D’Arcy has said the Church urgently needs to consider making clerical celibacy optional, as well as ordaining married men and women.Speaking to The Tablet, the Passionist priest, who is 50 years ordained next year, made his comments in the context of falling Mass attendances in Ireland and the lack of vocations to the priesthood. Referring to the drop in Mass attendance from over 90 per cent when Pope John Paul II visited Ireland in 1979, to 19 per cent in some urban areas today, he said that figure could be as low as 9 per cent if the older age group is excluded. “We have prayed for years, particularly in the western world, for an increase in vocations. We cannot say that God isn’t listening because we absolutely believe he is. But the vocations are not there, so maybe we are asking God for the wrong gift,” the 73-year-old said.
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The Funeral of Joe Mulrooney
- Written by: Alex Walker
Joe's funeral will take place at Cockfosters on Monday 17th September at 11:00 am.
Christ the King
29 Bramley Road
Cockfosters
London
N14 4HE
020 8449 6648
Download Towards Priests in Adult Communities by Joe Mulrooney, 2005
Joe Mulrooney
- Written by: Alex Walker
It is with sadness we announce the death of Joe Mulrooney today. He died in the hospice with Mary his wife by his side and Bernie his Niece. Joe was a retired lecturer in Biblical Studies at Heythrop College and a parishioner of Cockfosters. He was a leading light in Advent alongside his good friend Mike Hyland. Joe and Mike attended all of the European meetings of married priests. Joe died after a short illness from stomach and bowel cancer and was a devoted carer to Mary, his wife, who herself was not well. Funeral arrangements are yet to be announced. Please keep Joe and Mary in your prayers. May he rest in peace and go to his eternal reward.
Joe wrote in 2006 and still apposite to this day:
What of “celibacy” in the future? There will always be a place for the charism of the celibate life style. However, in the context of twenty first century communities, and granted the present crises, we have two choices. We can react like corporate managers or supermarket directors in the face of shortages and problems: We downsize and frantically close and amalgamate parishes, making the Eucharistic celebration more and more inaccessible. Would it not be better to have a closer look at our historical evolution and, instead of freezing the frame in the late Middle Ages, allow a different model of church to emerge? This would be to cultivate a vision for the future and perhaps apply in this context an expanded form of Paul’s dictum in Galatians: “There is no such thing as Jew and Greek, slave and freeman, male and female, heterosexual and homosexual, cleric and lay: for you are all one person in Christ Jesus” (Gal. 3:28
https://www.adventgroup.org.uk/news-mainmenu-2/advent-news/celibacy
Clerical abuse expert Richard Sipe dies
- Written by: Alex Walker
Richard Sipe, a leading expert on celibacy and clerical sexual abuse, died in California on 8 August aged 85. A former Benedictine priest and psychotherapist, he had investigated and written on the sexual abuse crisis in the Church for four decades.
In 1990 he published his landmark book, A Secret World: Sexuality and the Search for Celibacy. Based on interviews with 1,500 priests and others with first-hand knowledge of celibacy violations, Mr Sipe estimated that six per cent of all priests were having sex with children and young people.
He warned that sexual abuse of children by Catholic priests was a systemic problem within the Church fostered by the culture of celibacy, secrecy and hypocrisy. He suggested that only about half of the priests in the United States were at any one time practising celibacy – an estimate the Church said was exaggerated.
Accusations against McCarrick had been documented by Mr Sipe for years. He supported hundreds of survivors through counselling and as an expert witness in court cases. In a letter to Bishop Robert W. McElroy of San Diego in 2016, he wrote: “When men in authority – cardinals, bishops, rectors, abbots, confessors, professors – are having or have had an unacknowledged-secret-active-sex life under the guise of celibacy, an atmosphere of tolerance of behaviours within the system is made operative.”
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