A senior Vatican official has said that the Roman Catholic church should revise the requirement for priests to be celibate, while acknowledging that some will view the idea as “heretical”.
Archbishop Charles Scicluna of Malta, who is based in the Vatican’s doctrinal office and is an adviser to Pope Francis, said: “If it were up to me, I would revise the requirement that priests have to be celibate. Experience has shown me that this is something we need to seriously think about.”
The church had “lost many great priests because they chose marriage”, he said in an interview with the Times of Malta.
There was a place for celibacy but the church also had to take into consideration that priests sometimes fall in love, and were forced to choose between that and their vocation, he said. “Some priests cope with that by secretly engaging in sentimental relationships.”
Scicluna added: “This is probably the first time I’m saying it publicly and it will sound heretical to some people.”
The pope has sent mixed messages on the issue. In 2017, he said the Catholic church may consider ordaining married men who could potentially then work in remote areas faced with a shortage of priests. “We must think about whether viri probati are a possibility,” Francis said, referring to older married men who are already involved in church business.
Two years later, he ruled out any change to the celibacy rule. In 2021, he rejected a proposal to allow some elderly married men to be ordained in remote areas in the Amazon where there is a dire shortage of priests.
But last year, Francis spoke about the celibacy rule again, saying that “it is not eternal, like priestly ordination”, but a “discipline” that could be revised.
In his interview, Scicluna pointed out that priests were allowed to marry in the first millennium of the church’s history, and that marriage was allowed today in the eastern rite of the Catholic church and the Orthodox church.
Protestant and Anglican churches also allow a married priesthood. Some married men who were ordained into the Anglican church have since converted to Catholicism, mostly in opposition to the ordination of women, and have been allowed to continue to serve as priests.
Opponents of a married priesthood argue that celibacy allows a priest to dedicate himself entirely to the church and his congregation.
Advocates of change say the celibacy rule has contributed to the vocations crisis and shortage of priests, to loneliness and even suicide, as well as to the sexual abuse of children and vulnerable adults.
The Movement for Married Clergy (MMaC), based in England and Wales, has previously called for a national commission of bishops, clergy and laity to discuss ways of tackling the shortage of priests, including relaxing or abolishing the celibacy rule.
But Cardinal Vincent Nichols, archbishop of Westminster and leader of the church in England and Wales, has said he sees no need for change.
Mike Kerrigan, chair of the MMaC, said Scicluna’s proposal was encouraging and radical. “If he is saying that the church should think about simply ‘allowing priests to marry’, this could mean adopting a similar position to, for example, the Anglicans: both that a man may marry and subsequently be ordained, and that an already ordained celibate priest may decide to marry.
“This would go further than the present discipline in eastern-rite Catholic churches (and all Orthodox churches), where men may marry before – but not after – ordination.
“And it would go well beyond the modest objective which the MMaC set – that the church ordain suitable married laymen – a proposal which, even so, has still not been taken up by our bishops, despite the dire shortage of celibate priests.”
Pope Francis has changed the church’s practice on a number of sensitive issues in the course of his papacy, such as hiring women for senior lay roles in the Vatican and allowing priests to bless same-sex relationships.
But he has also disappointed liberals by doubling down on the church’s opposition to abortion, saying it is murder, and upholding the ban on contraception.
On Monday, he called for a global ban on surrogacy. He told diplomats at the Vatican: “I deem deplorable the practice of so-called surrogate motherhood, which represents a grave violation of the dignity of the woman and the child, based on the exploitation of situations of the mother’s material needs.
“Consequently, I express my hope for an effort by the international community to prohibit this practice universally.”