At the moment when a Catholic priest retires, the church only has responsibility towards him.
But what if the priest was married, has a wife and family?
Where would they go if they had to vacate their parochial home? What would they live on? What would happen to clerical widows or, even more distressingly, orphaned children?
Secondly, how could the Catholic Church maintain its stance on clerical celibacy?
It cannot argue logically that it is permissible for married Anglican clergy to convert to full communion with the Catholic Church and yet deny Catholic clergy the right to marriage.
Bolding mine. I don't bring all these questions up in my posts because I'm opposed to this move by the Pope. On the contrary, I am all for it. The Anglican Communion has been a mess for years now and it's about time Rome stepped in in an authoritative way, especially with the TAC petitioning for entrance. However, these are all questions that are going to need to be answered in the Apostolic Constitution or any companion documents before people start coming over or else Rome is going to have a real mess on its hands as the usual circumstances of human life rear their ugly heads.
Kudos to Kendall Harmon for bringing together so many good links on all of this.
2 comments:
I'm not exactly against this move by the Church. But its leaving me a little uneasy with the idea that the Church is willing to cater to specific sects. Is the Church to become less of a singular church and more of a big tent?
the church is a big tent. we have people of many different races. the mass in India in local languages is different from mass in Canada in English, which is different from mass in Brazil.
The Anglican situation is unique and yet no so. It is a special category in which we will allow those married Anglican priests to become catholic priests, they may have certain conditions etc to meet and yes being a big catholic family we might have to take care of them and their families so be it have they not dedicated their lives to the service of GOd.
but the anglican case is not unique as we are also accepting the erstwhile SSPX i like this and i look forward to bringing in all of them and yet we will still maintain the integrity of the faith, The Creed
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