From the editor’s desk

A way out of the clergy crunch

15 November 2008

While the nation feels the impact of the credit crunch, Catholics are becoming aware of a clerical crunch - a shortage not just of credit but of clergy. The one-priest presbytery, which became the standard a few years back, is starting to look like a luxury as parishes find themselves without a priest at all, or at best a share in the one next door. This is the real significance of a petition signed by many leading Catholics that was submitted to the Bishops' Conference of England and Wales this week. It calls for the ordination of married men. The cost of not doing so is beginning to mount - not least the increased workload and stress on the priests remaining.

Bishop Malcolm McMahon of Nottingham is by no means the only English bishop who feels the present insistence on celibacy is unsustainable, but he is the first to say so quite so openly. In a recent interview, he emphasised that it was a matter not just of expedience but of justice. What has brought that home, especially in England, is the growing number of parishes ministered to by a married priest who has taken advantage of the special rules applied to ex-Anglican clergy. Pope John Paul II was persuaded by Cardinal Basil Hume to allow priests of the Church of England who were already married to apply for ordination in the Roman Catholic Church. It was treated as a matter of discipline, not doctrine.

In many cases what triggered their decision was the ordination of women in the Church of England, though the Catholic Church has insisted that opposition to women priests was not sufficient grounds for conversion in itself. What happened was that the issue made some priests question their assumption that the Church of England was part of the Church Universal, and prompted them to look for that Universal Church elsewhere. The prospect of women bishops in the Church of England may well persuade another batch of Anglican clergy that they are in the wrong place. But as a result, a Catholic priest who has never been an Anglican finds himself treated differently from one who has. That is bound to cause a sense of unfairness. And whatever it is that an entirely celibate clergy is supposed to symbolise, that meaning is undermined when the clergy are a mixture of the married and unmarried.

At the time the policy was introduced, there was much official nervousness about how the laity would react. In fact, the influx of ex-Anglican clergy, married or not, has proved beneficial. The laity are obviously ahead of the curve and their maturity and good sense was underestimated - not for the first time. But parishes are becoming aware of another form of injustice. Their right to the sacraments, especially the Eucharist, is beginning to be jeopardised. Yet virtually every parish contains mature married men who are capable of exercising a priestly ministry. If the bishops were to call for such vocations to be tested, or were allowed to do so by Rome, they might be pleasantly surprised by the result. This would not devalue celibacy itself. It would merely recognise that vocations, like human beings themselves, come in different shapes and sizes.