Topic of the week – Time to ordain married men

Bravo, Bishop Bonny. At last a serving bishop has not only publicly acknowledged the elephant in the room, but also intends to deal with it. He has declared: “I will do everything in my power to ordain married men as priests in our diocese [of Antwerp] by 2028”. It is not, he says, a question of whether married men will be ordained, but when and by whom (News, 28 March).

We write as former officers of the now disbanded Movement for Married Clergy, which campaigned for almost 50 years, trying to persuade our hierarchy of the need and merit of ordaining married men, but with virtually no response, let alone action – even as the Church has accepted former Anglican clergy, many of them married, to serve as Catholic priests.

Few men are now volunteering for the celibate priesthood: the number of active priests in Bishop Bonny’s diocese has fallen by over 90 per cent in 60 years, with half of those remaining coming from abroad. In England and Wales they have gone down by almost 90 per cent since the 1960s, and – despite the contribution of ex-Anglicans – shortages of priests are causing grave concern in every diocese.

Few priests are aged under 50 and there are almost as many retired as active, so soon the situation will be worse. The current desperate attempt to cope – the amalgamation of parishes into large units, to be led often by priests well past normal retirement age and covering a wide geographical area – is no solution.

Bishop Bonny is confident that there is no lack of married men in his diocese who would make good priests. Indeed, research by our movement some years ago suggested that parish priests could identify as many as 5,000 such men in England and Wales. We have needlessly lost too many fine candidates for priesthood through our adherence to a compulsory imposition of celibacy.

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