The priest and vicar of the Hospital de Campaña Santa Anna in Barcelona, Xavier Morlans (Barcelona, 1949), has just published Chaplains celibes and chaplains married. Two lungs for a synodal Church (Claret), which will be presented this Wednesday (7pm) in the Barcelona parish. In the book he addresses the origin of celibacy, recovers the proposal of the teams of married priests by Bishop Fritz Lobinger formulated in the 1990s and figures at 10,000 priests united in marriage that there are currently in the Catholic Church.
Who are these priests?
They are those of the Greek-Catholic churches of the former Eastern countries, totally faithful to Rome: before being ordained, seminarians can get married. Everything that is said about the holiness and effectiveness of the Catholic priesthood must also be said about them.
Why is it allowed in the Eastern Catholic Church and not in the Western Church?
Because in the East things are preserved as they were in the beginning. The first Church was formed in present-day Palestine/Israel, Syria, Türkiye and Greece. The priests who felt called were always men, first married and then ordained.
At what point is that lost in our Church?
Historians disagree. For some, from the beginning married men, once ordained priests or bishops, were prohibited from having sexual relations with their wives. Others say that this does not happen until the end of the 4th century in Rome. In any case, during the first millennium what was required was total continence within the marriage of clerics.
What was the trigger for the implementation of mandatory celibacy in the Latin Catholic Church?
The First Lateran Council, of the year 1123, prohibited the marriage of clerics to prevent them from passing on Church properties to their children.
There is a lack of priests and the seminaries are becoming empty. Would the admission of married men to the priesthood help to alleviate this deficit?
This is a great change in mentality with simultaneous effects on several parts. The collective imagination that is still dominant in the Latin Catholic Church has to be reconciled with the emotional and sexual dimension of the person, it has to open itself to the world of women, to their sensitivity, their history, to their way of intervening in the world. We have to thoroughly rethink what human sexuality is and how we can live it. Everything would help.
You recover the proposal of Bishop Lobinger's teams of married priests. What would be your task?
Let three married priests, who work professionally, take care of a parish or pastoral unit in their free time.
What are the main arguments that, from your point of view, would make it necessary for priests' celibacy to be optional?
So that the freely assumed celibacy of priests who feel called to shine with all its beauty and without ambiguity and that candidates for the ordained ministry who also feel called to marriage are not lost.
What do you think of the objections that still oppose the proposal of optional celibacy?
It is not fair to lump together optional celibacy and, for example, the new attitude towards the LGTBI community as 'difficult issues'. Married priests are already a reality in the Eastern Catholic Church and it is only a matter of extending it to the Latin Church. Thoroughly rethinking what human sexuality is and the possible different ways of living it requires an authentic rethinking of the foundations of Christian anthropology.
In the book he introduces a new concept: daily and perennial interpersonal intimacy freely chosen. What do you mean by that?
Neither the network of relationships of the celibate priest with young people, couples, children and the elderly, nor prayer nor the celebration of the sacraments can fully fill that dimension that experience and personalist philosophy have helped us formulate. Every human being needs a 'you' to witness their passage through the world. You cannot love with a universal love if you do not love someone specifically and on a daily basis, whether it is a friendship capable of living together under the same roof or in a marriage.
Bishop Xavier Novell generated great controversy when he resigned from office due to a romantic relationship. Do you think that in the Church there are more cases like yours, people who feel the call to serve the people of God but who at the same time would like to have an emotional relationship?
The petition that has arrived in Rome from the five continents to the XVI Assembly of the Synod, in October 2023, and that asks for the review of the obligation of celibacy, allows us to infer that everywhere the existence of married men who could be some good shepherds.
