Lay groups launch new campaign for optional celibacy

Social justice news
February 2004

Hi-tech industry, low-class treatment
Islamic-Catholic groups asks prayers for peace
Lay groups launch new campaign for optional celibacy
More SOA protestors sentenced
Peace group plans to 'turn up the heat' in 2004 anti-war campaigns
Report reveals the true face of corporate social responsibility
Vatican blasts drug company 'genocidal action'

Lay groups launch new campaign
for optional celibacy
Inspired by priests, the Corpus Christi Campaign for Optional Celibacy promotes a return to the early church custom of having both celibate and married priests. Sparked by August's "prophetic call" of 163 Milwaukee priests, FutureChurch is spearheading this new effort in partnership with Call to Action. The campaign invites ordinary Catholics to write to their bishops and circulate a petition to U.S. cardinals and bishop delegates to the 2004-2005 International Synod on the Eucharist.

These actions will hopefully ensure that all Catholics have regular access to the Mass and the other sacraments as well as avert looming parish closings and clustering because of the priest shortage. Both CORPUS and the Women's Oridnation Conference have also pledged to support the campaign.

Never before available statistics give dramatic diocese by diocese documentation of the loss of priests over the last 25 years. Priest Shortage USA 1976-2001 lists Official Catholic Directory statistics comparing the number of priests, seminarians, priestless parishes and Catholics in every U.S. diocese for 1976, 1991 and 2001. Previous published statistics were released in the aggregate or did not include every diocese.

Catholics are asked to write their Bishops, quote statistics for their dioceses, and request publication of actuarial projections of availability of priests for the future. Early anecdotes indicate devastating declines:

• The Green Bay diocese told a local newspaper it could be down to 83 priests for 165 parishes by 2010.

• In the Dubuque Archdiocese, where 100 of 350 parishes are run by lay people, a priest told a national TV newsweekly that in 5 to 10 years, there will be only 75 priests for 200 parishes.

• Cleveland actuarials project that by 2027 there will be only 76 active diocesan priests for the 235 parishes in the diocese. This presumes 4 ordinations per year. Following the lead of Milwaukee clergy, supportive actions were taken or planned by priest associations representing over 700 priests in Pittsburgh, Chicago, Boston, Southern Illinois and the three dioceses in metropolitan New York.

• The Southern Illinois Association of Priests wrote their bishop, Wilton Gregory, who is also president of the U.S. bishops, asking him to "do all in your power to make the charism of celibacy a grace and not a mandated law for diocesan priests."

• The Association of Pittsburgh Priests is circulating a petition and sponsoring a diocesan wide educational program on the priest shortage and optional celibacy.

The campiagn invites other priest organizations, parish councils, lay organizations and individual Catholics to join it in requesting a return to an earlier church practice "which benefitted from both married and celibate priestly calls."

• "Mother Church earnestly desires that all the faithful should be led to that full, conscious, and active participation in liturgical celebrations which is demanded by the very nature of the liturgy, and to which the Christian people, ‘a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a redeemed people,' have a right and an obligation by reason of their Baptism." (Sacrosanctum Concilium)

• "The laity have the right, as do all Christians, to receive in abundance from their sacred pastors the spiritual goods of the Church, especially the assistance of the Word of God and the sacraments." (Lumen Gentium, 37).

• "Christ's faithful are at liberty to make known their needs, especially their spiritual needs, and their wishes to the Pastors of the Church."(Canon Law 212.2)

• "They have the right, indeed at times the duty, in keeping with their knowledge, competence and position, to manifest to the sacred Pastors their views on matters which concern the good of the Church." (Canon Law 212.3)

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