Word: archbishop
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...believe deep down they are called to the priesthood but not to celibacy," he writes. "And for these men, the burden of mandated celibacy threatens their spiritual and emotional well-being." Weakland felt this challenge acutely, particularly once he rose to the rarified but also isolated position of archbishop. "I soon realized that a relationship with Jesus Christ, as intense as it might be on the spiritual level, could not fill the emptiness rising from the lack of the physical presence and reality of another human person," he writes in A Pilgrim in a Pilgrim Church...
...declaration, however, was the news that earlier in the week Father Alberto Cutie - the Miami-based priest and television personality who left the Catholic church last month amid soap opera-worthy scandal - had married his girlfriend of two years. Also making waves was the publication of former Milwaukee Archbishop Rembert Weakland's memoir detailing his life as a closeted gay man within the church and the loneliness that drove him to pursue a sexual relationship with another man. Weakland, who stepped down seven years ago when he turned 75, the age when priests typically submit letters of resignation that...
Egan was speaking with the candor of a man about to retire. His replacement, Archbishop Timothy Dolan, rebuffed a group of 163 priests in the Milwaukee Archdiocese back in 2003, when they asked to at least launch a discussion about celibacy in the context of priest shortages. Even Pope John Paul II, who quietly started allowing married Protestant ministers to convert and become Catholic priests, was firmly opposed to reconsidering the celibacy requirement. Weakland reports that he regularly found himself in hot water during John Paul's papacy because he socialized with and employed former priests who had resigned...
...four bishops from an ultra-conservative movement in January, even his admirers worried that he was taking the proverbial lid off Pandora's box. The group known as the Society of St. Pius X had, after all, operated a separate ministry since 1988, when its founder, the late Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, ordained his own bishops in open defiance of Pope John Paul II. Two decades of schism were bound to feed both unorthodox ideas and an autonomous chain of authority...
...there was a practical reason too: celibacy meant no offspring vying to inherit church property. That's not to say the rules were always followed, however. Many priests' spirits proved weak and their flesh willing--notably the sybaritic Pope Alexander VI, who installed his teenage son as an Archbishop in 1493. Fernando Lugo, the current President of Paraguay and a former bishop, is accused of fathering three children as a man of the cloth. And while abstinence does not inevitably lead to child molestation, critics are quick to draw a link between priestly celibacy and recent pedophilia scandals...