Word: churchful
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Overshadowing the Pope's 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...
Although both he and Cutie have insisted they do not want to be held up as poster boys for changing the Church's celibacy requirement, their stories have added new fuel to a long-simmering debate. The Catholic Church in the U.S. has a serious priest crisis - the number of men entering the priesthood has dropped by 60% over the past four decades and the current average age of active priests is 60. Many dioceses have been forced to close parishes or import foreign priests to deal with shortages. But advocates of celibacy reform say there is a better solution...
...first thousand years of the Christian church, priests, bishops, and even popes could - and often did - marry. At least 39 popes were married men, and two were the sons of previous popes. The ideal of celibacy existed, but as a teaching from the Apostle Paul, not a church doctrine. In his first letter to the Corinthians, Paul argued simply that single men had fewer distractions from their godly work: "He that is without a wife is solicitous for the things that belong to the Lord, how he may please God. But he that is with a wife, is solicitous...
Over the centuries, the Church tried to split the difference, prohibiting marriage after ordination and encouraging married priests to abstain from sex with their wives after they had joined the priesthood. (The Eastern Orthodox CHurch continues to allow married men to be ordained as priests.) But it wasn't until the Second Lateran Council in 1139 that a firm church law allowing ordination only of unmarried men was adopted. Journalist and former priest James Carroll contends in Practicing Catholic that the reasons for this celibacy requirement were not purely theological. "Celibacy had been imposed on priests mainly for the most...
...year the country's highest administrative court denied the naturalization request of an otherwise irreproachable Moroccan woman on the grounds that her wearing a burqa was incompatible with French secularist statutes. On Tuesday, French Scientologists raised complaints of religious intolerance when state prosecutors wrapped up their arguments against the church on charges of organized swindling by requesting that the organization be disbanded and barred in France. (Read an argument against the veil by Azadeh Moaveni...