VATICAN/ITALY: Pope Benedict holds summit with top advisors to discuss celibacy

Pope Benedict on Thursday (November 16) held a summit with his top advisors to discuss the status of celibacy among Roman Catholic clergy and requests by married priests who want to return to the active ministry. The summit of more than 20 heads of Vatican departments was called to discuss a Vatican strategy to deal with a renegade African archbishop who has founded a movement of men who left the active ministry to wed and want to return as married men. The unprecedented meeting comes some two months after Archbishop Emanuel Milingo, a former Vatican official, raised the spectre of a modern schism when he ordained four married men as priests in Washington D.C. He was excommunicated. A Vatican statement this week said the Pope and aides would hold a "reflection on requests for dispensation from the obligation of celibacy and on requests for readmission to the priestly ministry by priests who had married." According to Canon (Church) law, a man who is allowed to leave the priesthood, under a procedure known as a laicisation, must receive a separate dispensation from the vow of celibacy from the Pope. Many men, however, have married without this specific dispensation and want to regularise their position in the Church. Vatican officials have said that no major decisions were expected to come immediately from the meeting, which one called "a study of the situation" that arose after Milingo's "disobedience". Milingo rejects his excommunication and is planning a convention for more than 1,000 married priests -- and their wives -- in New York for Dec. 8-10. The Roman Catholic Church insists that its priests remain celibate and has so far ruled out letting them marry.

ITN Source | November 17, 2006

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