Antwerp: a bishop trains married men to ordain them priests

The bishop of Antwerp, in Belgium, has undertaken to train several married men with a view to ordaining them priests, an ordination he intends for 2028, subject to Rome's approval.

In the Latin Church, no one is admitted to holy orders without first having promised celibacy. This is not a convenience that scarcity would license us to set aside: the Church has always held, and defined against her contradictors, that consecrated virginity and celibacy surpass the state of marriage. She wills her priests configured to Christ, the eternal priest, free for the altar and for souls. The necessity invoked does not dispense from a sacred law: it puts our fidelity to it to the test.

The bishop says he has already chosen his candidates and has them follow a theological and pastoral formation comparable to that of future priests, "transparently and discreetly, far from the attention of the media." The conditions laid down resemble those of the permanent diaconate: at least thirty-five years of age, the wife's consent, a stable family life, no more young children.

He justifies the step by the shortage of priests. "The necessity compels me to it," he says; "we have been waiting for more priests for thirty or forty years already." According to him, the diocese of Antwerp counts no more than seventy priests under seventy years of age, two-thirds of them of foreign origin; none is any longer assigned to a hospital, a youth movement or a school, and of the five prisons in the province, only one still keeps a permanent chaplain.

The question was debated within the Belgian bishops' conference and raised with Pope Francis at the last ad limina visit. The bishop states that he met the cardinal prefect of the Dicastery for the Clergy and the secretary general of the Synod of Bishops, who are said to have promised to speak of it to Pope Leo XIV; the date of that meeting remains uncertain. Nothing, however, is decided: to be legitimate, the project would require the approval of the Sovereign Pontiff, which is not given. Leo XIV has voiced his concern at the shortage of priests, without speaking of modifying celibacy or of ordaining women.

A diocese is dying for want of priests: the Church's remedy has never been to lower the priesthood to the measure of the shortage, but to beg it of the Master of the harvest, "that he send forth labourers into his harvest."

Sources. Catechism of the Council of Trent (1566), on the sacrament of Holy Orders; Council of Trent, session XXIII (the sacrament of Order) and session XXIV, canon 10 on marriage; Saint Matthew IX, 38 (Douay-Rheims); Pius XI, Ad catholici sacerdotii (1935); Pius XII, Sacra virginitas (1954).