The ex-head of the highest representative body of the Church lay associations in Germany has encouraged Germany’s bishops to ordain married men to the priesthood, even without approval from the Vatican. On Tuesday, the theologian Thomas Sternberg welcomed the proposal of the Archbishop of Brisbane, Mark Coleridge, to ordain married men from the ranks of the Australian aborigines as priests, because compulsory celibacy is culturally completely foreign to the country’s indigenous people.
The former president of the Central Committee of German Catholics (ZdK) said the move was justified by necessity. “There are different levels of importance in church matters,” he told the Catholic website domradio.de. “And without question, securing the celebration of the Eucharist for the faithful is more important for believers than the disciplinary question of the priests’ way of life. The way I assess the Vatican and its incredible powers of persistency and bigotry, the only way to make progress is to create a fait accompli.”
“I wonder why not three or four bishops simply have the courage for once to ordain specially selected good deacons, theologically trained, everything clean, clarified and organised?” asked Sternberg. “If they did that, what would happen? What sanctions would Rome have then? I would be happy.” He said there was now an opportunity to show courage, to act and not wait “for things to be simply sat out in the Vatican another 50 years”.
Sternberg also pointed out that the Catholic Church already had married priests with families – such as converted Protestant or Anglican pastors. He described the priest shortage in Germany as “extremely dramatic”. Since 1990, the number of ordained priests had fallen by about 85 per cent. At present, he said, pastoral care is still maintained by the commendable efforts of priests, some of them very old, from the large cohorts of the 1960s. “That is admirable. But it is foreseeable, of course, that this will soon come to an end. We need a change quite urgently.”
An end to compulsory celibacy for Catholic priests is a core demand of the German Synodal Way reform project, of which Sternberg was co-president for a time. Recently, the number of ordinations to the priesthood has plummeted. According to the German Bishops’ Conference, there were only 33 ordinations in 2022, compared with 79 in 2012 or 131 in 2002.
Originally reported by KNA Germany.
