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| Pope Francis delivers a speech in Isernia in southern Italy on July 5, 2014. |
VATICAN CITY
Pope Francis's
hints about a possible opening on the issue of married priests are
sowing confusion in the Vatican and among Catholic reformists and
conservatives alike.
Twice in three months, Francis has
talked about changes to the tradition of celibate priests - although he
has never been precise about how exactly this could be reformed.
On
a flight back from his trip to the Middle East, Francis pointed out
that there were already married priests in the Ukrainian Greek Catholic
and Coptic Catholic churches.
"The door is always open but we are not talking about it now as the order of the day," the Argentine pontiff said.
It is a priority, however, for the dozens of campaign groups that have sprung up — many formed by men who have been forced to leave the priesthood to get married.
The
European Federation of Married Catholic Priests estimated more than
100,000 former Catholic priests have got married over the years — a figure which would make up around a quarter of the number of current priests.
Earlier
this year, 26 women who said they were in love with priests living in
Italy, wrote an open letter to the pope asking for a Vatican audience
and speaking of their "suffering" because of the secret lives they have
to lead.
Vatican expert Andrea Tornielli said at the
time that Francis was particularly sensitive to the issue as, when he
was the archbishop of Buenos Aires, he was close to an Argentine bishop
who renounced the priesthood for love.
BOMBSHELL
The Pope's comments over the weekend have had the effect of a new bombshell after La Repubblica daily in an interview quoted him as saying on priestly celibacy: "There are solutions and I will find them."
The
comments were immediately denied by Vatican spokesman Federico Lombardi
who said that the interviewer - the newspaper's 90-year-old founder,
Eugenio Scalfari — had not written down the exact quotations.
"This
is not at all an interview in the normal sense of the word," Lombardi
said of the one-to-one conversation between Francis and Scalfari, even
accusing the newspaper of manipulating "naive readers" with
inaccuracies.
It was the second time that a papal
interview with Scalfari has raised some hackles in the Vatican, leading
to the question of whether the pope could be using these conservations
as a way of bypassing traditional Vatican communications.
Father
Papas Jani Pecoraro, an Italy-based married priest from the Greek
Byzantine church, which is under Vatican authority, welcomed the pope's
reported comments.
Speaking to La Repubblica,
he said: "The issue could not only change the relationship between the
Catholic Church and the lay world but also with other churches."
"We
have to read the times and there is no doubt that today's society
raises questions that a married priest is definitely better able to cope
with," he said.
A Vatican expert, speaking to AFP on condition of anonymity, said that as a whole Francis was seen as "an open pope."
"With his arrival, the progressives in the Church have regained hope," he said.
But
a Vatican source said that merely pointing out that priestly celibacy
is not a dogma was "no great discovery" and called for greater caution
on over-interpreting papal comments.
The source said: "Some questions have been raised but this should not be seen as messages being passed on."
In the Repubblica
interview, Francis pointed out that the ban on married priests was only
instituted in the 10th century - nine centuries after the death of
Jesus Christ.
"The pope is sensitive to the issue,"
said the Vatican expert, although many observers are puzzled as to what
kinds of "solutions" the pope could have in mind and few are expecting
major changes any time soon.
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