This month the Vatican will discuss the possibility of ordaining priests who are not celibate, but married with children. But this only would be allowed in remote and extensive areas such as the Amazonia, where priests are scarce and there is no longer daily or weekly masses.
The Synod of the Amazonia will meet this month in Rome. Pop Francis summoned bishops and experts of the region who will not only discuss with him the future ordination of married priests, but also the ordination of women as deacons, as El País de España recalls.
Priests should preferably be elderly, indigenous of the area and should habe stable families, according to the Vatican correspondent in La Vanguardia, Anna Buj.
The Vatican published last June the preparatory document for this meeting. The title of the document is “Amazonia: New Roads for the Church and for Integral Ecology” – the Synod will also discuss proposals to protect the jungle and its inhabitants after the recent fire devastation–. The paper talks about “studying the possibility of priestly ordination for elderly people, preferably indigenous, respected and accepted by their community, even if they already have a constituted and stable family, with the purpose of ensuring the Sacraments that accompany and sustain Christian life,” wrote Daniel Verdú from Rome for El País.
Buj writes that the summoning of the Synod of the Amazonia appears as “an emergency measure to fight against the lack of priests in the less populated places of the region.” It would be also a pioneer measure.
“Catholic communities find it difficult to attend mass because of the lack of priests. Since only priests can officiate, about 70% of Catholics in this place do not have access to the weekly Mass,” Buj writes.
The Amazonia covers an area of between 6 million and 8.1 million square kilometers (the various sources’ figures don’t match), in nine countries: Brazil, Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, Perú, Bolivia, Guyana, Suriname and French Guyana.
El País published some data, in a story signed by Naiara Galarraga Gortázar from Manaos, which shows that only 37 million people live in the Amazonia. The majority of thais population, adds a BBC Mundo article, is Catholic.
The source for El País data is the Pan-Amazonian Ecclesial Network and it reveals that in the area there are only 2,166 parishes, 3,828 priests, 418 married permanent deacons and 100 bishops.
Permanent deacons may perform some rites, but they are not allowed to hear confessions, or to give the Eucharist or the extreme unction. The Protestant religions, on the other hand, do not have these restrictions. “This may help explain the rapid growth of evangelical churches in the Brazilian Amazonia. According to census data, evangelicals grew from 19.8% to 30% of the population between 2000 and 2010,” BBC Mundo reports.
The same article quotes a study by Georgetown University that shows that while the number of Catholics in the world has doubled since 1970 to 1.3 billion people, the number of priests has remained stagnant since then, at around 400,000.
Galarraga Gortázar interviewed the bishop of São Gabriel da Cachoeira, Edson Damián, about the preparatory meetings of Manaos before the Synod. The document to be discussed at the Synod is the fruit of the work of 87,000 people from the nine Amazonian countries gathered in assemblies. “It is those leaders who are at the head of isolated communities, who have been sharing the word for a long time, who pass on the catechesis… We want them to be ordained priests with the proper education and we want the Eucharist to be present instead of being denied it as it is now,” said the bishop.
“We need to stop being a visiting church to become one that is more present in the communities,” Roque Paloschi, the archbishop of Porto Velho, told BBC Mundo. In that diocese there are only 47 priests for 950,000 inhabitants.
Damián told Galarraga Gortázar that he hopes the bishop who will replace him in the diocese of São Gabriel da Cachoeira will be an indigenous. “It is what corresponds, he says, because indigenous are one of the groups with the highest proportion of faithful natives.”
Gerardo Trinidade, ordained a year ago as a priest, is in charge of 17 communities where there is an evangelical majority. “I only visit them four times a year and they are visits in a hurry,” he said to El País reporter.
In the Catholic Church, clerical celibacy was not always a law. It was established in the 12th century; it did not exist in the foundation of Catholicism and for centuries until then.
If ordained married priests is approved at the Synod of the Amazonia, the monopoly of celibacy would end and the doors would be opened to similar changes in other regions, such as the Pacific islands, the journalists of El País and La Vanguardia write.