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Belgian Bishop Pushes for Ordination of Married Men
Developing
In Short: Bishop Johan Bonny of Antwerp continues discussions with Vatican officials and Belgian bishops to ordain married men as priests by 2028.
Bishop Johan Bonny of Antwerp has renewed his push to ordain married men as priests, despite no official Vatican authorization.
He emphasized that any step toward ordaining married men would require the agreement of both the Belgian bishops’ conference and the Vatican.
Bonny said, “How this step could take place with the agreement of the bishops’ conference and the Vatican is a question for the coming months.”
The bishop expressed confidence in Pope Francis’s role as a bridge-builder and cited conversations with bishops facing similar circumstances.
Archbishop Hubertus van Megen of the German bishops’ conference stated that no local church outranks another, and that any change in practice in a Latin diocese would require action by the Holy See.
Auxiliary Bishop Josef Graf of Regensburg suggested that the Church could ordain married men of proven faith while affirming the value of celibacy.
Bonny wrote an 11-page pastoral letter that included a plan to ordain married men as priests by 2028, even though such actions would violate the Code of Canon Law.
He said, “The question is no longer whether the Church can ordain married men as priests but when it will do so, and who will do it.”
What's still developing
- In an interview in the October issue of Herder Korrespondenz, Bishop Johan Bonny of Antwerp said he traveled to Rome in June to present the matter to the Dicastery for the Clergy and the General Secretariat of the Synod.
- Bonny told the German magazine he was continuing discussions within the Belgian bishops’ conference and holding conversations with potential candidates about further formation.
- He also said his confidence rested partly on Pope Leo XIV’s exercise of his office as a bridge-builder and on conversations with bishops in several countries and continents whom he said faced similar circumstances.
- At the German bishops’ plenary assembly in 2022, Bonny said that “Rome must learn to live with a healthy dose of Germanic culture.” He referred to an open style of consultation and discussion, not the ordination of married men; the address was also released as a podcast.
- A married Anglican priest who converts to Catholicism is allowed to be ordained as a Catholic priest and remain married.
- “For many a bishop, the ordination of married men has become a matter of conscience,” he wrote.
- “The fact that almost no domestic candidates are coming forward for ordination seems to me undoubtedly related to the absence of synodal discernment in classical vocation ministry,” the bishop continued.
- “It is the pope alone, the successor of St. Peter, who has God-given primacy in definitively teaching on faith and morals, and also the divinely given primacy of authority in binding and loosing on matters of discipline, and thus one must be very wary of going forward in a manner that would gravely violate that divinely ordained papal primacy of governance,” he said.
- Nash explained that married men can be validly ordained to the priesthood, as one can see in the Eastern rite and the rare exceptions in the Latin rite.
- It states clearly that the only holy orders “a man who has a wife” is eligible for is the permanent diaconate — not the priesthood.
- The Church makes some limited exceptions for other Protestant ministers who are married and also wish to convert to Catholicism and be ordained into the priesthood.
Sources
- National Catholic Registerlink