Rome – Under Pope John Paul II, the question was barely up for debate. But over the past week, the deep shortage of Roman Catholic priests has dominated the first gathering of bishops under the new pope, Benedict XVI, with an openness and urgency that the Vatican has not been used to in recent years.
“Celibacy has no theological foundation,” Gregorios III Laham, who attended the synod as the patriarch of the Melkite Catholics, an Eastern Rite church, said at an early session, official briefers reported. “Married priests are admitted,” he said.
After that bombshell, the Vatican cut back on the detail provided to reporters on the talks unfolding among 256 bishops, who came to discuss on-the-ground concerns from around the world.
Still, it seems clear that the private deliberations of this first synod of bishops under Benedict, in office for six months now, are a departure, even if the discussion is kept within relatively narrow confines.
Since the synod opened Monday, bishops have raised other delicate and rarely aired issues: whether to allow Communion to divorced Catholics who remarry without an annulment, and whether Catholics can vote for politicians at odds with church teaching on issues such as abortion and euthanasia.
Whatever taboos are being carefully cracked in this first synod, church experts caution that the chances remain slim that church policy on traditions such as priestly celibacy will be changed soon.
Synods are, for one thing, purely consultative. So far, too, there has been little discussion of possible solutions, though the synod runs until Oct. 23.
Further, while Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, before he became Benedict in April, allowed wide internal debate in his years as doctrinal enforcer, experts note that his decisions in the end often reflected some of the church’s most conservative thinking.
“It’s one thing to listen and to allow conversations,” said Law- rence A. Young, a sociologist who co-wrote one of the first scholarly examinations of the priest shortage, “Full Pews and Empty Altars.” “It’s another thing to shift one’s opinion vis-a-vis key theology and church practice.”