Cross on u.s. flag © Victor Moussa (shutterstock)
Pope Francis received the last group of bishops from the U.S. on Thursday for the so-called ad limina visit. According to media reports, the ordination of married men to the priesthood was also a topic at the meeting.
At the meeting of U.S. bishops of the Eastern Church rite with Pope Francis on Thursday in the Vatican, it was among other things about the priesthood, which in the Eastern Catholic Churches is in principle also open to married people, said the bishop of the Romanian Catholic Diocese of Ohio, John Botean, according to the news portal CNS. The "frank" discussion touched on "all the neuralgic ies," including, for example, clergy sexual abuse, ecumenism, evangelization and the threatened situation of Christians in the Middle East, Botean said.
According to Armenian Catholic Bishop Mikael Mouradian, the bishops, who are united with Rome, thanked the pope for his permission to ordain married men to the priesthood outside their original areas of distribution. In 2014, Francis had rescinded a previously decades-old provision that allowed Eastern Catholic churches to ordain husbands as priests only in their original areas of distribution, not in the diaspora.
Criticizing the book by Cardinal Sarah of the Curia
Mouradian, according to CNS, said he himself ordained the first married man to the priesthood two years ago. Pope's decision to lift ban did not open floodgates, he said. One of the conditions he set as bishop is that candidates for ordination must have been married for at least five years and have children. Also needed a master's degree in theology, according to Mouradian.
In the days before, according to media reports, Botean had criticized the recent book by Curia Cardinal Robert Sarah on priesthood and celibacy. This gave the "painful" impression that his confreres, the majority of whom were married, were not proper priests.
Differences of opinion
In recent years, there had been several disagreements and tensions between the Pope, the Curia and the U.S. Church. Topics included aspects of dealing with the abuse crisis, the political direction of the pontificate and criticism of Vatican financial practices. All these problems also led to fewer donations from the U.S. to the pope and the Vatican.
The Catholic Church in the U.S. has nearly 470 bishops, including local bishops emeritus and auxiliary bishops. This makes the U.S. bishops' conference the third largest in the world, after Italy's and Brazil's.