ANGLICANS seeking communion with the Church via the Pope’s unique offer
that allows married priests must recapture and understand the gift of
celibacy in the priesthood, a global leader of Anglo-Catholics said.
Traditional Anglican Communion Primate John Hepworth addresses the
Festival in Perth introducing the Anglican Ordinariate to Australia.
Photo: Anthony Barich
Adelaide-based Archbishop John Hepworth, Primate of the Traditional
Anglican Communion which claims a global membership of 400,000, said
Pope Benedict XVI’s 2009 apostolic constitution Anglicanorum Coetibus
(“Groups of Anglicans”) “challenges us in a most wonderful way”.
“I want to be quite clear that when becoming Primate eight years ago I
wrote to my people saying celibacy is part of the unity deal, just start
getting used to it. It’s something we have to start learning about,” he
told over 100 people at a 26 February festival introducing the Anglican
Ordinariate at Como parish.
“Having celibate clergy of people dedicated to God is vital to the life
of the Church and can’t be lost. Equally, (the priestly celibacy rule)
is not of divine legislation (as St Peter, the first Pope, was married).
“Therefore, it’s something that the Church has invoked as a tradition of
its own. It doesn’t have to be like that, and Anglican spirituality
revolves very much around the clergy’s family. The clergy not married
are usually not parish priests but teachers, lecturers and officials.”
Parish clergy have almost always been married and since the people have a
role in choosing their priest, they normally choose a married priest,
he said.
While Anglicans in general tend to make a “powerful deal” out
of married clergy, “we’re not looking for an exemption for celibacy, but
for both traditions to go side by side, each requiring massive
commitment in this world where the family is more under threat than any
time in the last 500 years”, he later told The Record.
In the Anglican tradition, the priest’s family is at the heart of the
parish, which he admitted puts “enormous pressure on the family”.
Former
Anglican priests who are now Catholic priests have previously told The
Record that in the Anglican Church, stress in the marriage is caused by
priest’s wives often becoming unpaid assistants, dealing with parish
matters when they should have the right to their own hobbies and
interests.
“I’ve tossed in my mind whether it’s more difficult to be a celibate in
today’s world or a totally faithful family man. These both require
heroic virtue to achieve,” Archbishop Hepworth said.
“We’re offering a charism - the gift of the Spirit in the Church of a
family struggling heroically to be faithful and to support the ministry
of the priest and his people and it comes to the heart of the Anglican
concept of little parishes where everybody knows each other and lives
closely to each other.”
He told The Record this after he told the festival audience that, as
Anglicans seeking to enter the Catholic Church,“we have to recapture the
gift of celibacy of the priesthood and the gift of monastic life”.
Although in the Anglican Church the priest was not married before he was
ordained, he was expected to be married during his first five years as a
curate (assistant priest), to ensure he’d marry a woman from the parish
who agreed with his life etc. Seminarians were not usually allowed to
marry, though they are now, he said.
The importance of the family unit was highlighted in a letter to the TAC
by Cardinal William Levada, Prefect of the Vatican’s Congregation of
the Doctrine of the Faith, which stipulated that men seeking to be a
priest in the Ordinariate must also send a letter from his wife stating
she agrees with him and why.
“This is a very difficult thing. I’m taking a priest’s wife to lunch
next week to convince her to write her letter of approval to Rome,”
Archbishop Hepworth said.
The prelate said that Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, before becoming Pope,
had written about “making rules for gifts of the Holy Ghost rather than
having them as free gifts within the Church. It opened up a celibacy
debate, but marriage of priests is something the Church is on the brink
of”.