Haitian priest Fr Enel Almeus will not be excommunicated from the Catholic Church for having sex.The maximum penalty that can be handed down for breaking his vow of chastity is being reduced to a lay person and not being allowed to function as a priest, according to the Pope's representative in Trinidad, Monsignor Archbishop Thomas Edward Gullickson.
The Archbishop, who is the Holy See's ambassador to 12 Caricom countries, not including Haiti, said Fr Almeus, who quietly left the country after being found not guilty of rape last week, can only be sanctioned by his superiors in the Holy Ghost Fathers order in Haiti.
Fr Elmeus was acquitted of the charge of sexually assaulting a police officer's wife at Spiritan House, the headquarters of the Holy Ghost Fathers in Trinidad, which is located on the corner of Frederick and Oxford Streets in Port of Spain.
The priest maintained that the sex was consensual. It was alleged that the priest forced the woman to have sex with him in his room on March 19, 2004. However, a nine-member jury found him not guilty last week Thursday.
Archbishop Gullickson, who was appointed to the post in 2004, explained yesterday that the Catholic Church has many traditions-Latin, Oriental, Greek, Slavic, even Arabic. In the Oriental tradition, there have been instances of married priests, men who were ordained after they were already married.
"But you never have marriage after priesthood," he said.
And if the priest's wife dies, he cannot remarry.
In the Latin tradition, which is followed by 98 per cent of Catholics, the vow of celibacy is as old as the Church itself, and though it has always been a controversial issue throughout the Church's 2,000-year history, it has also been an unchanged law in the Latin Rite.
"So the Latin tradition has always been a tradition of celibacy and the universal tradition in the Catholic Church is always marriage before priesthood, not after," said Gullickson, who is originally from South Dakota in the United States.
"There have always been people who have failed to keep their promise. No one is a saint, and it is important to remember this too. This is why we say that to become a saint you must have both feet firmly planted in the grave. Because no living human being is perfect."
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Source (TN)
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