A married Roman Catholic priest from Burnley has
said he believes the church is correct to prefer single celibate clergy
in their parishes.
Father Paul Blackburn is the most recently ordained priest into the Salford Diocese.
He is married with three children.
A former Anglican minister, Father Paul embraced Catholicism
after growing dissatisfied with the direction the Church of England was
taking on some moral issues.
He said single priests are better placed to serve God by giving their entire life to his ministry.
"Whatever the church decides about the future shape of
ministry there will always be a need for celibate priests," Father Paul
told BBC Radio Lancashire.
God's will
For centuries, the Roman Catholic Church has insisted that its
priests be both single and celibate claiming it is God's will.
They say
it has apostolic authority and back up the argument with biblical
references.
Critics, amongst them some practising clergy in the church,
say laws of celibacy are a more earthly ruling and did not apply in the
early days of the church.
Saint Peter, the first pope, was married and
so were some subsequent popes and bishops.
The rule of clerical celibacy is a church law and not a
doctrine, thus the Pope can alter the ruling at any time.
The current
pontiff, Pope Benedict XVI, is staunchly in favour of the status quo.
However, he can and does allow former married Anglican minsters to
become Catholic priests with each case being viewed on an individual
basis.
In recent times this was seen as a gift from the Pope and is
also now part of the ordinariate as some Anglicans struggle to remain in
the Church of England.
Many Catholics believe that a married priest is a more
rounded priest whose experiences can help deal with family issues better
than his single colleagues.
Father Paul disagrees.
"A celibate priest can give so much
more," he said. "They can give themselves and everything about them.
They can give to the church and to the service of God. I can give what I
give but a proportion of my time will always go to my family."
Father Paul Blackburn was born in Burnley where he attended
Ivy Bank School.
Whilst a parishioner in his early twenties at St.
Catherine's in the town he was accepted for training at the prestigious
College of the Resurrection in the West Yorkshire village of Mirfield.
He was ordained into the Blackburn Diocese and then moved to
the East Midlands to take his ministry to at a city parish in Derby.
'Protecting the belief'
It was there, towards the end of the nineties, that Father
Paul began to have worries about the future direction of the Anglican
Church.
"I will always be grateful to the Church of England, but I
began to have serious doubts about the direction the church was going.
It was the ethical dilemmas that worried me, particularly about medical
issues like abortion. I felt more and more that the Church of England
wasn't protecting the belief that life should be upheld from
conception."
"For me personally, I felt the Catholic Church upholds that
conviction about all human life however it presents itself to us." he
continued.
Father Paul's first role as a Roman Catholic priest was to
join the chaplaincy team at Blackburn Royal Infirmary. "I have met some
lovely people at the hospital, both staff and patients, and it is a
privilege to minister to them," he said.
He is one of two priests ordained into the Salford Diocese
this year - the average number of new priests per diocese, and a
statistic that worries many Catholics.
Even though the church is struggling to find enough priests
to cover its parishes, Father Paul still isn't in favour of relaxing the
church rules to accept vocations from priests who wish to marry.
"The world around us is changing and there are less and less
people going to mass," he said.
"It is almost as if the culture has
forgotten that we are a Christian country. Less people are going to
church but the people who are there are there because they are
committed."