Will you take this priest ...?

There are two things that almost every watcher of the Catholic Church is agreed on. One is that the present Pope, John Paul II, will never consider making celibacy voluntary for most priests; the second, that his successor will have to.

All over Europe and North America the rumblings against compulsory clerical celibacy have been growing louder since the Second Vatican Council in 1965. The council ended with what seemed to be a promise that the church would be renewed. Yet in the 30 years since, at least 60,000 priests and perhaps as many as 100,000 have left the church (out of a total of around 450,000 worldwide), most over this one issue. Nor is the problem diminishing; scandals and arguments have run across Europe like a burning fuse this year from Austria to Ireland and all have involved celibacy or sexual discipline.

At the start of the year, the Bishop of Basle, Hans-Joerg Vogel, at 43 one of the youngest and most popular bishops in Switzerland announced he was leaving his post because he had made a girlfriend pregnant. Their baby was born last week; and the bishop is not, apparently, sure whether he and the mother will marry. The case had echoes of the Eamon Casey scandal in Ireland in 1992, when one of the most popular and respected bishops in the country turned out to have a grown son, a fact revealed in newspaper interviews given by the mother. Bishop Vogel had not concealed his indiscretion, as Bishop Casey managed to do for nearly 20 years.

In Ireland again, the Bishop of Ferns, Dr Brendan Comiskey, was publicly rebuked by his cardinal and summoned to Rome for admonishment after he suggested that the church debate the issue. However the summons to Rome was quietly withdrawn and Bishop Comiskey this week announced a three- month sabbatical in America to "reflect upon the role of the bishop in a rapidly changing society", as the official statement put it. Yet the US is not, as will emerge, a place for a bishop to renew his faith in compulsory celibacy. Bishop Comiskey clashed very publicly with Cardinal Cahal Daly after suggesting debate, which according to an opinion poll was supported by four-fifths of Irish Catholics.

Probably the most significant challenge to the Vatican's orthodoxy has come from Austria. Earlier this year the church was rocked by a huge scandal when its head, Cardinal Hans Hermann Groer, was accused of sexually abusing a male seminarian. The cardinal has refused either to admit or deny the charges, and retired without fanfare this week. Though the act of which he was accused would still have been condemned in a married priest, his misdeeds provoked a great revulsion against compulsory celibacy, perhaps because both seemed rooted in a contemptuous attitude to the laity.

Half a million church-going Austrian Catholics - half the country's regular Mass-going population - signed a protest petition which called not merely for an end to celibacy but the ordination of women priests as well.

The petition has now moved to Germany, where it is opposed by the hierarchy but supported by two of the country's most famous theologians. Its organisers have taken the ominous-sounding name "We are the church" - ominous because it consciously echoes the slogan "We are the people" which was the rallying cry for the mass demonstrations that brought down the Berlin Wall. The implication is clear: the church government against which they are protesting is totalitarian and vulnerable.

Elsewhere the battle is not so much forgotten as over: and it is clear that compulsory celibacy has lost. Africa is one such place. The celibacy of the clergy is one of the few subjects on which Pope John Paul II has not spoken on his trip around Africa this week. He has denounced apartheid, the arms trade, the world bank and war. But if he has spoken a word on priestly celibacy, the wire services have ignored him. And small wonder, too, for Africa is the one continent where candidates for the priesthood are so numerous that the seminaries must turn them away; the only snag is that all these priests expect to have wives, or at least concubines, when they are ordained.

In Latin America the situation is much the same; as it seems to have been in much of medieval Europe after Rome started seriously trying to enforce celibacy in the 13th century. About two-thirds of the Catholic priests in the world - a quarter of a million men - are "secular" priests who have not taken vows of poverty, chastity and obedience. Dr Richard Sipe, an American former monk, now a psychologist, estimates that half the priests in North America are sexually active at any one time; and that the figure is much higher outside Europe and North America.

The decree that all priests should be celibate, and not merely those who take monastic vows of obedience, poverty and chastity, has never reflected a doctrine about the nature of the priesthood in the way that the ban on women priests has done. Celibacy was highly esteemed by the earliest Christians and from about the fourth century at the latest seems to have been associated with the priesthood in the West. Yet the Orthodox churches allow a married parish clergy, though bishops must be monks and hence celibate.

A case of special difficulty for the Polish pope is supplied by the "Uniate" churches of the Ukraine and the Middle East, which have orthodox rites but Catholic doctrine, and which acknowledge papal superiority. The Uniate churches in their native lands have married parish clergy; but their branches in North America and Europe are not allowed to.

The Orthodox or Uniate model, where married men may be ordained, but men already ordained may not marry, is the one advocated by the Movement for the Ordination of Married Men, the most "respectable" of the groups in the Roman Catholic church here pressing for reform. Fr Michael Gaine, a former chairman of the movement, says that compulsory celibacy "is a violation of somebody's natural rights. Theologians would say that someone has a natural right to marry and procreate if they wish. Occasionally someone may give up that right; but there is no ground for suggesting that if you receive a vocation to the priesthood, then you simultaneously receive a vocation to celibacy."

Almost the first act of Pope John Paul II in office in 1978 was to send out a letter to all the bishops' conferences of the world greatly tightening up the rules under which priests could be released from their vows. In essence, only men too old to marry would henceforth be allowed to leave. Thousands of applications for priests to leave their ministry piled up in Rome until the fact of the new policy became known.

The policy "did diminish the number of those leaving, but it leaves a terrible thought in the back of one's mind: that we may have a lot of unhappy, unwilling, celibate priests in the parishes," says Fr Gaine.

It was reasoning such as this which led the National Priests' Conference of England and Wales to pass overwhelmingly a resolution last week asking for a discussion of compulsory celibacy. But the particular trigger is more specifically British. The reception of married former Anglicans into the Roman Catholic church as priests seems to many Catholic priests grossly unfair because they are granted, it seems, a privilege which faithful, lifelong Catholics are denied. It would be ironic if the absorption of part of the Anglo-Catholic wing of the Church of England, which was heralded at the time as a great triumph for Rome - not least by those so noisily absorbed - should turn out to have opened a wound that cannot be staunched.

Pope John Paul II may have succeeded in his attempt to exclude the ordination of women priests from discussions for ever. But his successor, whoever he may be, will almost certainly find himself making arrangements for the large-scale ordination of married men. Otherwise he may find the number of honest priests coming forward for ordination quite insufficient for the church's needs.

A financial headache in the making

The arguments against married Catholic priests are all prudential or disciplinary, and not, as with women priests, doctrinal. There are practical problems ahead for a church with married priests and some of these are already appearing among the married former Anglican clergy who have joined the Catholic church in England and the US.

At present Catholic priests have minute salaries (as little as pounds 800 a year) and live almost entirely on collections from parishioners. The clergy of the Church of England, whose families must be fed and housed, cost their diocesan authorities perhaps 20 times as much. As well as proper salaries (roughly pounds 13,000), national insurance and tax, they must be housed more expensively than single people; and when they retire their pensions must be paid. This is one reason why the married clergy converts have traditionally been kept away from parishes. As school chaplains, on the other hand, their salaries are paid by the schools and not the dioceses.

If married men were to be ordained in large numbers the financial strain on the church could be immense. Congregations that give happily to a priest might give with much less joy to his wife and children.

Nor can it be safely assumed that the priest's wife would work outside the home and so pay her own way. To be a priest's wife is itself almost a full-time job; and one which can put a marriage under great strain. Indeed the first divorced Roman Catholic priest in the world will soon be William Bry Shields, in the diocese of Mobile, Alabama.