Pope decides against allowing married men to become priests

Pope Francis has dismissed a proposal to allow married men to be ordained as priests in the Amazon region, marking one of the most significant decisions of his papacy.

The proposal was put forward by Latin American bishops in 2019 to combat the scarcity of Catholic priests in the region.

But in an “apostolic exhortation” focusing on environmental damage to the Amazon, he sidestepped the proposal and called for bishops to pray for more “priestly vocations” instead.

The pope also urged bishops to be “more generous in encouraging those who display a missionary vocation to opt for the Amazon region”.

In 2017, Pope Francis raised the prospect of lifting the celibacy rule to allow married men to be ordained as the lack of Catholic priests has seen the Church’s influence decline in the Amazon region.

But traditionalists were alarmed that the move could ruin the church and change the centuries-old commitment to celibacy among priests.

In January this year, Pope Francis’ predecessor, the former pope Benedict XVI, spoke out against allowing married men to become priests and defended clerical celibacy in a controversial book written with conservative cardinal Robert Sarah.

In the book, titled ‘From the Depths of our Hearts: Priesthood, Celibacy and the Crisis of the Catholic Church’, the authors urged bishops, priests and laity to “let themselves be guided once more by faith as they look upon the church and priestly celibacy that protects her mystery”.

In the apostolic exhortation, which is a teaching document used to encourage Catholic faithfuls, Pope Francis instead focused on saving the Amazon rainforests and credited women with keeping “the Church alive”.

He praised the roles of women who “baptised, catechised, prayed and acted as missionaries” in the absence of priests in some Amazonian communities.

“For centuries, women have kept the Church alive in those places through their remarkable devotion and deep faith,” said the pope.

“We must keep encouraging those simple and straightforward gifts that enabled women in the Amazon region to play so active a role in society, even though communities now face many new and unprecedented threats.”

The pope also wrote of the Amazon being an “ecological dream” and said it was impossible to separate “the care of people and the care of ecosystems”.

“The harm done to nature affects [the indigenous peoples] in a very direct and verifiable way, since, in their words, ‘we are water, air, earth and life of the environment created by God. For this reason, we demand an end to the mistreatment and destruction of mother Earth. The land has blood and it is bleeding; the multinationals have cut the veins of our mother Earth.’”

The exhortation comes after a three-week synod was held last year to discuss the Catholic Church’s position in backing indigenous people defending their territorial rights and way of life in the Amazon.

The Amazon rainforest and its indigenous communities faced a massive surge in wildfires during 2019, fuelled by Brazillian president Jair Bolsonaro’s pro-business policies that weakened environmental protections and encouraged deforestation.

In addressing the fires, Pope Francis had strong words: “The businesses, national or international, which harm the Amazon and fail to respect the right of the original peoples to the land and its boundaries … should be called for what they are: injustice and crime.

“They frequently resort to utterly unethical means such as penalizing protests and even taking the lives of indigenous peoples who oppose projects, intentionally setting forest fires, and suborning politicians and the indigenous people themselves.

He added: “All this accompanied by grave violations of human rights and new forms of slavery affecting women in particular, the scourge of drug trafficking used as a way of subjecting the indigenous peoples, or human trafficking that exploits those expelled from their cultural context.

“We cannot allow globalization to become ‘a new version of colonialism’.”