Holy Smoke: Why the Pope said no to married priests

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🗓️ 25 February 2020

⏱️ 21 minutes

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Summary

The dust has still not settled after Pope Francis unexpectedly – and very pointedly – ignored pleas from liberal Catholics to ordain married men as priests. They had a fully worked-out plan in place, but the Pope had pressed the 'delete' button. So what happened?

With Vatican expert Dr Ed Condon, Washington bureau chief of the Catholic News Agency and a canon lawyer.

Holy Smoke is a series of podcasts where Damian Thompson dissects the most important and controversial topics in world religion, with a range of high profile guests. Click here to find previous episodes.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Just before you start listening to this podcast, a reminder that we have a special subscription offer.
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0:10.3	Go to spectator.com.uk forward slash voucher if you'd like to get this offer.
0:20.4	Welcome to Holy Smoke, the Spectator's Religion podcast.
0:23.6	I'm Damien Thompson.
0:30.6	This was the month in which Pope Francis was expected to permit the ordination of married Catholic men as priests
0:41.3	on an experimental basis in the Amazon in response to a desperate shortage of clergy.
0:47.3	He didn't do it. Despite a strong recommendation from a synod of bishops last October, his official response to the synod, when it landed, said absolutely nothing about married priests.
1:02.0	His liberal supporters have cried enough tears to water a rainforest. Conservatives are crowing. Lots of people are very confused. What on earth happened?
1:14.6	I'm here with Dr. Ed Condon, who's Washington Bureau Chief of the Catholic News Agency and a canon lawyer.
1:22.6	And he has some interesting thoughts on it.
1:25.6	So Ed, I felt that last week Pope Francis dropped a bit of a bombshell, only it wasn't one that we read a great deal about, because it was the sort of bombshell that the liberal media and his own supporters didn't particularly want him to drop.
1:41.3	And even conservatives didn't want to make a fuss about it because a lot of them
1:44.6	didn't want to be seen to be agreeing with Pope Francis. But essentially, he issued his apostolic
1:50.8	exhortation, Perida Amazonia, which is a response to the, I think, utterly fatuous synod of bishops
1:57.3	on the Amazon, which voted for the ordination of married men as priests. And Francis
2:04.4	has disregarded that. There's no real reference to it in the document, not even in a footnote.
2:11.2	And clearly, this is not something that he's planning to do any time soon. And the headlines,
2:16.6	in so far as there were any, were of a liberal
2:19.0	Pope who had let people down. And you could sense from some of his more hardline supporters,
2:23.4	the pain and the anger in their voices. But my question to you, I think, Ed, is, was Pope Francis ever
2:31.2	really in favor of ordaining married men as priests? Well, no, he wasn't. And I think
	...

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