UL profs weigh in on new priesthood ordinariate

On Jan. 1, the Vatican announced the Personal Ordinariate of the Chair of St. Peter to allow Anglican priests and their parishes to convert to Catholicism; this ordinariate also allows Anglican priests who are married to be ordained as priests in the Roman Catholic faith.

"After over 500 years of division, it will be the start of a process of unification,"said Richard Cusimano, Ph.D, emeritus professor of medieval history at UL Lafayette, referring to the two denominations, Roman Catholic and Anglicanism, which share the same religion and faith: Christianity.  

The division of Roman Catholic and Anglicanism occurred when King Henry VIII of England could not bring forth a healthy male heir through his marriage to Catherine of Argon, causing Henry VIII to divorce her and seek remarriage, which was shunned in the church. As a reaction to the belief that he may never have a male heir, along with many other factors, he broke away from the church and became Anglican.

"In the first 1,000 years of the church's history, priests were allowed to get married. In reality, marriage is a sacrament that confers grace and priests should enjoy the benefits of it whereby love is expressed in a sacred union," said Cusimano, who is currently retired.

The Ordinariate now allows manifold amounts of Anglican married priests to be ordained, even if they are married.

"When the creation of the Personal Ordinariate was announced, the media speculated that perhaps this represents a real challenge to clerical celibacy," said Sara Ritchey, Ph.D., director of Graduate Studies and assistant professor of history at UL, referring to men of the faith who have chosen to remain unmarried and not engage in sexual activity in order to commit themselves fully to Jesus Christ and the church.

Ritchey, who recently published an OP-ED in the New York Times on the future of priests' wives and their treatment, continues, "And yet, at the same time, authorities like Archbishop Wuerl, who is overseeing the implementation of the Ordinariate, insisted that, no, this is not a challenge, that married priests and their families really won't linger for more than the current generation, that new aspirants to seminary will choose a life of celibacy."

In the Latin Church (the largest of all the Catholic Church populations), men are expected to chose a life of clerical celibacy if they want to be ordained as a priest. The annexation of Anglican Priests, who are married, converting to Roman Catholicism, poses a problem to many.

"This game of cat and mouse over the ordination of married men sort of had me thinking much more generally about ordination and about the creation of a defined, a distinguished clergy, separate from the laity, a clergy with very unique powers, that clerical class—as utterly distinct—emerged with the eleventh century reforms, and was intimately tied to the aggressive adoption of celibacy," said Ritchey.

In attempts to continue celibacy, the 11th-century reforms were constructed to somehow keep this slowly fading tradition alive. Consequently, it caused negative attitudes and feelings towards the already married Catholic priests' wives and children during that time.

Ritchey explained, "Not all priests and canons at the time of these reforms wanted to abandon their wives and/or concubines, and so the reformers' rhetoric demeaning women as defiling bloodsuckers became all the more vitriolic in a reform effort to finally extinguish them."