THE CHURCH AND CLERICAL CELIBACY.

New Zealand Tablet, 18 September 1919, Page 9

THE CHURCH AND CLERICAL CELIBACY.

We have already in a brief note (says the Fortnightly Iteview) denied the slanderous report that the Neapolitan clergy had resolved in favor of abolishing sacerdotal celibacy. The Month (No. 659, pp. 380 sq.) administers a welldeserved rebuke to the London Times for having reprinted the slander from the columns of a disreputable Italian newspaper. It was not the first time that such a story has appeared in the press (says our esteemed British contemporary). The various anti-clerical news-agencies eagerly fasten upon, or readily invent and disseminate, any news of that kind that seems to reflect discredit upon the Church. But, judging from a Papal Letter mentioned in the Catholic Times, April 19, addressed to a Hungarian Archbishop, wherein the Holy Father sternly rebukes certain Hungarian clergy who have demanded or suggested the abolition of celibacy; judging also from a persistent rumor, very difficult to verify, concerning some priests in Prague whose demands arc even more violently subversive of Catholic discipline ; there seems no doubt that the shock of war has had its repercussions amongst ecclesiastics in these turbulent regions. It may be, furthermore, that association with Orthodox clergy and with those Uniat Churches which have been allowed by the Holy See to retain a married ministry, has weakened their attachment to the sacred tradition of celibacy. “These occasional outbreaks,” comments the Month, “need not surprise, us. All through her history the Church has had to fight against strong human passions .for the observance of this lofty ideal, which so befits the ineffably holy status and functions of the Christian priesthood. As lately as the beginning of last century an association was ■formed in several South German States to advocate the repeal of the law, and it required an Encyclical of Pope Gregory XVI., in 1832, to bring the agitation to a close. It is, therefore, to be expected that in the present general upheaval a few discontented spirits her© and there it needs no more to hatch a press-canard should be found to complain of a dignity which their lack of self-control has turned into a burden.”.