>>826257
Benedict and Francis have spoken admiringly of each other, but their different views about the church — Francis has pushed for changes that his predecessor opposed — have caused some traditionalists to rally around Benedict as an alternative authority figure.
“One Pope is complicated enough,” John Gehring, the Catholic program director at the Washington-based advocacy group Faith in Public Life, wrote on Twitter Sunday night. “This is a mess. With great respect to Benedict XVI, it’s time for him to live up to his promise to be ‘hidden from the world.’ ”
“From the Depths of Our Hearts,” was co-written by Benedict and the Guinean Cardinal Robert Sarah, with each authoring certain passages. Sarah, who did not immediately respond to a request for comment, is far more direct than Benedict, speaking to Francis directly about the dangers of altering the church’s celibacy practices.
“I am humbly pleading for Pope Francis to protect us definitively of such an eventuality by putting his veto to any weakening or lessening of priestly celibacy, even limited to one region or the other,” wrote Sarah, the head of the Vatican’s liturgical office. “The possibility to ordain married men would represent a pastoral catastrophe, an ecclesiastical confusion and an obfuscation in an understanding of the priesthood.”
A passage jointly written by Sarah and Benedict mentions that they had taken note of the “uproar” surrounding the bishops’ meeting on the Amazon last year. Benedict and Sarah wrote that they could not stay silent.
“If ideology divides, truth unites hearts,” they wrote. “Examining the doctrine of salvation can only unite the Church around its divine Master. We do it in a spirit of charity.”
Benedict, 92, uses a walker and talks barely above a whisper, according to recent footage, but remains mentally sharp. His contributions to the book, according to the excerpts, are steeped in church language. He makes the case that celibacy is a way for priests to give themselves fully to the service of the priesthood.
“To be with God is to set aside what is only the self,” Benedict writes.
Benedict’s personal secretary, Archbishop Georg Gänswein, did not respond to a request for comment.
As the church debated last year whether to allow the ordination of married men in the Amazon, traditionalists warned about the destruction of the priesthood. There are already some celibacy exceptions within the church: married Anglican ministers, in some cases, can join the Catholic priesthood after conversion. But some conservatives worry that the rationale for the Amazon could also be applied to other parts of the world, including Europe and North America, that have shortages of priests.
Sarah argues that lifting the celibacy requirement would not help such areas, but deprive them of true priests.
“We cannot offer them ‘second class’ priests,” Sarah wrote.