Vatican City, Jan 8, 2024 / 12:13 pm
A Vatican official has said that he thinks the Catholic Church’s priestly celibacy requirement in the Latin rite should be revised.
Archbishop Charles Scicluna, who serves as the archbishop of Malta and is an assistant secretary at the Vatican’s Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, said in an interview published Jan. 7 that the Church should “think seriously about” changing the Western discipline.
“If it were up to me, I would revise the requirement that priests have to be celibate,” he said, according to a captioned Maltese-language video interview by the Times of Malta.
“This is probably the first time I’m saying it publicly and it will sound heretical to some people,” he added.