VOTF and the Year of the Priest

The current edition of the Catholic Telegraph of Cincinnati reports that the group Voice of the Faithful recently held an advisory board meeting in the archdiocese. The purpose was to contemplate ways of showing support for priests during the priestly year. Near the top of the list is lifting the "marriage restriction," i.e., the celibacy requirement that dates to the time of St. Augustine. They claim it is discouraging vocations and having a negative effect on the morale of priests. Never mind that surveys reveal an extraordinarily high level of career satisfaction for priests and that vocations are strongest in dioceses with an unambiguous commitment to priestly identity. When the only tool in your box is a hammer, the world looks like a nail.

“Our national working group for priest support, the second of the three goals of Voice of the Faithful, was reorganized in October 2006, with mostly new members recruited across the U.S.,” he told The Catholic Telegraph. “We were looking for ways to do more than just honor priests who showed courage by speaking out about the child abuse scandal and other problems facing our church. As an example, in 2005, at our conference in Indianapolis, we honored Msgr. Larry Breslin of Dayton as our 'Priest of Integrity' for speaking out against the decision to send an accused predator priest to Rome for further study.”

He said that the group decided it “needed to look for ways to reach all priests, find ways to best support them and the priesthood due to the decline in vocations.” He said that in their research, VOTF learned that “mandatory celibacy was a key issue, affecting the morale of many” priests, and the organization decided to call for “a serious, unbiased review of this requirement,” which it did a year ago.

The group compiled a list of what it calls “key contacts,” “ranging from quite conservative to very liberal, and added names of other theologians, authors, and noted Catholics to come up with a list of over 400 people.” A new website was created, www.nwgps.org, in which questions for discussion were listed.

Okenfuss says that the action plan “is to focus more on key contacts who we believe will help us spread our message to support priests,” he said. “We want to encourage them to speak out on the problems facing the priesthood and hopefully support or offer encouragement for the ideas we are presenting to them.”

The group believes that priests are its target audience, and is offering the website as a forum where they can discuss their concerns without identifying themselves, if they so prefer, he added.

“We are considering a similar forum for theologians. We would love to have bishops join in the discussions. However, raising the understanding of all of the laity that something must be done is, we believe, likely to be more effective,” he said.

The purpose of the VOTF advisory board meeting in Cincinnati was to hear from expert guests about the challenges facing the church and to discuss topics of “importance to our goal of supporting priests,” Okenfuss said.

D’Antonio told the group that there are many young men who are interested in the priesthood, but the restriction of marriage continues to discourage them from entering the seminary.