Controversial Issues Coming To Fore at Bishops' Gathering

Bishop Luis Antonio Tagle of the Philippines said the synod had to squarely confront a priest shortage so as to provide congregations with proper services.

The National Council of Priests of Australia, which claims to represent half the country's clergy, offered a letter to the synod saying the priesthood could attract more recruits if the church allowed priests to marry and opened a debate on letting women be ordained.

Venice Archbishop Angelo Scola, who functions as a kind of master of ceremonies at the synod, noted that some delegates had "put forward the request to ordain married faithful of proven faith and virtue," a special category made up of older, married and religiously grounded Catholic men known as viri probati .

Scola added that he was opposed to the idea and that the solution to a priest shortage was a better distribution of priests in the world, not a loosening of celibacy rules in an attempt to draw more men into the priesthood.

He said the church wasn't a business with production quotas to meet. According to statistics that the church issued two years ago, there was one priest for every 2,677 Catholics compared with one for every 1,797 in 1978.

Bishops also took up the issue of letting Catholics who divorce and remarry take communion, the briefers said Tuesday. Under Catholic teaching, those who remarry can receive communion only if their first marriages have been annulled by the church. Pierre-Antoine Paulo, bishop of Haiti, said, "We have to ask ourselves whether in particular cases, as already happens for certain sinners," communion "could not be given to remarried divorcees."

Archbishop John Dew of Wellington, New Zealand, said, "There are those whose first marriages ended in sadness; they have never abandoned the church but are currently excluded from the Eucharist."

Scola did not respond directly but noted that communion was a "gift" and not a "right."