Shrewsbury: Bishop reaffirms 'enduring value of priestly celibacy'

Bishop Mark Davies

The witness of priestly celibacy is needed more than ever before, the Rt Rev Mark Davies, the Bishop of Shrewsbury, said today. In an address to seminarians and staff of St Mary’s College, Oscott, Birmingham, Bishop Davies said celibacy was rightly understood as “a radical self-gift by which we give ourselves completely to Christ and make ourselves totally available to the service of His Church”.

He said that the element of sacrifice in celibacy seems small “compared with the joy of a gift which allows us to give the whole of our lives in the Priesthood”.

“When we recognise the reality of the Priesthood we would wish to give all of ourselves, all of our lives in return and know this would never be enough,” Bishop Davies said in a homily in the College Chapel during a Mass on the Solemnity of the Ascension.

Pope Benedict XVI, he said, had noted that priestly celibacy was a “great sign of faith” when lived out with integrity even though it was a “scandal” to the agnostic world.

But it was incorrect to view priestly celibacy as an arbitrary imposition of ecclesiastical law arising from historical conditions, the Bishop said.

He explained that it had been codified into law by Church councils of the earliest centuries because it was recognised as an apostolic tradition and upheld in our own age by such popes as Blessed John XXIII, Paul VI, Blessed John Paul II and Benedict XVI. “This is, I believe, because the witness of the celibate Priesthood is not something less needed today but is more needed than ever before,” he said.

Bishop Davies was in Oscott to preach a weekend of recollection.

Source: Shrewsbury Diocese