Catholic Church

The Catholic Church is open to reviewing its thousand-year-old practice of celibacy, Pope Francis has suggested.

He said the ban was only ‘temporary’ and there was also ‘no contradiction’ for a priest to marry.

Celibacy was made a requirement by the Catholic Church in the 11th-century for financial reasons, as clergy without children were more likely to leave their wealth to the church.

With Pope Benedict dead, the gloves are off

In the early hours of January 2, the fully robed body of Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI was transferred from the little monastery in the Vatican where he had died on the last day of 2022 to St Peter’s Basilica. There is a photograph of his remains being lifted into a vehicle. It’s shocking, but not because it shows a dead ex-pope. It’s true that today’s megapixel cameras conveyed the waxwork sheen of the corpse in unnerving detail, but that was more obvious when Benedict was lying in St Peter’s (and, anyway, we British are squeamish because we don’t open the casket for mourners).

When Pope Benedict XVI died on December 31 at the age of 95, it turns out that he had a completed book ready for publication upon his death. Written in Italian, that book, Che cos’è il Cristianesimo: Quasi un testamento spirituale (What Is Christianity: Almost a Spiritual Testament), is full of explosive revelations and trenchant criticism of his woke successor, Pope Francis. Could Pope Benedict begin a counter-revolution within the Roman Catholic Church from the grave? Stranger things have happened, although it would take any one of us a good while to think of one.

New book by the late pontiff makes extraordinary claims about the Catholic Church under his progressive successor

Gay “clubs” operate openly in Catholic seminaries, the institutions that prepare men for the priesthood, the late Pope Benedict XVI has claimed in a posthumously published book scathing of Pope Francis’s progressive agenda.

In a blistering attack on the state of the Catholic Church under his successor’s papacy, Benedict, who died on Dec 31 at the age of 95, said that the vocational training of the next generation of priests is on the verge of “collapse”.

He claimed that some bishops allow trainee priests to watch pornographic films as an outlet for their sexual urges.

Pope Benedict XVI warned in a 2006 book that “Western self-hatred” had become “pathological”, and that the decline of marriage, the family, and depopulation could be the death knell for European identity.

Former Pope Benedict XVI has died, aged 95, almost a decade after he stood down because of ailing health.

He led the Catholic Church for fewer than eight years until, in 2013, he became the first Pope to resign since Gregory XII in 1415.

Benedict spent his final years at the Mater Ecclesiae monastery within the walls of the Vatican where he passed away at 09:34 (08:34 GMT) on Saturday.

His successor Pope Francis will lead the funeral on 5 January.

Priests like Fr. Backhaus are no longer rare exceptions in the Church.

Just when you thought things couldn’t get any worse in the Catholic Church, Father Hermann Backhaus, a priest of the Diocese of Münster, Germany, proves you wrong. In a recent interview, Backhaus said that consuming pornography “can have a relieving effect” on celibate clergy.