By 
A Catholic bishop in Belgium wrote an 11-page pastoral letter that included a plan to ordain married men into the priesthood by 2028, even though such actions would violate the Code of Canon Law.
Bishop Johan Bonny, head of the Diocese of Antwerp since 2009, noted that the topic of ordaining married men was discussed in the Vatican’s Synod on Synodality (2023-2024). Although the topic was openly discussed, neither the late Pope Francis nor the authors of the final document authorized the ordination of married men or recommended any future changes to canon law to authorize it.
Despite this, Bonny wrote in the pastoral letter that in every synodal discussion “the question arises of ordaining married men … for the priesthood.” He claimed “the consensus on this question is almost total … especially among the most faithful and devout” and “has existed for many years.”
“The question is no longer whether the Church can ordain married men as priests but when it will do so, and who will do it,” the bishop said. “Any delay comes across as an excuse.”
Contrary to the asserted consensus, Canon 1042 prohibits the ordination of married men in the Latin rite under most normal circumstances. It states clearly that the only holy orders “a man who has a wife” is eligible for is the permanent diaconate — not the priesthood. A married man can enter the permanent diaconate with the consent of his wife if he is at least 35 years old, but a permanent deacon who is a widower cannot remarry.
The rule is not completely universal in the Catholic Church. The Code of Canons of the Eastern Churches permits the ordination of married men in Eastern-rite Catholic Churches, which have long practiced it.
There are also limited exceptions in the Latin rite. A married Anglican priest who converts to Catholicism is allowed to be ordained as a Catholic priest and remain married. The Church makes some limited exceptions for other Protestant ministers who are married and also wish to convert to Catholicism and be ordained into the priesthood.
However, apart from rare exceptions, married men are not permitted to be ordained into the priesthood in the Latin rite.
Bonny does not address the relevant canons in his letter. He also did not cite any approval from the Vatican or reveal any insight about a potential change in canon law.
The bishop did not state that he will first seek approval before the ordinations, but he did say he would ensure “the necessary communication and arrangements” with the Vatican and Belgian Bishops’ Conference, “as we can learn from each other’s experiences and insights.”
“I will make every effort to ordain married men as priests for our diocese by 2028,” he said. “I will approach them personally and ensure that by then they have the necessary theological training and pastoral experience, comparable to that of other priest candidates. This preparation will be transparent but discreet, away from the media spotlight.”
“For many a bishop, the ordination of married men has become a matter of conscience,” he wrote. “At that level, too, transparency, accountability, and evaluation are important for the credibility of the Church.”
Bonny makes several cases for why he intends to ordain married men, such as the “historical shortage of local priests in many dioceses.” He said many foreign-born priests fill the gap now, but “it would not be fair to place the burden of our shortages on their shoulders.”
He noted that the Church in Belgium already works “with a number of married Catholic priests,” citing the Eastern-rite Catholic priests and converts who fell under the limited exceptions.
Bonny also said “there is a cluster of experiences related to the psychosocial health of priests and the transparency of their lifestyle.” He said “the issue of sexual abuse continues to weigh heavily” and “clerical subcultures and lifestyles have had their day.”
“The fact that almost no domestic candidates are coming forward for ordination seems to me undoubtedly related to the absence of synodal discernment in classical vocation ministry,” the bishop continued. “When I visit parishes or pastoral unities, I regularly meet people whom the community would consider to be a good priest. Just as I myself know several co-workers who would be well suited as candidates for ordination.”
Tom Nash, a staff apologist for Catholic Answers, told EWTN News that he hopes Bonny “is docile to the Holy Father, Pope Leo XIV.”
“It is the pope alone, the successor of St. Peter, who has God-given primacy in definitively teaching on faith and morals, and also the divinely given primacy of authority in binding and loosing on matters of discipline, and thus one must be very wary of going forward in a manner that would gravely violate that divinely ordained papal primacy of governance,” he said.
Nash explained that married men can be validly ordained to the priesthood, as one can see in the Eastern rite and the rare exceptions in the Latin rite. However, without approval from the pope and a change to canon law, such ordinations would be “illicit” under the circumstances discussed by the bishop in the pastoral letter.
If Bonny ordained married men to the priesthood, Nash said the situation would be similar to the Society of St. Pius X, which illicitly consecrated bishops in 1988 and are threatening to do so again. Such consecrations, he explained, were “valid but illicit.”
A priest who is ordained validly but illicitly would be a real priest and could validly celebrate Mass, according to Nash. However, such celebrations would be illicit, and in defiance of the Holy See, and sinful, he said. Other priestly faculties, however, may not be valid, he said.
“Just because such ordained priests could validly but illicitly celebrate Mass, they would need delegated priestly faculties from the pope to validly absolve sins in the confessional and also to receive the consent of the parties during the Church’s marriage rite, lest they marry each other invalidly,” Nash said.
“It’ll be interesting to see how this matter develops in the coming two years, and I pray that Bishop Bonny is docile to the Holy Father,” he added.
David Long, director of the Institute for Policy Research and Catholic Studies at The Catholic University of America and a canonist, told EWTN News that the question of ordaining married men “does not lie within the authority of a diocesan bishop acting on his own.”
“Any current change in practice in a Latin diocese would require action by the Holy See and could not be accomplished by a unilateral decision by a diocesan bishop, no matter how pastorally urgent the circumstances may be,” he said.
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Gee, I wonder why the Church in Belgium is on life support.
Belgium deserves much better. We all do.
Spiritually weak Bishop’s pushing for married men as priests and spiritually weak Cardinals pushing for women to be priests. What’s next…how about a woman Pope? Sounds like the path of the Anglican church?
This is another pathetic and spiritually weak priest. The sooner all these priests that came out of the 1960’s and 1970’s go to meet their Maker the better off the Catholic Church will be.
Wonder if he will be excommunicated.
Of course not, only those clergy that want to practice the faith as it has always been believed and practiced get excommunicated.⁶
This bishop has been spending too much of his time in front of Pachamama.
Mrs. Hess, he’s already outside communion by virtue of his rejection of the infallible teaching that holy orders is reserved for men. This article strangely(?) fails to mention the very same bishop openly promotes the ordination of women in his same statement on ordaining married men. Of course one shows he does not have the faith, for to reject a part is to reject the whole, pace Thomas Aquinas. Yet the world won’t be telling us this, nor that so many cardinals have entertained this heresy in the public square. Of course there’s absolutely nothing wrong per se with ordaining married men—it’s simply the whim(?) of a couple men in Rome, namely the Pope and those whose task it is to bring forward such proposals to the Pope so that the Pope knows it’s being requested. We have had celebratory articles on this website for married priests such as the recent former Army chaplain ordained for Wheeling Charleston, WV. There’s not a doctrinal obstacle. And there truly is a shortage. As the heretical bishop states: the Church is relying heavily on foreign priests to fulfill pastoral duties all the while closing down parishes or merging them and even selling property. There is a major vocations crises and it’s hard to reject the bishop’s proposal if we are to remain sane. No, I don’t think his is the only option. But his proposal to ordain married men is certainly a coherent one that violates a law that doesn’t need to be in place for our salvation. I won’t hold me breath for any pastors to warn their flock to avoid traveling to Belgium due to the potential schism while we continue to endure constant rebukes of the SSPX as though they’re worse than the Antichrist.
I guess he could find room at the SSPX.
🙂
One wonders if Pope Leo is alert enough to know that this is being talked about by this rogue Bishop, who evidently thinks that HE is the Pope! If Leo is awake he needs to do something about this Bishop NOW, before he starts ordaining married men willy-nilly. Immediate demotion sounds like an idea to me. I see NO demand for a married clergy in my middle of the road parish. Nor any demand for ordained women. People who want to press for popular secular positions to be adopted by the Catholic church would have better luck taking themselves to join any of the liberal, loosely run “do your own thing” protestant sects which abound in every store front.
Nash hopes that this Bishop is “docile” to the Pope??? Obedient is the word I believe he should have been looking for. There is a difference. This is not a duel of equals, because a Bishop is not the Pope. Pope Leo should stop this guy NOW before his ego runs away with him and he actually performs this immense act of folly.
He should either resign or the Pope should remove him, given that he admitted being an apostate.
The Church receives the number of vocations it deserves. A “shortage” is impossible, unfortunately a difficult concept for atheistic Catholics to understand.
If the SSPX is punished for ordaining priests outside of Vatican approval, then this man too should be accused and punished by the Vatican for flat-out schism. Unless the current regime wants to be accused of hypocrisy, namely that only leftists can ordain (CCP, this Bishop).
Women cannot be ordained to the Priesthood, but theologically speaking, ordaining a married man is not impossible. I think this Bishop is trying to trigger serious discussion in the Vatican. There are married former Anglican Priests who converted. I don’t think that this Bishop wants to abolish the celibacy tradition, but perhaps allow Bishops to ordain married Deacons on a case by case basis. It might not be such a big deal to ordain a few married permanent Deacons.
That’s correct , the Eastern Rite has married clergy. But this isn’t the way to start a conversation.
Leave it to a liberal to characterize indulgent defiant arrogance of social engineering as “serious discussion.”
I am not a liberal. I am a classic conservative, not right wing.
William: The fact that you believe there even is such a thing as a “right wing” speaks to your level of willful acceptance of indoctrination. I don’t believe you’re mean-spirited, rather you are neglectful of the implications of original sin in the public square.
There is no such thing as a political spectrum. The fiction of a right wing has been a creation of all ideologues who are essentially the same, and who have a psychological need to project vices, real and fictional, among those who oppose them and who they reduce to caricatures.
Were you to ever discover what you seem to have resisted, you would find why authentic conservativism is synonymous with Christianity as both are a rejection of all man-made ideology because all ideology is rooted in vanity and disobedience to God.
Belief systems, even while professing religion, follows less from what we think we believe about God than what we decide to believe about the nature of evil. We respond to God when we respond to truth, whether it’s with self-awareness or not. Authentic faith enables us to deal with evil, but human ideologies do not. If evil is viewed as always personal, as conservatives and Christians do, then the human condition is understood as permanently imperfectible, and we can only hope to inspire individual reform. If we decide to believe evil is determined by the tides of history and are products of cultural artifacts, an attitude often made to escape having to confront personal reform, we are then inclined to side with the principalities of elites whose vanity prefers to view evil as a problem of social engineering, a management problem, which they promise to eliminate once they are allowed to impose their self-anointed vision on the rest of humanity. Thus, we end up with endless crimes against humanity.
The Judeo-Christian tradition and honest inspired philosophical thought, throughout history, have viewed human rights, personal virtues, and moral obligations as innate, divinely endowed to the human condition, rather than political or culturally idiosyncratic political inventions. Natural endowed principles of how we ought to order our lives together are true, not because of popular acceptance, favor by intellectual elites, or enshrinement in statutory law, but are true because they are inherent to the nature of being a decent human being. Only decent individuals acting virtuously can affect honor and justice, which is what authentic conservatives and authentic Christians have always contended. Self-identified leftists, yes, the fantasy “political spectrum” can be and is single wing, contend that they can outperform God and lead us to utopia.
I’ve become convinced that the difference between people like William and MorganD and those more grounded is that he believes language defines reality and that it is infinitely malleable in that service and it can be wielded with abandon to impose their vision-especially if the strategic objective is the arousal of emotion.
The rest of us believe words are mere representations of reality, often woefully inadequate in apprehending it and that words must be used with as much care and precision as is humanly possible to remain factual, because emotion is a wildfire in waiting.
I agree with your conclusions, but confused thought is not necessarily mean-spirited. Their passion is evidence of caring. As a former leftist atheist semi-hippie in my long past youth, I can recognize how difficult it can be to see the loopholes of anything presented as social reform and progress.
I tried to give a more lengthy perspective above.
TPR: Brilliantly said!!!!!Thanks.
” I think this Bishop is trying to trigger serious discussion in the Vatican.”
He is a revolutionary, and revolutionaries attempt to trigger chaos.
Bonny has been raising Cain for how long? Seems he is not in disfavor. Actions speek louder than words. So he retains his office but Vigano, Strickland, Fernández-Torres, et al., remain in the dog house.
You can’t make it up.
It is all rising to the top, as is its nature.
I hear that Pope Leo refuses to meet with Archbishop Vigano. However, Pope Leo thinks that President Trump should sit down and meet with whoever’s in charge for Iran. Isn’t that ironic? It’s eminently easier for Leo and Vigano to sit and discuss things proper to the Church but Leo refuses.
He’ll probably be politely ignored while the SSPX bishops are being excommunicated. That’s what Frannie would have done.
No problem! Just don’t say anything in Latin, and you’ll be fine. Or, just ordain a Chinese married man, or ordain both partners in a blessed “couple.” (Two priests for one!) There is only ONE form of disobedience left in the Church today: praying like everybody prayed before 1970.
The diaconate is not a stepping stone to the Presbyteral Order. The diaconate is its own separate and distinct ordained ministerial calling in the Church. We’re not “mini-priests” or “pre-priests” or “half-priests”. We are deacons. This bishop would be expected to know this and respect this..
I believe the confusion arises because many(most, all?) priests in formation are ordained as transitional deacons.
This isn’t the only subject on which Bishop Bonny is “ahead”. He is quite “progressive” on the euthanasia front as well.
Cleo, but how about his devotion to the Pachamama?
“…continence for the sake of the kingdom of heaven, the choice of virginity or celibacy for one’s whole life, has become in the experience of Christ’s disciples and followers the act of a particular response of love for the divine Spouse. Therefore it has acquired the significance of an act of nuptial love, that is, a nuptial giving of oneself for the purpose of reciprocating in a particular way the nuptial love of the Redeemer. It is a giving of oneself understood as renunciation, but made above all out of love [….]
“So continence for the sake of the kingdom of heaven (virginity, celibacy) orients the life of persons who freely choose it toward the exclusion of the common way of conjugal and family life. Nevertheless it Is not without significance for this life, for its style, its value and its evangelical authenticity. Let us not forget that the only key to understanding the sacramentality of marriage is the spousal love of Christ for the Church (cf. Eph 5:22-23)— Christ, the Son of the Virgin, who was himself a virgin, that is, a ‘eunuch for the sake of the kingdom of heaven,’ in the most perfect meaning of the term” (St. John Paul II, “Theology of the Body,” 1979-85; Pauline Books and Media, 1997).
Partial SUMMARY: If the Church wants to preserve both priestly vocations and marriage, then preserve priestly celibacy.
As a Catholic revert who was in the Orthodox Church between 1990 and 2003, I strongly endorse the ordination of married men to the priesthood. However, Bishop Bonny is going about it the wrong way. It’s not right for one Bishop to defy Church canon law. Pope Leo should allow the ordination of married men to the Latin/Western Church priesthood on the same terms as the Eastern Churches. Parish structures would need to be changed, but I think the Catholic Church needs it. But of course, I am just a laywoman in the pews — I must not demand this. (BTW, I don’t support the ordination of women to major orders, but I think the minor orders should be revived: women could *perhaps* be ordained to minor orders. As a reader for 20 years at my parish, I hope I could become an ordained lector someday.)
Soul care and body care have been important areas of concern for church leaders and their followers across the Low Countries for centuries.
Diocesan clergy, deacons, priests, brothers, and sisters from religious congregations have kept the flame of faith alive through their relentless medico-spiritual services in their own countries and across Christendom.
Times have changed and needs keep growing. Inviting spiritual and medical workforce from overseas could do wonders.
Zealous and enthusiastic African, Asian, East European, and Latin American consecrated men and women if invited could reignite in the local youth the zeal, fervor, and passion to serve the spiritual needs of the faithful.