My father is a Catholic priest. When he was made a priest, a few years after he gave up being an Anglican clergyman, it felt to the rest of his family like a resumption of business as usual. Rather symbolically, the house we moved to on his becoming a priest had been the vicarage of the local Anglican church.
My father was ordained as a Catholic priest in 1995, thanks to a window opened by John Paul II for married Anglican clergy to become priests. I don’t think he ever found a wife and children an encumbrance; nor did any of the people in his parish, or his celibate colleagues. Quite the contrary.
So the great ding-dong over clerical celibacy is hard to understand. Far from being the pizza-eating, football-watching buddies portrayed in The Two Popes, Pope Francis and Pope Emeritus Benedict are being sucked into a head-to-head struggle over Francis’s reforming agenda. The row is worthier of Jude Law and John Malkovich as the Young Pope and the New Pope in Paolo Sorrentino’s eponymous series of Vatican intrigue.
Esta historia es de la edición March 2020 de The Oldie Magazine.
Comience su prueba gratuita de Magzter GOLD de 7 días para acceder a miles de historias premium seleccionadas y a más de 8500 revistas y periódicos.
Ya eres suscriptor ? Conectar
Esta historia es de la edición March 2020 de The Oldie Magazine.
Comience su prueba gratuita de Magzter GOLD de 7 días para acceder a miles de historias premium seleccionadas y a más de 8500 revistas y periódicos.
Ya eres suscriptor? Conectar
Travel: Retreat From The World
For his new book, Nat Segnit visited Britain’s quietest monasteries and islands to talk to monks, hermits and recluses
What is... a nail house?
Don’t confuse a nail house with a nail parlour. A nail house is an old house that survives as new building development goes on all around it.
Kent's stairway to heaven
Walter Barton May’s Hadlow Castle is the ultimate Gothic folly
Pursuits
Pursuits
The book that changed the world
On Marcel Proust’s 150th anniversary, A N Wilson praises his masterpiece, an exquisite comedy with no parallel
RIP the playboys of the western world
Charlie Methven mourns his dashing former father-in-law, Luis ‘the Bounder’ Basualdo, last of a dying breed
Arts
Arts
My film family's greatest hits
Downton Abbey producer Gareth Neame follows in the footsteps of his father, grandfather and great-grandmother, a silent-movie star
Books
Books
A lifetime of pin-ups
Barry Humphries still has nightmares about going on stage. He’s always admired the stars who kept battling on