By Cindy Wooden
Catholic News Service

VATICAN CITY (CNS) -- Cardinal George Pell of Sydney, Australia, said it would be a mistake for the Latin-rite Catholic Church to relax "the ancient tradition and life-giving discipline of mandatory celibacy" for its priests.

The cardinal addressed the Synod of Bishops on the Eucharist Oct. 12, just before leaving the session to witness Pope Benedict XVI bless the cornerstone for Sydney's new Redemptoris Mater seminary, inspired by the lay-led Neocatechumenal Way.

Portions of Cardinal Pell's remarks were released by the Vatican. At a press conference the following day, a Ukrainian bishop told of some practical problems with a married priesthood.

Cardinal Pell said the Second Vatican Council "brought great blessings and substantial gains" to the church, especially in its missionary activity and in the birth of new lay movements.

But, he said, the council "was also followed by confusion, some decline, especially in the West, and pockets of collapse."

In Australia and New Zealand, he said, the confusion has resulted in a serious lack of priests and in misunderstandings about the Eucharist and priesthood as the number of prayer services led by lay people increases.

"Communion services or liturgies of the word should not be substituted for Mass when priests are available," he said. "Such unnecessary substitutions are often not motivated by a hunger for the bread of life, but by ignorance and confusion, or even by hostility to the ministerial priesthood and the sacraments."

He asked synod members to consider "to what extent are regular celebrations of Communion services, Sunday after Sunday, a genuine development or a distortion, a 'Protestantization,' which risks confusing even regular churchgoers."

The cardinal said ordaining married men would not be an appropriate solution to the priest shortage.

"To loosen this tradition now would be a serious error, which would provoke confusion in the mission areas and would not strengthen spiritual vitality in the First World," he said.

Ordaining married men would be "a departure from the practice of the Lord himself, bring significant practical disadvantages to the work of the church" -- for example, added financial responsibilities -- "and weaken the sign value of the priesthood," he said.

Relaxing the Latin-rite discipline also would weaken "the witness to loving sacrifice and to the reality of the 'last things' and the rewards of heaven," Cardinal Pell told the synod.

Addressing a Vatican press conference Oct. 13, retired Ukrainian Bishop Sofron Mudry of Ivano-Frankovsk said that although married priests "kept the church alive" during 45 years of communist persecution in Ukraine, his church has found "endless" practical problems with supporting married priests and their families.

The bishop said more than half of the 400 priests in his diocese are married, but ordinations of married men have been put on hold for the time being.

Most of the faithful are poor and cannot give enough to support a priest and his family, the bishop said, and the church still has not recovered many of the priests' houses confiscated by the communist government beginning in the mid-1940s.

Copyright (c) 2005 Catholic News Service/U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops