By Susan Brinkmann, OCDS
Staff Journalist
A new law under consideration in the UK could put the Church at risk for refusing to accept women, homosexuals and transsexuals as candidates for the priesthood.
According to the Catholic News Service (CNS), Catholics bishops of England and Wales say the Equality Bill, which is scheduled for debate in the House of Lords tomorrow, defines priests as employees rather than officeholders. Under the bill’s definitions, a priest would be immune from prosecution only if he spends the majority of his time in worship or explaining doctrine.
Otherwise, the bill would make it “unlawful to require a Catholic priest to be male, unmarried or not in a civil partnership, etc., since no priest would be able to demonstrate that their time was wholly or mainly spent either leading liturgy or promoting and explaining doctrine.”
According to a briefing by the Bishops Conference of England and Wales, “The bill fails to reflect the time priests spend in pastoral work, private prayer and study, administration, building maintenance, etc. This contentious definition was drafted without consultation and has been maintained by the government despite the concerns of the bishops’ conference and representations made by most religious bodies in the U.K.”
The bishops asked Catholic Lords to either strike out the contentious definition or widen it to protect priests and lay employees “whose credibility … would be fatally compromised if their personal lives were openly at variance with the Church’s teaching.”
In a Dec. 8 phone interview with CNS, Richard Kornicki, the bishops’ parliamentary coordinator, said the bishops believe it is not possible to meet the criteria of the government definition of a priest.
According to legal advice received by the bishops, he said, this could lead to legal actions for sex discrimination if the church rejected women, married men, gays in civil partnerships or transsexuals who asked to join the priesthood.
“The government is saying that the church cannot maintain its own beliefs in respect of its own priests,” he said.
Neil Addison, a Catholic lawyer who heads the Thomas More Legal Centre, which specializes in religious discrimination law, said that under the new law, the Church could not only be sued but bishops could face imprisonment and unlimited fines as well as the seizing of church assets.
Addison said the bill would have the effect of making it impossible for the bishops to discipline clergy who wanted to live “alternative lifestyles.”
Addison claims the government is deliberately seeking a clash with the Church and was falsely claiming that European directives required British law to be changed. “The supporters of this Bill don’t understand why the churches don’t have women priests and gay clergy and they want them to have them,” he said.
“The supporters of this Bill are very ideological. They want transsexuals to sue to remain priests; they would love that situation.”
The promoter of the bill, Equality Minister Harriet Harman, is referred to as a committed “left-wing social engineering activist” who wields considerable political power in the UK.
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