Priestly celibacy can be unbearable without friends, Pope Francis told an international symposium on the priesthood Thursday.
Francis stressed the value of priestly celibacy, "a gift that the Latin Church preserves," but which must be rooted in healthy relationships." He said "without friends and without prayer celibacy may become an intolerable burden and a counter-testimony to the very beauty of the priesthood".
The pope was addressing the International Theological Symposium on the Priesthood.
The Holy Father addressed his remarks not only to those priests "who, by their life and witness, showed me from my earliest years what it means to reflect the face of the Good Shepherd," but also "to those brother priests" that he has had to accompany "because they had lost the flame of their first love," priests whose "ministry had become barren, repetitive, and meaningless," Vatican News reported.
In a time of "epochal change," he said, priests must learn to respond to the challenge not by retreating into the past, seeking "a sort of protection from risks"; nor by an "exaggerated optimism" that ignores the difficulties of change." Instead, he said, "I prefer the response born of a trusting acceptance of reality, anchored in the wise and living Tradition of the Church, which enables us to 'put out into the deep' without fear." All vocations, including the vocation to the priesthood, require trusting discernment to determine where God is leading us, the Pope said. Faced with the many questions and temptations of our age, Pope Francis said he wanted to focus on what is "decisive" for the life of a priest today, "the attitudes that sustain us as priests." He focused on "four pillars of our priestly life," which he described as "four forms of closeness": closeness to God, to the bishop, to fellow priests, and to the People of God.
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