Votes to Keep Cleric Who Has Confessed to Girlfriend
ANSA
September 5, 2007
http://www.ansa.it/site/notizie/awnplus/english/news/2007-09-05_105110487.html
(ANSA) - Padua, September 5 - A scandal-hit parish in northern Italy has voted to keep its local priest despite his love for a separated mother.
More than 200 parishioners in Monterosso near Padua said they wanted Sante Sguotti to stay on, in a ballot called by the priest himself to sound out the extent of parish support for his position.
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Only 17 villagers sided with the local bishop, Msgr. Antonio Mattiazzo, who wants Sguotti to quit.
Before the Tuesday night ballot, a parishioner whom Sguotti has accused of deliberately exposing him was ejected from the church.
Sguotti told villagers that the man, Armando Villani, was trying to discredit him because he had refused to sell him a piece of land belonging to the parish.
"But I won't go unless my flock asks me to," he said.
Meanwhile, Villani told reporters that he had in his possession the diary of another woman who knew Sguotti and which was "highly compromising" for the priest.
Sguotti triggered alarm among his superiors last month by saying he had fallen in love and implying that he was the father of his girlfriend's one-year-old child.
Since then, the priest has denied fathering the woman's son but admits to being in love in a "chaste way" with her.
He says he wants them to become officially engaged in a special ceremony this December.
"I have known Laura for more than eight years, but not in the biblical sense. I am in love with this woman and I helped her choose her child's name," the priest said recently.
He stressed that their relationship would remain chaste because he did not want to jeopardise his job.
"Canon law does not forbid a priest to fall in love or become engaged in a celibate manner. I want to remain in the Church and so I will obey the celibacy rule," Sguotti said.
He urged other priests who were in love to "come forward" and break their silence.
"I believe falling in love is a fundamental stage in life. A person can't be a good priest or nun or anything else in life unless he has experienced love at least once," he said.
CLERICAL CELIBACY DEBATE.
The case has revived the debate about clerical celibacy.
Sguotti argued in a press conference last month that the Church's celibacy requirement meant that "only the most closed and narrow-minded priests, the least humane ones, get ahead".
"The Church is losing the best part of itself," Sguotti said.
The Vatican has never shown any sign of altering its long tradition of demanding celibacy from priests, despite calls for a rethink from dissidents in the US and elsewhere.
Late last year Pope Benedict XVI rejected a request from once-married Zambian archbishop Emmanuel Milingo to accept priests with wives into the Catholic Church.
Milingo argued that the Church was in "dire straits" because of a vocation crisis and that allowing priests to marry would help resolve the shortage.
He has founded an association of like-minded clerics to promote his cause. The organisation - called Married Priests Now! - says about 150,000 Catholic priests have left the Church in order to marry.
Milingo was excommunicated last September after he presided over an unauthorised ceremony in Washington to consecrate four married priests as bishops.
The elderly churchman came close to excommunication in 2001 by defecting to a sect and marrying a Korean acupuncturist.
That time he was persuaded to return to the church and to abandon his wife by the late John Paul II.
The first pope, Saint Peter, as well as many subsequent popes, bishops, and priests during the church's first 270 years were in fact married men and often fathers.
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