One man's long and lonely crusade against Vatican opposition to married priests

RITE AND REASON: ONE NIGHT in 1952, a German boy of
19, in the throes of a youthful romance, became overwhelmed with the
certainty that God wanted him as a priest. 

In the following days he felt
he could not pray “Thy will be done” if he refused the call.

And
yet during those same days he found himself weeping uncontrollably,
“shadowed with darkness because, for the sake of the priestly vocation, I
had to accept the renunciation of marriage”.

Heinz-Jurgen Vogels
stayed with his vocation all the way to ordination, for the call had
taken place “with such inner force that it carried me over the threshold
of priesthood, yet only to drop me burnt out immediately after that.”

The
couple of years that followed Vogels’s 1959 ordination were years of
unrelieved depression, inability to function in his priesthood, leading
him eventually to the brink of suicide.

“Only years later was I
able to recognise that my subconscious, at the ordination, had
concluded: ‘Now, finally, the door to marriages has closed; now there is
no longer any rescue for my desire to have feelings for the other half
of humankind, which is, however, part of my nature.’”

The crisis
came in his little Cologne room overlooking the Rhine: “The abandonment
in the colourless grey room was felt so greatly that I stopped again and
again at the washstand, and took the razor blade to cut open the
arteries in my wrist. Only with extreme effort could I return it to the
glass plate. The window, the Rhine, the rail tracks, everything
attracted me almost irresistibly.”

Vogels was sent to a rest home
for a while and then resumed duty, living with an understanding old
parish priest in a village in the Eifel mountains.

“It was a time
of long conversations in the evenings, seated in comfortable armchairs.
Yet it should take another five years before the fog was dispelled.”

It
happened after a pilgrimage to Kevelaer: “It may sound strange that
during my prayer I found rising in my soul the dear wish: ‘Oh would I be
allowed to use sexuality!’”

And then came the revelation in a
verse from St Paul’s first epistle to the Corinthians: “Have we perhaps
not the right to take a wife along with us, like the other apostles . .
?” (1 Cor 9:5) – the word “mulier” being open to interpretation as
“wife” as well as “woman”.

That linked up with the sudden
realisation that there were already married priests in the Catholic
Church – all the Eastern Catholic churches in union with Rome had their
married priests, and even here in the West, Protestant pastors could
become Catholic priests and then live openly with their wives and
families.

The rest of Vogels’s life has been a one-man crusade to
convince the authorities in Rome to abolish compulsory celibacy.

This
story is told in his extraordinary book,
Alone Against the Vatican , now available in English.

Unfortunately the publishers have chosen a less striking title,
Catholics and their Right to Married Priests , with the subtitle,
Struggles with the Vatican . 

It’s readily available in paperback from Amazon and is also on Kindle eBooks.

Those
struggles make for a fascinating story. 

The first declaration of his
views in a sermon led to such a rumpus that he was diagnosed with
“endogenous mania”, church authorities holding that anyone with such
views had to be round the bend. 

But Vogels stayed sane, dangerously so,
grew as a theologian and disputant and gradually his crusade developed.

Inevitably
came marriage to Renata, plus a challenge to Vatican authorities to
declare his marriage invalid, which they declined to do.

All these
years later, Vogels is still fighting his case, alone against the
Vatican. 

The kernel of his argument is that the gift of priesthood and
the gift of celibacy are separate, and only rarely are bestowed on one
person.

Hence the horrors that we see around us here in Ireland,
when attempts at staying celibate fail. Vogels even has the support of
Vatican II, which declared that celibacy “is not required by the very
nature of priesthood”.

This fascinating book is just Vogels’s
latest salvo. 

But what comes out most clearly is the steadfastness,
devotion, support, indeed heroism, of Renata. 

She, indeed, is the best
of all arguments for what a helpmate could be for a priest.

---

David Rice directs the Killaloe Hedge-School of Writing, (www. killaloe.ie/khs). His books include the best-selling
Shattered Vows

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