Madam, - A report in your edition of March 23rd says 63 per cent of priests want an end to the vow of celibacy. One in five are said to believe the Pope would never change the rules but that a future Pope might.
We should be careful what we wish for. The removal of the rule on celibacy would bring large numbers of men into the priesthood and a clerical culture, happily on the way out, would get a shot in the arm. Such a scenario would virtually kill off any real and substantial lay involvement in the Irish church.
Married priests - or even women priests - are the wrong solution to the real problem: namely, that the Irish church has for too long been a "drive-through" church dispensing its goods once a week to a congregation used to "getting" Mass rather than celebrating it.
In fact, Irish Catholics don't seem to know any other way of coming together in a religious context without Mass. There's no Sunday school, or Church forums a for discussions and debates, yet we wonder why young people, who have so many questions and are searching for meaning, walk away disillusioned by our one-dimensional practice.
The fall in vocations has opened up great opportunities for the Irish church to become a vital community of believers. What we need is for the thousands of people who have been trained in theology and philosophy, who have studied catechetics and religious education, to be encouraged and energised by the church leadership to get involved with people and parishes in imaginative ways.
When the local community takes ownership of its faith and takes responsibility for it, vocations will come from that community. That won't happen overnight and by the time it does, the thinking on celibacy may well have shifted in Vatican circles.
For now, in our lifetime, married priests may well be an Irish solution to an Irish problem. And we've had enough of those, haven't we? - Yours, etc,
GARRY O'SULLIVAN, Editor, The Irish Catholic, Bluebell, Dublin 12.