Vatican City, Oct 9, 2019 / 07:40 am
A contributor to the working document for the Vatican's Synod of Bishops on the Amazon region made his case Wednesday for the priestly ordination of married men in the region.
"I'm saying this with great sincerity - there is no other option," Bishop Erwin Kräutler, the retired head of the Xingu prelature in Amazonian Brazil, said at a Vatican press briefing Oct. 9.
"The indigenous people do not understand celibacy," Kräutler added. "For them, at least those I have met... they can not understand this thing that a man is not married, that he does not have a woman taking care of the house, of the home."
The bishop added that he was often the object of suspicion or pity when he explained to indigenous communities that he did not have a wife, and he joked that he sometimes found it easier to say that his wife was "far away from here."