Leading South African prelate deplores Olympic parody, lends support to married priesthood
August 08, 2024
In a wide-ranging address to his brother bishops, the president of the Southern African Catholic Bishops Conference deplored “the blasphemous depiction of Jesus and the disciples at the Last Supper as drag queens.”
“Drag queens are people who dress across their gender, mainly men dressing as women to entertain and to mock,” said Bishop Sithembele Sipuka of Umtata, South Africa. “More abominable is the naked man wearing only a thin string of flowers sitting on the table where Jesus would have put bread and wine, replacing what we consider holy with obscene nudity. This is a vilification of the worst kind of what we believe about the Last Supper.”
Bishop Sipuka also expressed caution about calls for the ordination of women to the diaconate, but lent his support to the ordination of married men to the priesthood.
“The question we need to ask is, at this point in the life of the Church, what material difference will the ordination of women to diaconate make?” he asked. “If women are doing practically everything that a deacon is doing (except presiding over marriages, of which there is no abundance of them) and doing baptism (of which there is not much demand), why clericalize them to do what they can do without being ordained? Why do we want to draw women into clericalism when we are having so many problems with it?”
Bishop Sipuka lent his support to a 2007 proposal by Bishop Fritz Lobiger for “teams of elders”: married men, respected in local parishes, who would be ordained to the priesthood, serve only in their local communities, and minister under the direction of a celibate priest.
“The version Bishop Lobinger proposes is uniquely local and homegrown,” said Bishop Sipuka. “It would be good to share with him as he embraces the sunset of his life that we are building on his thoughts for a possible solution to the felt pastoral need of providing variation of priesthood for a vibrant Church.”
In its coverage of Bishop Sipuka’s remarks, Vatican News, the news agency of the Vatican’s Dicastery for Communicatio, emphasized Bishop Sipuka’s remarks on the ordination of married men, but ignored his condemnation of the Olympic parody and his remarks about women’s ordination.
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