The Archbishop of Dublin, Cardinal Desmond Connell, has said celibacy in the Catholic Church does not have "an uncertain future".
At St Patrick's College Maynooth yesterday, where he ordained clerical students at the seminary to the diaconate, he said: "The faithful living of a celibate life is not a matter of submission to a law with an uncertain future.
"Apart from the fact that there is nothing uncertain about its future, as the Synod of Bishops in 1990, confirmed by the Pope's Apostolic Exhortations, makes clear, what is here at stake is something more fundamental than law," he said.
"I am referring to the word you give to Christ and His church in making the gift of yourself in a love unqualified by any reservation. This shares in the love with which the Father gave his only Son to the world: he did not withdraw the gift of his Son even when the world rejected him and put him to death.
"It shares in the love with which Christ loved the church: he gave himself for her even to the end. It is the love poured into our hearts by the Holy Spirit in the form of the gift of celibacy: it makes us such as the church desires of her priests," he said.
He added that celibacy was "not a love that the world can inspire or explain." It was a love that came from Heaven "into our hearts to enable us bear witness to the power of Christ to raise all flesh through love".
Cardinal Connell continued: "The very love that sanctifies Christian marriage is the love of the celibate heart of Christ. In reflecting this love, the celibacy of our priests is a sign to the faithful of the permanence and surpassing dignity of their own married love."
