The Bishop of the Swiss Diocese of St. Gallen, Markus Büchel, spoke out in favor of the ordination of women in the podcast “Laut + Leis” of the news portal kath.ch.
Specifically, Büchel said: “We have an emergency, an ordination emergency. And for me, an ordination emergency means we can only ordain single men because of celibacy. And we cannot ordain women or allow them to perform ordination services.” As a result, the “relationship to the sacraments” is “increasingly evaporating.”
It is important to him that “where we have the opportunity to open up paths with extraordinary commissions from the bishop, we do so,” the bishop continued.
Pope John Paul II had already definitively excluded the ordination of women in his 1994 Apostolic Letter Ordinatio sacerdotalis . At that time, he emphasized that “the Church has no authority whatsoever to ordain women to the priesthood and that all the faithful of the Church must definitively adhere to this decision.”
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