Catholic priests holding government positions
A number of Catholic priests have served in civil office. [1] The Catholic Church discourages this practice.
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A number of Catholic priests have served in civil office. [1] The Catholic Church discourages this practice.
Canon 285 of the 1983 Code of Canon Law, which governs the Latin Church, is a provision of Roman Catholic canon law that prohibits members of the Catholic clergy from doing things that are "unbecoming" or "foreign to the clerical state". In addition, it prohibits diocesan priests and bishops from serving in "public offices which entail a participation in the exercise of civil power". [2]
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The Bishop of Urgell is a ruling co-prince of Andorra; the bishop's ex officio role as a monarch has existed since 1278. The bishop additionally sends a personal representative to rule as a viceroy in their stead.
The Constitution of Bolivia prohibits clergy from serving as president. [3]
The Constitution of Costa Rica prohibits clergy from serving as president. [3]
The Constitution of El Salvador prohibits clergy from serving as president. [3]
The Constitution of Honduras prohibits clergy from serving as president. [3]
Article 130 of the Constitution of Mexico (clauses d. and e.) prohibits clergy of any religion from holding public office or directly participating in politics: [4] [5]
- Religious ministers cannot hold public offices, according to the statutory law. As citizens, religious ministers have the right to vote, but they do not have the right to be elected. Those who have ceased being church ministers with the required anticipation and by the procedures established in the law may be elected.
- Church ministers cannot join together for political purposes nor proselytize in favor of certain candidate, party or political association or against them. Neither may they oppose the laws of the Nation or its institutions, nor insult patriotic symbols in any form, in public meetings, in worship or in religious literature.
Article 121, section i of the Constitution of Myanmar prohibits a member of a religious order from serving as president. [3] [6]
The Constitution of Nicaragua prohibits clergy from serving as president. [3]
Article 235 of the Constitution of Paraguay prohibits any minister of any religion from serving as the president.
The Constitution of Venezuela prohibits clergy from serving as president. [3]
Ignaz Seipel, a priest, theologian and academic, served as the Foreign Minister of Austria from 1926 to 1929 and in 1930, and served as Chancellor of Austria from 1922 to 1924 and 1926 to 1929.
Theodor Innitzer, who would become a cardinal and Archbishop of Vienna, served as the Austrian Minister of Social Affairs from 1929 to 1930.
Three Catholic priests have been elected to the House of Commons of Canada.
Andrew Hogan was the first Catholic priest to serve as a Canadian Member of Parliament. First elected to represent the electoral district of Cape Breton—East Richmond, Nova Scotia, in the 1974 federal election, he was re-elected in 1979 but defeated in 1980. Hogan was a member of the New Democratic Party.
Robert Ogle was elected to the House of Commons in 1979 in the electoral district of Saskatoon East, Saskatchewan. Ogle was re-elected in 1980. He chose not to seek re-election in 1984 as a result of the new ban by the Holy See on clergy in public office. Like Hogan, Ogle was a member of the New Democratic Party.
Raymond Gravel was elected in a 2006 by-election in the electoral district of Repentigny, Quebec. He had received a dispensation from his diocesan bishop to enter politics. Gravel did not seek re-election in the 2008 federal election after Holy See authorities ordered him to choose between politics and the priesthood following controversy over his opposition to anti-abortion Bill C-484 and his support for the Order of Canada nomination of abortion rights activist Henry Morgentaler. Although he chose to leave politics, Gravel maintained that he remained, in accordance with Catholic doctrine, opposed to abortion. [7] Gravel was a member of the nationalist Bloc Québécois.
Daniel Herman is a laicized Roman Catholic priest who was Minister of Culture, representing the Christian Democratic Union – Czechoslovak People's Party (KDU-ČSL).
Fernando Arturo de Meriño, a priest who would later become an archbishop, served as President of the Dominican Republic from 1880 to 1882.
Barthélemy Boganda, a priest from Ubangi-Shari (today the Central African Republic), was elected to the French National Assembly in 1946, serving until 1958. He left the priesthood in 1950 and married, and from 1958 to 1959 served as the first Prime Minister of the Central African Republic.
Beda Weber was a German Benedictine priest who served as a member of the Frankfurt Parliament in 1849.
Ludwig Kaas was a priest of the Weimar Republic. In 1919 he was elected to the Weimar National Assembly and in 1920 was elected to the Reichstag, where he served until 1933.
For a brief period in 2011 during the Libyan Civil War, the Nicaraguan priest Miguel d'Escoto Brockmann served as the Libyan ambassador to the United Nations.
In the 1970s and 80s, the President of Nicaragua, Daniel Ortega, appointed three priests to his cabinet: Miguel d'Escoto Brockmann as Minister of Foreign Affairs, Fernando Cardenal as Minister of Education, and his brother, Ernesto Cardenal, as Minister of Culture.
In 2005, Fernando Lugo, the Bishop of San Pedro, requested laicization to run for office but it was denied. In 2008, he was elected President of Paraguay, in spite of Article 235 of the Constitution prohibiting any minister of any religion from serving as president. After his election he was laicized. In 2012, he was impeached for unrelated reasons.
Hugo Kołłątaj was a Polish noble and Catholic priest who in 1786 received the office of the Referendary of Lithuania. He co-authored the Constitution of May 3, 1791 and held a variety of posts before falling out of political favor in 1802 as a result of his radical views.
Stanisław Staszic was a philosopher and political activist who served in the government of Congress Poland.
Andrej Hlinka served in the Parliament of Czechoslovakia from 1920 to 1938 and was leader of the Slovak People's Party from 1913 until his death.
From 1939 to 1945, the priest Jozef Tiso was President of the First Slovak Republic, a satellite state of Nazi Germany. Following World War II, he was convicted and hanged for treason that subsumed also war crimes, and crimes against humanity.
Augustine Geve was a Catholic priest who served as a member of the National Parliament from 2001 to 2002 and was Minister of Youth, Women and Sports from 2001 to 2002. He was assassinated on 20 August 2002.
David Cairns, a laicised Catholic priest, was elected to the House of Commons of the United Kingdom between 2001 and 2011, following the House of Commons (Removal of Clergy Disqualification) Act 2001 which removed the ban on clergymen being elected as an MP. [8] Former Archbishops of Westminster Basil Hume and Cormac Murphy-O'Connor were individually offered life peerages and a seat in the House of Lords but both declined the offer. [9] [10]
Possibly the earliest known instance of a Catholic priest serving in public office in the United States was Gabriel Richard. Born in France, he founded the University of Michigan and served as a delegate from Michigan Territory from 1823 to 1825.
Two priests, Robert Drinan and Robert John Cornell, have served in the United States Congress. In 1980, when Pope John Paul II decreed that priests not serve in elected office, [11] Representative Drinan withdrew from his re-election campaign, and Cornell withdrew from his bid to re-gain the seat he had lost in the 1978 Congressional election. In 1983, the prohibition on serving in governmental office was codified as section 3 of canon 285 of the 1983 Code of Canon Law.
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Listed below are the names of the priests, and the countries they served in parentheses.
The Federal Republic of Central America, initially known as the United Provinces of Central America, was a sovereign state in Central America which existed from 1823 to 1839/1841. The Federal Republic of Central America was composed of five states: Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and Nicaragua, as well as a Federal District from 1835 to 1839. Guatemala City was the federal republic's capital city until 1834 when the seat of the federal government was relocated to San Salvador. The Federal Republic of Central America was bordered to the north by Mexico, to the south by Gran Colombia, and on its eastern coastline by the Mosquito Coast and British Honduras.
In the canon law of the Catholic Church, the loss of clerical state is the removal of a bishop, priest, or deacon from the status of being a member of the clergy.
Clerical marriage is the practice of allowing Christian clergy to marry. This practice is distinct from allowing married persons to become clergy. Clerical marriage is admitted among Protestants, including both Anglicans and Lutherans. Some Protestant clergy and their children have played an essential role in literature, philosophy, science, and education in Early Modern Europe.
Robert Frederick Drinan was a Jesuit priest, lawyer, human rights activist, and Democratic U.S. Representative from Massachusetts. Drinan left office to obey Pope John Paul II's prohibition on political activity by priests.
Ernesto Cardenal Martínez was a Nicaraguan Catholic priest, poet, and politician. He was a liberation theologian and the founder of the primitivist art community in the Solentiname Islands, where he lived for more than ten years (1965–1977). A former member of the Nicaraguan Sandinistas, he was Nicaragua's minister of culture from 1979 to 1987. He was prohibited from administering the sacraments in 1984 by Pope John Paul II, but rehabilitated by Pope Francis in 2019.
The Catholic Bishops' Conference of the Philippines (CBCP) is the permanent organizational assembly of the Catholic bishops of the Philippines exercising together certain pastoral offices for the Christian faithful of their territory through apostolic plans, programs and projects suited to the circumstances of time and place in accordance with law for the promotion of the greater good offered by the Catholic Church to all people.
Norberto Rivera Carrera is a Mexican prelate of the Catholic Church who was archbishop of Mexico City from 1995 to 2017. He was made a cardinal in 1998. He was Bishop of Tehuacán from 1985 to 1995.
Miguel d’Escoto Brockmann was an American-born Nicaraguan diplomat, politician and Catholic priest of the Maryknoll Missionary Society. As the President of the United Nations General Assembly from September 2008 to September 2009, he presided over the 63rd Session of the United Nations General Assembly. He was also nominated as Libyan Representative to the UN in March 2011. He died on 8 June 2017, having suffered a stroke several months earlier.
El Grupo de los Doce, or Group of Twelve, were a dozen members of the Nicaraguan establishment whose support for the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) against President Anastasio Somoza Debayle played a pivotal role in the acceptance of the Sandinistas by foreign and domestic opinion.
Fernando Armindo Lugo Méndez is a Paraguayan politician and laicized Catholic bishop who was President of Paraguay from 2008 to 2012. Previously, he was a Roman Catholic priest and bishop, serving as Bishop of the Diocese of San Pedro from 1994 to 2005. He was elected as president in 2008, an election that ended 61 years of rule by the Colorado Party.
Irreligion in Mexico refers to atheism, deism, religious skepticism, secularism, and secular humanism in Mexican society, which was a confessional state after independence from Imperial Spain. The first political constitution of the Mexican United States, enacted in 1824, stipulated that Roman Catholicism was the national religion in perpetuity, and prohibited any other religion. Since 1857, however, by law, Mexico has had no official religion; as such, anti-clerical laws meant to promote a secular society, contained in the 1857 Constitution of Mexico and in the 1917 Constitution of Mexico, limited the participation in civil life of Roman Catholic organizations and allowed government intervention in religious participation in politics.
John Momis is a Bougainvillean politician who served as the President of the Autonomous Region of Bougainville in Papua New Guinea between 2010 and 2020.
The Embassy of Nicaragua in Washington, D.C. is the Republic of Nicaragua's diplomatic mission to the United States. It's located at 1627 New Hampshire Avenue, Northwest, Washington, D.C., in the Dupont Circle neighborhood. The embassy also operates Consulates-General in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Houston, New Orleans, Miami, and New York City.
Fernando Cardenal Martínez was a Nicaraguan Jesuit and liberation theologian.
The Sixty-third session of the United Nations General Assembly was the session of the United Nations General Assembly that ran from 16 September 2008 to 14 September 2009.
Latin American liberation theology is a synthesis of Christian theology and Marxian socio-economic analyses, that emphasizes "social concern for the poor and political liberation for oppressed peoples". Beginning in the 1960s after the Second Vatican Council, liberation theology became the political praxis of Latin American theologians such as Gustavo Gutiérrez, Leonardo Boff, and Jesuits Juan Luis Segundo and Jon Sobrino, who popularized the phrase "preferential option for the poor". It arose principally as a moral reaction to the poverty and social injustice in the region, which Cepal deemed the most unequal in the world.
Pedro Joaquín Chamorro Barrios is a Nicaraguan journalist and politician. He began his career in journalism working at La Prensa, following the 1978 assassination of its editor, his father, Pedro Joaquín Chamorro Cardenal. Working on the side of the Contras in exile in the 1980s, he returned to the country in 1989 when his mother Violeta Barrios de Chamorro ran for president, and following her election, served as a Nicaraguan ambassador. He later became defense minister. In the 21st century, Chamorro has been a city councilor for Managua and deputy in the National Assembly, also for Managua. On 25 June 2021, he became part of a wave of arrests of opposition and civic figures in Nicaragua.
Active clergy may not hold public office, advocate partisan political views, support political candidates, or publicly oppose the laws or institutions of the state.