Today I noticed this tweet from Church Militant:
The fact is while the motives for those pushing this might not be all that pure I find this issue interesting because unlike Gay Marriage or communion for the divorced this isn’t an issue that involves making mortal sin licit.
Many people forget that the imposition of celibacy on the priesthood was itself a reform to stop inherited parishes being passed down to sons as a family business rather than being about the worship of God, so if this reform was rolled back while it would be a big change from what we’re used to it would not be an assault on the doctrine of the church.
But there is a difference between this change being “licit” and it being wise. Let me give you a few reasons why this would be a rather foolish idea.
- Time: If there is one thing that you will notice about your parish priest is that his time is at a premium. Between masses, hospital and nursing home visits, and various duties attending parishioners in need, a priest is very busy particularly give these duties are a 24/7 situation. Add to that the administrative duties and you leave very little time to take care of a wife and family.
- Cost: Right now the cost of medical care for retired priests is a significant expense. Consider what costs you would be adding to the church in general and to parishes in particular if you added the cost of insuring a priest, his wife and children.
- Housing: Once you are housing a priest his wife and his family you suddenly need bigger accommodations. While this might not be a disaster when you have a rectory that has a single priest when it was built to house several, if you have a parish with multiple priests suddenly housing one or more families becomes a real problem.
- Scandal: What do you think will be the situation when a priest and his wife quarrel? Or a priest and his son? What happens when a priest’s son or daughter gets in trouble or if you run into a situation where a wife wants to leave? All of these things not only consume time to try to repair but have the potential for scandal within the church.
- Jealousy: Anyone who has been in a parish for any amount of years will notice that there are a group of women who tend to pursue priests some more subtle than others. What do you think will happen when it is suddenly licit for a priest to get married? The pursuit of eligible priests in a parish will be a lot more brazen with results that will generate a lot of difficultly in for a man trying to fulfill his pastoral duties. And can you picture the type of trouble a woman whose advances are rejected by a priest can cause? Does the church really need that?
And of course none of this will solve the problem of predatory priests when you consider that four out of five cases involve homosexual behavior, in fact you might end up with the horrible situation where a priest uses a wife as a “beard” to cover such behavior. And these are just the problems that I’ve come up with today.
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It’s not that big of a jump, as the camel’s nose has been in the tent for a long time. There are Eastern Rite Catholic Priests and Deacons who are married, as well as previously ordained Protestants who became Catholic. (ex: https://catholiccourier.com/articles/family-man-eyes-historic-ordination/). In this case, I would look at the existing practices in those unusual cases for how clerical marriage is practiced.
I wanted to address the reasons you mentioned.
Time: This applies to men in many sorts of careers, not just the priesthood. Because families take a lot of time, it does not mean priests should be prohibited from getting married. The apostle Peter managed to be married, and still do his duties. If St. Peter can do it, so can Father Bill in Buffalo, NY.
Cost and Housing: Yeah, wouldn’t it be terrible if devout Catholic men had a bunch of Catholic children? We would have to feed and care for all these little Catholic kids! That is way to much trouble for the Church to deal with! Good grief. Priests and the Church can figure out how to take care of their kids just like people have been doing since we lived in caves and wigwams in the woods. Having children is a good thing, not a bad one. God ordered people to have children, and you are acting like this is a terrible thing: “God blessed them and said to them, “Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky and over every living creature that moves on the ground.”
Scandal: Yeah, forbidding men from marrying sure has been effective in preventing scandal in the Church. Umm about that. No, the Catholic church has lots of sexual scandal. Homosexual, child raping scandal. The Catholic priesthood is filled with a vastly disproportionate amount of homosexuals, about 25% perhaps; how is this working out for the church?
https://bayourenaissanceman.blogspot.com/2019/01/the-cardinal-is-partly-right.html
(The author of the blog is a former Catholic priest who left the priesthood over how they handled the abuse scandals. He is now married.)
Some of these homosexual priests molest young men. The homosexual child rapist is practically a trope in the Catholic church at this point. One of the primary benefits of allowing priests to marry is that you can get a large influx of heterosexual men to dilute and drive out the massive homosexual influence that is perverting the church and preying on young men.
The Bible advises people to marry to channel their sexual passions in a good way, rather than an evil one: “But since there is so much immorality, each man should have his own wife, and each woman her own husband. The husband should fulfill his marital duty to his wife, and likewise the wife to her husband.” The Church has been disregarding this sensible advice for about a thousand years! Massive sexual frustration can boil up into sin in many people. Few people have a calling for singleness. There are not nearly enough people with this calling to fill the need for priests.
Jealousy: Once again, like the time thing, this applies to men in every sort life situation with a high visibility! Should doctors be banned from marrying, because women may get jealous of their attention?
Allowing Priests to marry does in fact help several problems:
1) less miserable, sexually frustrated priests. The Bible gives us advice about combating sexual sin; get married and enjoy sex the way God wants us to!
2) more heterosexual influence in the church; could it be that there are negative effects to having one quarter of priests be gay? Yes, that is in fact possible!
3) more Catholic priests; some men are turned off by the ban on marriage
4) less sexual hypocrisy; in the third world many Priests keep concubines.
I certainly don’t think allowing priests to marry would be a cure-all, but boy, what the church is doing now sure isn’t working!
These are the exact same things I think about when anyone mentions that letting priests marry would completely solve the priest shortage problem. One of the other things that you missed was the pay – a priest barely makes enough to scrape by as a single person – now with that meager salary he’s expected to support a household? Now multiply that by how many kids he would have – which would probably be A LOT because of Catholic teaching . . . but maybe not because there would probably not be enough time for even making kids due to #1.
Another aspect is that everyone, even priests are human, and as such, would fall to all human failings – imagine the scandal of a divorced priest, a priest who cheats (again with your point #1 he may NOT have time to – but his wife will certainly have enough time to!), a priest who cheats and violates all Catholic teachings and gets remarried without an annulment (or even if the marriage is annulled, it would be suspect since people would think he got one easier than others because he “knows the right people”), a priest who has premarital sex or just sleeps around without getting married at all, etc. I’m not saying laypeople don’t do the same on a regular basis, but right, wrong, or indifferent, some are held to higher standards than others.
1. Its a short terms solution. If you look at even conservatives denominations like Missouri Synod Lutherans they are struggling with vocations too. There are larger cultural issues here.
2. People almost always forget Eastern Catholic Church has been making Married Priest work for 2000 years to stay nothing of Orthodox Churches.
You can say this bad idea frankly we are already doing it it just not in large numbers.