Well Exhorted

The Catholic Church has always had married priests, only in greatly varying numbers at different points in history. They are of course the norm in several of the Eastern Catholic Churches, although there, as in Eastern Orthodoxy, it is often the case that most or all priests are in practice the sons of priests, while most or all priests’ wives are priests’ daughters. Something comparable has existed in numerous Protestant bodies, and still does. Do we really want to end up like that? I only ask.

Unlike the absolutely impossible ordination of women (an ordination ceremony performed to the letter on a woman, even by the Pope, would never have any sacramental effect), celibacy is a pastoral question, not a doctrinal one. And for those who like their Vatican II, Presbyterorum Ordinis 16 simply does not compromise the discipline of priestly celibacy in the Latin Church, but the very reverse.

Nothing could be more appropriate theologically and pastorally in the present age than the preservation of that discipline, while those who blame it for the shortage of priests in the tiny number of countries where there is such a thing need to be asked in exactly which of the last 60 years they imagine sex to have been invented, and exactly when they expect the rest of the world to become aware of it. Never mind what use they think that marriage would be in controlling a man whose sexual interest was in teenage boys.

As for the exceptions to the Latin discipline, which are mostly for convert Protestant clergymen, they make perfect sense. We must be ruthless in counteracting those who would pass on what they know to be entirely baseless claims about celibacy and “pollution”, about celibacy as a Medieval innovation, about celibacy as concerned with questions of property, and so on.

However, having mentioned endowments, it must be said that the Church of England, in particular, has married bishops and married presbyters because it can afford them. Where do the proponents of such a change among us imagine that widows’ pensions and the rest are supposed to come from? Or would they have our priests adopt the Eastern discipline and work the land?

Furthermore, as the Church of England has discovered, the benefits of spouses cannot legally be denied to civil partners, or now to legal spouses of the same sex. And then there is divorce. In any case, the mass laicisations of the 1960s and 1970s, at least ostensibly on the celibacy issue, now belong to a distant age.

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