A group of New York-area priests are agitating for married priests. I know it’s not a dogma, but a discipline. However, the discipline is a good one for the Latin rite.
The problem of a declining number of priests is not caused by celibacy. The rot goes deeper, into areas that most priests and bishops don’t want to deal with. So it’s easier to say marriage would solve things.
Unfortunately, all that would happen is that if you make this change without fixing what’s wrong, you’re only going to transfer the problems to the married priests. It’s not a solution. It’s avoidance of having to deal with the real problem, the elephant in the sacristy.
[Thanks to Chris for the link.]
I would think the women of the Catholic Church would be more vocal against married priest. We have only to look at our Protestant sisters to see how great the struggle is and how insane family life can be. I wouldn’t mind marrying a man who worked for the Church, but certainly not one who is, in essence, married to the Church as well. JAB, exactly my point.
“Men want to see authentic, manly, obedient priests.”
Here, here! The best thing the Church can do to promote more authentic vocations is to help men considering such to believe that they won’t have their manhood and their true calling whittled away by bureaucracy, moral relativism, disobedience, heterodoxy, an embrace of homosexuality, vacuousness, politics, and intrigue. In other words, the purer and holier and less corrupt the Church, the more vocations there will naturally be. I would like my sons to be able to look up to priests as manly examples of virtue and integrity and Christian witness, rather than to wonder about what sorts of sexually perverse activities they engage in (which, I assure you, most boys their age now wonder…)
Dom, you may have noticed WAY down in the article that the “New Yawk” priest group includes a bunch from Milwaukee, and other parts of the country.
Rembert Weakland strikes again. The movement actually BEGAN in Milwaukee as the first ‘test’ of Abp. Dolan.