Let's Talk About Married Priests

Let's talk about married priests. Well, not married priests per se, but our attitudes toward married priests. I had a very unpleasant interaction with a reader the other day that has left me sort of fuming and feeling like there's some issues that need to be cleared up. So, be warned, I'm a bit saucy.

I. Some Real Big-Brain Arguments

I recently posted an article entitled "Why I'm Not Orthodox." The article was generally well-received, but discussion went off the rails in the comments on the subject of married priests. It started when an Anon popped in and said:

I could never abide with a married "priest." I could perhaps understand a converted pastor who perhaps was a widow becoming a hermit brother, yet even that might contaminate the brethren. It's a scandal for married pastors to convert and wear the mantle of a Catholic priest—and they seem quite jolly which again is suspect—what exactly are their motivations, I wonder.

This is an ignorant comment in many respects. Putting the word priest in quotes implies that a married priest is not truly a priest, or at least that his ordination is suspect. But of course, being married does not invalidate Holy Orders; even when a priest illicitly tries to marry in violation of his vows, it invalidates the marriage, not his ordination (cf. Can. 1087). How a married priest in good standing would "contaminate the brethren" I couldn't say, but this Anon accused married priest-converts of being a scandal and implied they are motivated by lust because they are "quite jolly." I'm not sure how you can infer anything by jollity (save a joyous heart) or if a proper priest ought not be jolly. It also seems the commenter is ignorant of married priests in the Eastern Catholic rites and perhaps of the tradition of married priests in the Latin West, of which we shall say more presently.

At this point, a married Catholic priest jumped in, posting publically under his real name, to give his two cents. This priest converted by way of the Anglican Ordinariate, and a any cursory review of his biography available online shows that his career has been very distinguished in many respects. The priest responded:

Well-written article, for which I am thankful. For the previous anonymous respondent who simply commented about married clergy, why? Your comment addresses the situation of St. Peter. Did you know St. Hilary of Poitiers was a married cleric, not merely a priest, but even elevated to a bishop? Let the exception to the rule simply be that. Yes, I am one of them, and there are very few around the Western Church. It takes papal dispensation, and my file went to the desk of Pope Benedict XVI. We have to be vetted to a much greater extent than normal, celibate diocesan clergy. The balancing act is tremendous, and the life is very sacrificial, in ways you might not even think about. 

This man was admitted to Catholic Orders by Pope Benedict XVI himself.  Who is going to quibble with that? Any priest deserves respect at least by virtue of his Holy Orders, if nothing else...but a priest whose ordination was personally signed off on by Benedict XVI? 

That wasn't going to stop our Anon. Seeing one of the detested married priests in the comments, he launched a broadside of attacks (when these comments started coming in, I did not publish them because of their vitriol, but I'm sharing them here to make a point and expose this stupidity). The Anon replied:

That's why married " Priests" are a scourge to the Church—always lobbying for deviations to the rule of celibacy—shame on you!

I did not post this comment. Within minutes, Anon submitted another comment:

Your only a Father to your own children. Spiritual Fatherhood is not for those who have committed themselves to carnal relations—and make it their life work to justify it at the cost of the priceless gift of Chastity—which is only possible with Heavenly graces—a true calling.

Okay...again, stupid comments and awful trying to shame ths priest. Especially the latter comment, which implies that those who are having carnal relations with their spouses are not being chaste...I think the commenter is ignorant of the difference between chastity and celibacy. 

At this point I felt like I needed to step in. Being the mature, well-spoken academic that I am, I responded publicly by calling the Anon disgusting and suggesting he had a mental disorder:

To the Anon who all day has kept trying to post comments attacking Fr. Ken for being married and making base accusations against him (a) I'm not publishing any of your comments, (b) you are disgusting (c) do you have a mental disorder?

The Anon didn't stop. The following three comments came in succession, all directed at the priest:

Your [sic] just a glorified deacon couple that moved into the church's rectory, I doubt your masses are even valid and question how it happened that you were ever consecrated.

Your pride puffs you up to level of St Peter and St Hilary of Poitiers, both Bishops—is that the next goal? Please inform of the doings of the "converted" married "priests"—no doubt you have formed a contingent.

I now understand for the first time prophecies how bishops will lead the flock astray and masses will be invalid.

Real big-brain thinking, here, folks. I find this just awful and representative of the worst, most ignorantly knee-jerk buffoonish side of Catholic Traditionalism. I am assuming most of my readers can see how ridiculous these accusations are, so I'm not going to respond to them.

At any rate, the Anon finally paused from his (or her?) attacks long enough to notice my defence of the priest and left a comment directed to me:

Defend the Holy Priesthood or do you stand with the heresiachs [sic]

Is the Anglican Ordinariate somehow an attack on the priesthood? What heresiarchs? Pope Benedict, who established the Ordinariate and signed off on this priest's admission? 

At any rate, when the commenter realized I wasn't publishing their posts nor supporting this position, they thankfully left.

II. Our Attitudes Towards Married Priests

I'm not sure how common the attitude of this Anon is among Traditional Catholics; I hope it is an outlier, because it is horrifically ignorant and mean-spirited. I personally have never heard anything amiss about the priests of the Anglican Ordinariate; quite the contrary, actually. There is one Anglican Ordinariate priest not far from me. I've never met him, but his little small town parish is thriving, and every Catholic I've met who knows him heaps praise upon him. In times when many larger Catholic parishes see only one or two converts per year, his tiny parish recently welcomed 20+ people to the Church at Easter. 

My only experience of a married priest was when I lived in Gaming, Austria during my studies at Ave Maria's satellite campus there in 2003. The campus chaplain, Fr. Yuri, was a married priest of the Ukrainian Catholic Church. Fr. Yuri was an impressive man, deeply spiritual with a true fatherly heart—and his liturgies were beautiful. I felt privileged to receive Communion from him, and I regularly chose to attend his liturgies in Old Slavonic rather than go to the celibate (but charismatic) Franciscan priests kept there by Steubenville.

I understand that there is a push by progressives to eliminate the discipline of celibacy in the Latin rite. And I, like the vast majority of Trads, reject this as contrary to the Tradition of the West. I think it would harm the integrity of the priesthood and that such a profound shift in discipline would wreak havoc in ways we can't begin to foresee. The celibate priesthood is, afterall, one of the few things left standing after the Second Vatican Council, and its elimination would likely inaugurate a chaos comparable to what we saw in the early 1970s. I am 100% against eliminating the discipline of celibacy.

That being said, while the western Church's tradition strongly prefers unmarried men for the priesthood, it is a discipline that can, theoretically, be dispensed, and the Church has allowed exceptions for the good of souls and the cause of authentic ecumenism. I understand that some are tempted to see these exceptions as abuses, akin to communion in the hand, altar girls, and all the rest. But this is certainly not in the same category, as married priests have always been a part of the Church's tradition in various ways, even if they were much less common in the Latin West. 

Furthermore, progressives are not championing the Anglican Ordinariate, which today is the primary vector through which married priests enter the Latin rite. To progressives, the entire concept of the Ordinariate reeks of the "out-dated ecclesiology of return" condemned at the progressive Balamand Conference on ecumenism in 1993. But I think it was an exceedingly wise act of Benedict. Seeing the developing split in Anglicanism between its progressive and conservative wings, Benedict XVI demonstrated exceptional pastoral insight in establishing the Ordinariate as a path of return for Anglican clergy who wished for reunion. Pope Benedict should be known as the Pope of Ecumenism for this decision.

And the Church is hardly being flooded by a cabal of married priests; the Ordinariate has about 40 parishes and 100 priests across the entire North American continent, all serving admirably, from what I have heard. Remember, Ordinariate priests were among the most traditional of the Anglican Communion; the Anglican liturgy has more in common with the TLM than the Novus Ordo does, leading some to refer to it as "the Traditional Latin Mass, but in English." This is one reason why progressives are dismissive of the Ordinariate. A certain well-known website known for its pro-Bergoglian paeans considered the Ordinariate a hot-bed of Traditionalism, especially hostile to the Synod on Synodality (at least in the U.K.). If you are a Trad, Ordinariate priests are not your enemies. And if you treat them as such merely because some of them are married, I suggest you prayerfully reconsider your priorities and swiftly remedy your severe case of rectal-cranial inversion.

And ultimately, though we can criticize clerics for many things, there are few things as profoundly un-Catholic, so anti-Traditional, as shitting on a priest merely for the fact of his ordination. I may think a priest's teaching is nonsense or be scandalized by his poor behavior, but I will never disrespect the fact of his priesthood, let alone one who was personally admitted to Orders by Pope Benedict himself. 

III. Priestly Marriage in the Latin West

This comes down to what I have found to be a pervasive misunderstanding on this issue from both sides, from those who wish to attack priestly celibacy as well as from those who wish to defend it.

On the one hand, you have people who stupidly accuse the Catholic Church of imposing celibacy on priests in the high Middle Ages, imagining that priests for the first thousand years were all married and sexually active. These are the people who say, "Celibacy in the priesthood wasn’t the norm until the time of the Gregorian reforms." You get this view from secularists, progressives, and brain-fogged Orthodox trolls. On the other hand, you also have people like the Anon above, whose knee-jerk Traddism leads them to make exaggerated defenses of celibacy that the Church herself has never made (e.g., that married priests are of questionable Orders, that they "contaminate" the Church, that they are lustful, etc.). Generally, these people imagine that the Church's discipline here has always been as it is today; they fail to account for history or for the presence of married priests in almost all of the Eastern Catholic rites. 

Both of these positions are incorrect. 

From the beginning of the Church, there have always been married priests. There were married priests in the East and well as the West. The discipline was similar to what you see today in certain Eastern rites, where a married man may be ordained to the priesthood but a single man ordained as a priest could not subsequently marry. This was allowed for many centuries, at least into the 6th century and longer in some places. Married priests were simply a reality for a long, long time. Suck it, Anon.

However (and this is a big however)...

There has never been a tradition of sexually active priests in the ancient Church, either in East or West. While married priests could be ordained, they were expected to be perpetually celibate from the moment of their ordination (actually, their celibacy began when they reached the diaconate or even sub-diaconate). Married priests were expected to observe perpetual continence—be married and celibate. Priestly celibacy is an apostolic tradition and was regarded as such by the Fathers. OrthoBros and secularists who suggest celibacy was a Roman invention foisted on the Christian west in the Middle Ages are suffering from historical ignorance on this point. If you'd like to read the sources on this, the text you want is Fr. Christian Cochini's Apostolic Origins of Priestly Celibacy, a very large tome but absolutely worth the read. Another good source is Alfons Cardinal Stickler's The Case for Clerical Celibacy: Its Historical Development and Theological Foundations, which covers the same ground as Fr. Cochini's work but in a more condensed form.

If you'd like to see my own summary of the sources, I have three articles to recommend (although they are long, I must warn you):

1. The Truth About Priestly Celibacy in the Early Church
2. The Council of Ancyra and Celibacy
3. The Quinisext Council in Trullo and Priestly Celibacy

These articles summarize the work of Cochini and Stickler, demonstrating the universal testimony of the Early Church that celibacy was always expected of priests, married or not. I am currently working on a fourth installment in this series (I've actually been working on it since June), demonstrating that, in fact, it was the East whose custom changed, not the West; the West has preserved the older custom of expecting celibate priests, whereas the Eastern custom gradually changed following the promulgation of Justinian's Corpus Iuris Civilis.

IV. Conclusion

I am grateful for the married priests we have in our midst, whether of the Latin rite or one of the Eastern Catholic rites. And I am tremendously grateful for the Anglican Ordinariates and their beautiful liturgies. May the Lord, in His mercy, raise up more laborers for His harvest, whether from near or afar.