Thoughts on Celibacy

Despite what I wrote below I'm not really opposed to allowing priests to marry. Here are a few things that ran through my head over the weekend.

1. Scandals: Eliminating celibacy will not reduce the number of scandals involving priests. We'll just have different scandals. Instead of priests breaking their celibacy vows, we'll have priests violating their marriage vows. I figure that it'll take about three weeks from the end of mandatory celibacy before we have the first tabloid headlines shouting that 'Fr. Murphy has left his wife and 3 children to run off with his 22-year-old lover'. Human nature is what it is. And, we'll still have child sex abuse scandals, only these will involve priests and their own children. However, I do believe that the systematic failures with regards to child sex abuse would have been less likely to have occurred if there had been married priests. Any sane father would have demanded that his Bishop recognize that these abuses are nearly as serious as murder from a parent's perspective.


2. Loneliness: The media loves anything to do with sex and any person or institution that tries to swim against the tide in our sex-soaked culture is inviting scorn as far as the newspapers, etc. are concerned. Sex is only a small part of the celibacy problem, however. Loneliness is a much bigger issue. A priest's life has always been lonely, but it's even lonelier now. There are fewer priests around and many live alone. And, thanks to the scandals and changes in society priests are less involved in the lives of Catholics today, other than maybe with the elderly. Priests are no different than anyone else - they don't want to spend all day, every day talking only to people over 70. They want to be involved with people of all ages.


3. Vocations: It seems logical to assume that allowing priests to marry will lead to an increase in the number of priests, but it's not going to be automatic. The Church will still need to go out and attract men into the priesthood. Sitting back, waiting for men to hear 'the Call' is simply not good enough any more. I've said before that the Church is not trying hard enough to find new priests. It's a noisy world; some men might not be hearing 'the Call'. Allowing married priests is not a solution to this problem.