First Things is running an exceptional piece by Fr. Leonard Klein, a former Lutheran pastor, now married Catholic priest. My emphases and comments.
I would love to have the input of our Anglican Use/Pastoral Provision priestly readers on this post.
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What Can the Catholic Church Learn From Married Priests?
Apr 7, 2010
Leonard Klein
I might well have been one of the most available priests in the diocese that Saturday afternoon. After four hours of shoveling, my driveway was clear before the rectory garage was plowed out. Because of a disability, our youngest lives at home. Because she needs a wheel chair, we own vans. They have four-wheel drive.
So I got to the church to celebrate mass for the small group that assembled that evening. On Sunday I said one mass at the parish to which I am assigned and one at a neighboring parish. I prepared an RCIA lesson. I shoveled some more snow. Before bed I switched on the hospital pager, since hospital chaplaincy is another part of my assignment. The four-wheel drive would have made the thirteen miles, had I been called.
Whatever the difference is between celibate clergy and us exceptions, it is, I am convinced, not availability.
There is enough time; there is never enough time. What is true for everyone in the modern world is true also for priests, equally for the celibate as the married. Clergy who bemoan the demands of their office and the lack of personal time are whining. Tough though some of their situations may be, family life would not ease them.
I entered the Catholic Church in 2003 after twenty years as a Lutheran pastor and was ordained to the priesthood in 2006. I have a wife, three children, and five grandchildren. They have claims on my time, as do our large extended families. But many a celibate priest must respond to a large extended family or provide care for aging parents. Priesthood does not bring freedom from family and human obligations, nor should it. The requirements of a nuclear family are more immediate and time-consuming, but it does not seem to me that they establish a categorical difference in availability from the rest of the clergy.
To be sure, married priests can’t easily be sent off for advanced study in Rome. Nor can we move at the drop of a hat. We are in some ways more expensive, but the costs of maintaining and staffing a rectory are considerable. And we are generally cheaper to educate, since we all come to the Church with theological educations and a personal formation refined by the reflection and self-examination that led us to full communion.
So it cannot be the practical arguments that bear the weight for celibacy. Pastorally, there are some advantages. On questions of marriage and family we do have an enhanced credibility. While it is surely wrong to think that celibate priests know nothing of family life and equally wrong to imagine that marriage and family make anyone an expert on those subjects, it is true that those of us who have made this commitment have worked hard to live out our values and stand willing to help. A huge percentage of the people in the pews are unmarried, but few seem unwilling to relate to a married priest, while the opposite opinion seems widespread.
This last observation has always struck me as a convenient excuse and a rationalization for dissent from the Church's teaching on sexuality. I tend to think that the lion's share of folks who claim that celibate clergy lack credibility on marriage and family issues have more of a discomfort with the message than the messenger. Still, it seems that married priests do have a distinct advantage here.
Acceptance by other priests has not been a problem. Some who were ordained in the turmoil after Vatican II expected celibacy to fall and may resent us, but their numbers seem few. Some may also be too imbued with Anglo-Saxon notions of fairness to accept the Roman character of the Church’s law, which sets standards that the legislator may in his benignity relax.
For those Pastoral Provision priests, has this been your experience? Have you generally been accepted by your celibate brothers in the diocesan presbyterate? If not, how has this lack of acceptance impacted your ministry?
How might things change under Anglicanorum Coetibus? A married Anglican priest will be incardinated into a personal ordinariate, but, according to Article 8 of the Complementary Norms, he will be also eligible for membership in the Presbyteral Council and Pastoral Council of the local diocese.
Most of my colleagues are happy to be colleagues and to have one more hand on deck. I cannot say that I have felt unwelcome or out of place at all, whereas in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America I found myself increasingly out of step and at times could not in good conscience even attend liturgical celebrations. My day-to-day experience is not one of feeling exceptional. I feel part of the thin black line called to serve the Catholic Church in a world that has lost its way.
It would be a mistake to confuse the exception made for some of us with an experiment in married priesthood. Even less does the exception constitute a critique of celibacy. There is in any event little indication that the Catholic Church is going to change a discipline so firmly rooted in its own history and paradigmatically modeled by Jesus, Paul, and John the Baptist.
And Anglicanorum Coetibus makes it crystal clear that it is not the intention of the Holy Father to undermine, in any way, the universal norm of clerical celibacy. A failure to recognize this fact will only create friction and resentment with some "ordinary" Roman Catholic clergy and play into the hands of the progressives who, if they were able to point to one bright spot in the Apostolic Constitution, would likely grasp at the possibility of a change in this difficult discipline of the Church. We must not be viewed as an insurgency. The author's attitude seems to be the way to go. Rather than seeing himself as exceptional, Fr. Leonard views himself as just another Catholic priest called to labor in the vineyard.
At the same time I would concede that not all the critiques of celibacy are irrational.
A married priesthood would increase the pool of available men who might otherwise suppress their sense of vocation, but to blame celibacy for the shortage of priests overlooks some possibly more significant and spiritually weighty causes. Where there is a passion for the faith and an assertive call to sacrifice there tend to be more vocations. If the problem is secularization and weakened commitment, a married priesthood is not much of a solution. Richard Neuhaus’ famous and often maligned solution to the abuse crisis—“Faithfulness, Faithfulness, Faithfulness”—is likely both the better and the more realistic solution also to the vocations crisis. But to hear it requires abandoning some widespread assumptions.
While the modernist congregations wither on the vine, it is the traditionalist orders of priests and religious that are flourishing in the Catholic Church.
The Long Lent of 2002, now dawning afresh in Ireland and Western Europe, has also led many to wonder anew about the wisdom of celibacy. While a celibate community does provide concealment for offenders and has contributed to the formation of dark networks of abusers, ending celibacy would not end human sinfulness. Celibacy does not cause abuse any more than marriage causes adultery. A married clergy and the ordination of women have hardly ended violations of the sixth commandment and pastoral trust in Protestantism. Protestantism endures the scandal of divorced and remarried clergy, sexual abuse in all forms, and in the mainline the increasingly successful effort to normalize homosexual liaisons. The Protestant experience ought to warn any thoughtful person off the notion that celibacy causes sexual misconduct.
That argument is also a smokescreen. It conveniently serves a bias that was already in place. Worse, it has served the politically correct denial of the main feature of the abuse crisis, to wit, homosexual misconduct. Now again, in reports on the European crisis, the word “pedophilia” is automatically used to describe the homosexual abuse of young males, when the statistics and anecdotal accounts suggest only a handful are pedophiles and the rest are homosexual men behaving badly.
Thus to the question many would prefer to skirt: Would a married priesthood dilute the problem of homosexuality in the priesthood? Almost surely to some degree, although in Lutheranism a married clergy did not eliminate either homosexual networks or sham marriages. But the problem in the Catholic priesthood was not so much the presence of a disproportionate number of homosexual men; it was the winking at misconduct, culpable naiveté and the failure by bishops to deal with criminal acts.
While a disproportionate presence of homosexual men in the priesthood can influence the ethos in troubling ways—Michael Rose’s anecdotal Goodbye, Good Men remains relevant—the option of marriage would help less than would an authentic quest for holiness in life and ministry. Where there is a passion for the Gospel, the Church, and the Christian life, sin remains but purification comes much more quickly.
There is one other thing that is usually left out of the advocacy for a married priesthood. In our sexually saturated culture it is simply assumed that what the celibate priest gives up is sex. Naturally enough. But that is not what the tradition sees as primary. What the celibate priest “gives up” is marriage. Marriage includes sex. Naturally enough. But in any biblical understanding of human reality, sex is part of the vocation of marriage, not a free-floating good looking for a place (generally in the modern mind any place) to land.
In giving up marriage and the family, vowed celibates teach a jarring truth, fundamental to the Christian faith: The greatest of human goods, one Catholics understand to be a sacrament, in itself a means of grace, is secondary to the pursuit of the Kingdom. Speaking of himself, Jesus said that some had made themselves eunuchs for the Kingdom of God. It would be hard to put it more bluntly. And it is plain that he expected some of his followers to follow his example. The mind of the Western Church on priestly celibacy instantiates that vision, even as the Church recognizes that it could be otherwise and hence permits some of us married converts to be ordained.
The wise old priest who catechized Christa and me had the idea that the Orthodox could afford a married priesthood because their liturgy pointed so powerfully to the otherness and holiness of the Kingdom of God, but that in the Catholic Church that witness had come to be shouldered by the celibate priesthood. The point has value. It suggests that advocates of a married priesthood as the obvious solution to the vocations shortage and other problems would do better to lay aside the political model of entitlement and complaint and to place their energies into the reform of the liturgy. A vigorous commitment to the truth of the Catholic faith and the long-overdue realization that the world is not our friend will do more good that a laundry list of “progressive” changes that should have been made after Vatican II.
Can I get an 'Amen'?
Still, in the end it may prove that we were an experiment and not an exception and that the Church will reconsider the requirement of celibacy. The Church may look at the record of married convert clergy and other aspects of clerical celibacy and re-examine the practice. Married priests were common enough in the first millennium in the Western Church, and no one can on Catholic grounds object to the practice of the Eastern churches. It may indeed be the will of God at some point that the Roman Church change its practice. I do not envision such a time, but none of us has privileged information about the future.
Meanwhile there are a few hundred married men [and, God willing, soon to be several hundred more!] in the priesthood in the Latin rite. We are not here to make a point but to serve. The Church will, we hope, be enriched by our experience as married men and by the positive legacies and hard lessons we bring from our past ministries. Our presence provokes discussion of things that need to be discussed, and that may be argument enough that the occasional exception is a good thing.
Fr. Leonard R. Klein is the Director of Pro-Life Activities for the Diocese of Wilmington.
Be sure to follow our Moderator at Eccentric Bliss, his personal blog!
I'm a big fan of the celibate clergy, and even though I recognize there's nothing inherently wrong with a married clergy–if today Benedict released some kind of papal bull lifting the requirement of celibacy, I'd be the first to defend it from the ultra-traditionalists–I still can't wrap my head around a few of the arguments in favor of married clergy.
The one I've always had the most difficulty with is the idea that married clergy has more credibility on marriage and family life. I used to be a Protestant, and I've known far, far, far too many children of Protestant ministers who are despicable cretins that undermine their parents' ministries in every conceivable way. I've known self-righteous pastors' wives who play Church Queen and lord themselves over other members of the congregation. And I know so many Catholic priests out there who undermine so many aspects of the faith that I dread to think what sort of witness they would provide to the Church's teaching on contraception were they married.
I'm not at all trying to suggest that the families of the married Anglican clergy who will be entering into full communion with the Catholic Church are going to provide a negative witness to the faith, but I would seriously like to know whether Anglicans who play up the patrimony of their married clergy are really giving us the full picture of how the married clergy's family life fits into the larger picture of the Anglican Church's ministry.
I'm sure that the traditional Anglo-Catholics do indeed have great families that lend credibility to their teachings on sexuality and family and marriage, but I'm just as sure that I'm not hearing about all the Anglican clergy whose families do just as much to undermine their credibility on the same issues.
IMO, lifting the ban on married priest now would be as much a disaster as the liturgy reforms of the 1960s. Using the native language of the country is a good thing and is the main reason why the Bible and liturgy was converted away from the original Greek in the first place. But that reform provided an excuse for many unapproved reforms and the spirit of the age made halting these abuses a multi-decade long process. Lifting the ban in this age, would lead to the mess in the Anglican Communion.
WRT the priestly scandal, IMO, this is an issue of vows. To be unfaithful to God is worse than to be unfaithful to a wife, yet the criminal priests broke their vows to God anyway. So celibacy really isn't an issue. The key problem is that vows just aren't respected any more. Divorce? Sure if you're not having fun. Adultery? Sure as long as no-one finds out so no-one is hurt. Sex before marriage? Sure, as long as you're not hurting anyone. The list goes on. Vows have been devalued as "I'll try my best, but I'm only human, and humans are helpless in the face of genetics, hormones, and environment, BF Skinner and Pavlov confirmed it".
IMO, I think the real problem is that we lack role models of what keeping vows, even to the point of death means…the saints and the martyrs. Society today is so focused on the here and now, that all sense of where we've been and who got us here is lost. Today, people put up as heroes inevitably let you down. If they can't live good lives, what hope have we? But for people who know history, know that the standards for what people can be, with the grace of God, is much higher than we could ever think is possible. I know I'm humbled and ashamed at how far I have to go reach many of these saints and martyrs who had much less opportunities that I do. How could I not keep the few vows that I need to make? The burdens are so light?
I think that we need to have a deep respect for BOTH the celibate and the married priesthood. I think what would be a fantastic idea would be to do a study on a parish where you have one married and one celibate priest. I think that it might be surprising how well they both work together. I know at the seminary this is a HUGE discussion and people have very different feelings about it. If there is going to be ONE issue that proves to be VERY VERY divisive it is this. Let us pray that we can learn to love the priesthood in ALL its many forms.
I am sure that some of the comments by Seth G. are correct. However, when it comes to PKs (Priest/Parson Kids) I believe that he really does not understand the situation. There are two kinds of PK – the really good and the really bad. Having had one of each, I can attest to this fact. Living in a Rectory, AKA ecclesiastical gold fish bowl, is not easy for anyone. Everyone in the parish and the community as a whole has expectations as to how the clergy family should act, behave, believe &c. Quite frankly it is impossible to live up to someone else's expectations. No matter how hard one tries, failure is a moment away.
Consider the clergy family. At school they are teased. Teachers expect them to set an example. They are expected to be in the top 2% academically, to be stars in sports. In fact, you name it, they are expected to be super kids. So they are doomed to fail, no matter how good they are.
Some survive and do very well at school and in life. Others decide the best way to get noticed is to fail before they start. Funny thing, is that they succeed at that.
For clergy parents, there are a gamut of feelings from absolute success to absolute failure – and much in between.
So please be gentle on PKs and their parents.
Father Don
I realized after posting that I sounded harsher than I intended, but believe you me, I'm by no means a stranger to preachers' kids. I grew up on the same block as two protestant churches. About half the kids in my neighborhood were the children of protestant ministers. I'm aware of the difficulties of being raised as the child of a minister, because I've seen first hand that hardship and I've grown up with a number of such kids.
It's part of the reason I'm so thankful for a celibate clergy: Catholic children are not subjected to the scrutiny and the tribulations that go along with having a parent who dedicated his life to Christ before the kid even existed. I can't imagine the commitment that children of ministers are expected to make to the faith before they even know what it really is, and I can't imagine the shame they must feel when they act in ways that undermine their parents' ministries. I know that many are torn by their own sense of duplicity and I've seen the sad animosity that so many ministers' kids come to harbor against Christianity as they grow up. So please don't tell me I don't understand the situation.
My point was simply to show that for every benefit of a married clergy, there are in fact gross deficits as well. We all know what the demerits of celibacy are. And I do believe that Catholics could have something to learn from a married clergy.
But so many people who tout the married clergy are eager to point out only the good, and I think people don't realize what a disservice it is not to discuss the problems as well. The fact is that those who point out the blessings of a married clergy are preaching to the choir: Most everyone knows the good that comes from a married clergy.
But the married clergy entering the church need to understand that many Catholics are wholly ignorant of the serious shortcomings of the marriages and family lives of married clergy, and it's misleading and disingenuous, I think, not to discuss them. And I speak as someone who's pretty intimately familiar with both approaches, as well as the blessings and failures of both.
"About half the kids in my neighborhood were the children of protestant ministers.
I dread to think about the implications of that.
I am a Byzantine Catholic. We have a married clergy. They have no problem raising children and serving the Church. Our Archbishop closed our seminary in Washington, D.C. to renovate it in order to accomodate a married seminarian and his family. So far, no takers. So men are not flocking to a married priesthood as some suppose.
What no one is touching on are the serious reasons – both legal and theological – in favour of repeal of the law.
And Seth, for every benefit in compulsorily celibate clergy, there are deficits, too.
The key to the problem is the will of the Lord – which is certainly not enforced celibacy.
Neither is it clerical marriage for those who are not suited to be spouses or parents.
And Seth, for every benefit in compulsorily celibate clergy, there are deficits, too.
I specifically said there were, and we all know what they are. And I also said that if the Pope were to lift the celibacy requirement today, even though I wouldn't particularly like it, I'd be the first to defend it.
The point I'm trying to make is that I think there's a somewhat irresponsible tendency to gloss over the real pros and cons of both sides of the issue, and glossing over them is ultimately to the greater detriment of the Church.
I'm all for an open debate on the merits of repealing mandatory clerical celibacy, but part of that debate means informing people about the realities of what that repeal would entail, not just playing up the positive side of things.
And since the title of this article is "What can the Catholic Church learn from Married Priests?", I think we should freely discuss what we can learn from the human failures and mistakes and problems that come with a married priesthood.
As Christians, we are called as much to learn from our fallenness as from our blessings, so I hope no one thinks that by pointing out the negative side of things I'm trying to denigrate or put down married priests. I'm simply pointing out that real learning comes from understanding the breadth of an experience.
For those married priests who will be entering into full communion with the Church and want Catholics to understand what they bring to the fold, it can only be good to be forthright about the good and the bad.
It's like the marriage vows: Spouses don't simply commit themselves to loving in health, in good times, and for the better, but rather in sickness and in health, in good times and in bad, for better or for worse. Catholics who are to embrace married priests deserve to know what they're making a commitment to, and it will strengthen the bonds of that commitment for everyone, I should hope.
I wrote a significant article on celibacy and clerical marriage some time ago – http://www.theanglocatholic.com/2010/03/light-on-clerical-celibacy/ – and it received 64 comments.
Everyone seems to want his or her opinion imposed as the universal norm. It matters very little now, as having a priest in a parish is now a luxury for the privileged.
I don't know about the idea of family as the "centre of the parish". It can cut both ways. All marriages have ups and downs, and few women in churches are interested in what they can't directly control.
The paedophilia crisis is no argument for ordaining married men, nor is the idea it would attract more vocations. To be a priest in today's world, you have to be a masochist or a hero. Things may become easier in the future, and certainly were in the past.
The keyword is vocation (the way a person is, what that person wants to do in life for a higher goal than power over other people and money, what that person thinks / feels God wills for him or her, etc.). Marriage is a vocation and celibacy is a vocation. The priesthood is a vocation that can go with the vocations of marriage and celibacy.
Vocations come outside the categories of "one size fits all" and laws applied the way we Anglo-Saxons think they should be applied. In a nutshell – some priests should be married and some should be celibate. All should be trusted to be good unless they are found to be bad. What about that?
Thanks Fr, what sense. If people had any idea the pain that shoots through the heart everytime you hear all the vocations materials that say, "Is God calling you to the priesthood?" "Are you called to be a priest?" only for the numbness of an inability to say, "Yes", in an audible way because the 'law' says "no", to prevent you from being heard! Actually for me now, like gaviscon on heartburn(!), I have mastered the art of supressing and so chanelling what was a source of unbearable torment into the most amazing positivity that is diaconal ministry (after all all priests are first deacons and are bound to find fulfilment there if their motivation is authentic and good, regardless of whether or not they can ever ultimately answer a priestly calling).
The vocation to celibacy and the vocation to priesthood are two distinct callings: the first is open to men and women, layfolk and clergy; the second is not. It is the right of the Church to call to the priesthood only those who have a vocation to celibacy (but note: this is not a universal rule, though it is normal in the Latin rite). Where I respectfully doubt the wisdom of the current 'recruitment' policy is that it asks young men to consider a call to the priesthood, rightly stressing the nature of the priesthood in itself, and then (in effect) adds, "And by the way, this means you must dedicate yourself to celibacy." Would it not be better to ask both men and women to consider whether they are called to the celibate life, and call priests from among those men who have shown that they truly have this calling? And in addition, to consider for priesthood married deacons whose children have grown up, and who have proved their aptitude for pastoral ministry?
Fr. Chadwick,
I think that Fr. Klein's buried sentence holds the key…
"The wise old priest who catechized Christa and me had the idea that the Orthodox could afford a married priesthood because their liturgy pointed so powerfully to the otherness and holiness of the Kingdom of God, but that in the Catholic Church that witness had come to be shouldered by the celibate priesthood. The point has value."
In the long run, priests with solid vocations and spiritual foundations are the central issue. The debate about marriage vs celibacy is a small side-eddy in the stream of church life.
And how true that rings! Thank you, Jim, for highlighting this essential truth of what the Catholic priesthood and its high ideal are all about.
for those who dont not have the burden of a priestly calling which they can not answer, may be… you obviously dont!
I spent a little while with the Romanian Orthodox, and felt very much at home in that setting, with their married parish clergy. One of the great blessings of having the possibilityof married priests is that it gives a higher value to celibacy; because it is seen as a vocation, parallel to but different from the vocation to marriage. The priesthood needs both; and thanks to Ang: Coet: it is likely to get them both. Alleluia! +E
Yes, My Lord, and when one looks with a birds eye view that is so… but what about those caught in a situation where they are 'cradle Catholics' and married -the Lord doesn't want them as his priests? Completely agree with your comments on the even greater witness of the celibacy of priests who 'could' have been married but for the sake of the kingdom…. (actually who have a celibate vocation anyway!)
…sorry, Father (just read your profile! lol)…
That proposition is what is disputed.
Hence my contention that there are serious legal and theological reasons for the law's repeal.
Cf. the link from Fr A's reply above.
Well, ultimately, if a point is being made, isn't God the one making it?
After all, He chooses His priests.
OTOH James M, I think the Church's reasons for the discipline have to be respected. For the Latin Rite, there was a great deal of licentiousness that a asecetic focus on monastic celibacy helped in no small part to rescue the West from, as Pope Benedict has pointed out in his discussions on Saints such as Peter Damien.
The East had other problems, so they never really considered the discipline in the strictest sense necessary. They do still admire monastic celibacy and the emulation of the monastic life, and there is much that life can teach us as well.
I hope that, as in the Eastern Church, there is room for the Monastic or eremitic aspect in the priesthood as well. The East's insight that the Episcopate requires total dedication to the shepherding of the faithful is one part of the universal testimony of the Church.
St Peter Damian made the error of attacking genuine clerical (including episcopal) marriages. Sex between a married cleric, open to the transmission of life, is not "licentiousness". St Peter D's problem was that he thought it was.
In fact, St Peter Damian had problems of his own to deal with, that shaped his attitude towards the situation of clerical marriage: he was the youngest of thirteen children, rejected by his own mother. This cannot but have had a debilitating psychological effect – I remeber one of his rants against women – I can't remeber whether against women in general or priests wives – in which he refers to them as "bitches" among other unsavoury things.
It's somewhat ironic that if were not for his elder brother, an archdeacon, and his wife, St Peter D. would probably have died on the street.
He should not be taken as in any way a trustworthy authority on this issue – it'd be a bit like asking a Jansenistically-inclined French priest prior to Vatican II whether the marriage act had a secondary, as well as a primary end! And the clergy at the time who resisted this particular aspect of the Gregorian reforms knew that they had the law on their side.
Re: James:
According to the article in the Catholic Encyclopedia, the brother that took St. Peter Damien in was an archpriest of Ravenna.
The vocation to priesthood is an ecclesial calling- that is, God calls through the Church. I remember being told that one could not be sure one had a vocation until one's name was actually called out to step forward and kneel before the Bishop! Much harm is done by suggesting that the "call" is something interior, a hotline to God. That is why so many women sincerely believe that they have a vocation, which is being denied by the Church. No- unless the Church calls, you have no vocation; and conversely, if the Church ordains you, you are called to this ministry even though you later try to evade it. In the matter of sacraments, you cannot separate the Church from Christ, who is always the principal minister of them: he baptizes, he ordains.
I stand corrected on this, and thank you for the correction.
I did not make mention of St. Peter Damian to imply that the marital embrace between a married cleric and his wife was licentious. I was simply pointing out the historical context in which the discipline of priestly celibacy emerged as a rule within the Western Rite, and Damien played no small role in that reform.
Yes, he played no small role alright, and an unfortunate one at that.
I think Seth G. makes a lot of sense.