Married Priests

Why am I advocating the Roman Catholic Church adopts the discipline of the Orthodox Church regarding clerical celibacy?  The reasons are complex and it would take a long thesis to explain them fully, but I will try to summarize them in a few short paragraphs.

God is calling married men to be priests.  No profound powers of discernment are needed to know this. The evidence is all around us. So why are our Roman Catholic bishops ignoring God and failing to provide seminary training for married men as well as for single men?

It seems to me our bishops have a blind spot and don’t hear that God is calling married men to be priests.

I believe Pope Paul VI pointed the Church in the right direction to deal with this problem.

“What are the Church’s greatest needs at the present time?”, asked Pope Paul VI at a General Audience November 15, 1972.  “Don’t be surprised at our answer and don’t write it off as simplistic or even superstitious: one of the Church’s greatest needs is to be defended against the evil we call the Devil.”

The Pope went on to say, “It is a departure from the picture provided by biblical Church teaching to refuse to acknowledge the Devil’s existence.”

Earlier in the year during a sermon at St. Peter’s Pope Paul warned that “the smoke of Satan has entered the temple of God through a fissure in the Church.”

Not surprisingly, the Pope was howled down for blaming problems in the Church on the Devil.

I don’t want to argue for the existence of the Devil which is a matter of faith and Church teaching. Renunciation of Satan has been an important part of our Catholic baptismal vows from the very earliest days of the Church.

The war between good and evil is taking place all around us all of the time and will continue until the end of time. The Church is one of the main battlegrounds where this war takes place.

If we are not hearing God and not being obedient to God, then we leave an area of darkness between ourselves and God. In this darkness dwells the force of evil Pope Paul was talking about.

God is calling married men to be priests. By not submitting to God’s will, the Church’s bishops are exposing the Church to this personal force of evil, the Devil. 

Opening the priesthood to married men as well as to single men is the only way this particular problem is going to be solved.

Adopting the discipline of the Orthodox Church with regard to celibacy and the priesthood seems to me the easiest way for the Latin Rite Church to solve the problem.

Graham Briscombe