Should Diocesan Priests be Married?

It is plain that the Church has chosen that nearly all her priests should be unmarried. The special exceptions – some priests of the Uniate rite, or converted Protestant pastors who are already married and have an evident vocation to the priesthood – do not negate her general and obvious intention, though they do show that priests don’t have to be unmarried. The Church could change the situation tomorrow.

Yet she does not give rulings to the faithful – whether it is a matter of Lenten abstinence or the celibacy of the priesthood – without reason; and if she does not spell out her reasons to us, we should use our intelligence to find out why she may have made this or that ruling.

The arguments against the celibacy of the priesthood come from two main quarters – from those who are moved by pity and feel that priests have too heavy a cross to carry; and from those who believe that married priests would be richer, wiser men whose marital experience would be a great advantage to their flock. I think that both arguments are founded in a large degree on these premises.

The argument from pity has perhaps the most weight to it. Apart from page 582 spectacular cases such as that of Charles Davis, there is in all countries a steady leakage from the priesthood involving defections where the chief factor would seem to be an insurmountably difficulty in adhering to a celibate life. The statistics of defection imply a mountain of real misery. I am of the opinion that charity demands a radical change in the way that most people view the ‘failed priest’; there are some who still regard such men as pariahs, a view that is neither just nor human, and there are others, perhaps a majority, who shelve the matter as an unfortunate but inevitable recurring scandal.

I have never yet met a priest who lacked charity and sympathy for his ‘failed’ brothers. And priests are those who know best how strong the temptations are. Perhaps the pressure which is hardest to bear is that of solitude. At any rate, we should regard such clerical casualties as wounded soldiers, men who have taken up their cross and then fallen under the weight of it, never as Judases, for the fault of Judas was despair of God’s mercy, and there is no reason to suppose that any given ‘failed priest’ has sinned in this way.

While I believe that every effort possible should be made to alleviate the situation of the ‘failed priests’ and to make the road back to the Sacraments easy for them, it is another thing to argue that most priests should marry because some are unable to remain celibate. There is no guarantee whatever that the priest who finds celibacy emotionally intolerable will be able to be a chaste and loyal husband. If his will to cherish and comfort his flock is not strong enough to keep him from entanglements with women why should his will to cherish and comfort a wife keep him from extra-marital entanglements, if – as can so readily happen – that wife becomes in certain respects more a cross than a comfort to him?

I am sure no marriage ever lacks its crosses; and the commonest of all crosses is sexual incompatibility. Flight from suffering is a normal human reaction. The Church can sympathise; but she cannot condone it, remembering that her Master suffered to the point of death and has asked His members to do the same. Curiously, on the psychological level, flight from suffering also seems to increase suffering. I have often suspected that what trips up many ‘failed priests’ may be a divided commitment. Somewhere – perhaps at a subconscious level – they have said to themselves – ‘Yes, I will suffer so far; but no further.’ This attitude is equally fatal for a priestly vocation or for the vocation of marriage.

The argument that marital experience will increase the pastoral capabilities of our priests seems to me most doubtful. It conceals a kind of sentimental arrogance, the view of life current among writers for the poorest women’s magazines, which attributes a pseudo-religious significance to romantic infatuations and supposes that what is not ‘natural’ is unnatural, forgetting it may equally well be supernatural.

‘Ah,’ some critic may well say, ‘you have taken us up wrong. We are not arguing that priests should have romantic liaisons. We are arguing that they page 583 would be better off if they were loving and respectable married men.’

Nevertheless I think that those who think they are arguing for married chastity may be over-rating the emotional aspects of sexuality. Too often for the modern world ‘experience’ means precisely the transitory knowledge that comes from sex relations. When we talk of an ‘experienced woman’ we mean usually a woman who is not a virgin. Is a wise old nun less experienced than a wise old wife and mother? Certainly her experience has been different; but it is not on that account second-rate.

Our Lord was not an unnatural nor an inexperienced man. If married life and the experience of active sexuality were essential for efficient pastoral care, then He would certainly have been a married man. Yet our intuition tells us that the situation would have been quite incongruous. Why? Not solely because He was God. I think it was also because the married cannot embrace total poverty.

He said to us – ‘The birds of the air have their nests; foxes have their burrows; but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head.’ The ideal of every priest should be a degree of poverty which makes him wholly accessible to God and his fellow men. A married man must earn money and accumulate possessions. He must buy his wife dresses and his children radiograms. Even his much vaunted sexual experience is in a sense a mental possession. But to be bare as a bone, bare as a coal glowing in the fire, to be inwardly destitute – this is not his vocation, however much he may hunger for it. But it is the vocation of the Son of Man and of his virgin priesthood whom we love and reverence so greatly.

There is no kind of priest for whom we should pray much harder than for the priest who has lapsed and given his affection to a wife and family instead of to his flock; and that is the priest who refuses to be a poor man. Though the second fault of Judas was treachery and despair, his first fault was avarice. May God defend all His priests from any shadow of it.

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