I know wives of married clergy, and 99.9% of them say the same thing: “he’s married to his parish/congregation and not to me!” You can’t have two masters! Either be the father of a group of people, or the father of your family.
Yet some men in Germany want Rome to allow married preists. Give it up, fellas! Or go to the Eastern Church.
WIESBADEN, GERMANY – Some 80 Catholic former priests ended a four-day meeting in Germany Monday by issuing an open letter to Pope Benedict XVI calling for an end to Rome’s nine-century-old policy that forbids priests to marry.
“We want the practice of the married priest in the Eastern Church to be implemented in the Western Catholic Church,” said conference spokesman
Heinz-Juergen Vogels.He said the conferees based their appeal on the conciliatory style of Pope Benedict XVI, who won over hundreds of thousands of young Catholics at the World Youth Day Catholic congress in Germany last month as much by what he did not say as by what he did say.
Under current church practice, priests who take a partner or marry must revert to being lay Catholics, lose their jobs and face disapproval from fellow Catholics. Many have formed associations to campaign against the celibacy rule.
The International Federation of Married Catholic Priests, which met in the central German city of Wiesbaden, claim there are signs of flexibility from Rome.
The federation draws its optimism from a rumoured account of remarks by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger in summer 2004, well before his election as pope, when he was prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.
He reportedly asked a delegation of U.S. bishops, “What would your people think about a re-introduction of the tradition of married priests?” The Americans were
supposed to have been speechless for a moment with surprise.
