“The Church once allowed priests to marry, and it can do again . . . . Together with this, there needs to be a new monastic order to soak up the degenerates. Which was a function of the Church in times past, as much as we don’t want to think about it.”
Aidan Maclear, “A Few Minor Reforms,” SettingtheRecordStraight.com (Sep. 26, 2018)
While reading the archive of an old neoreaction blog, I was arrested by the very sensible suggestion above. The first part may be controversial, but it is familiar and I am for it. There may once have been good reasons for a celibate priesthood, but the discipline is not necessary and now does far more harm than good. It greatly reduces the number of vocations, and with it the general quality of priests and higher churchmen. There are exceptions, but the general intellectual quality of Catholic clergy is fairly, sometimes egregiously, low.
You know something is seriously wrong when your deacon is more knowledgeable and articulate than your priest!
The discipline of celibacy has also made the priesthood a haven for sexual weirdos, not only homosexuals but also incels and men beset by darker demons of the libido. The homosexuals are not all tickling altar boys in the vestry, but they give the Catholic Church an unpleasant gay vibe. The best priest I knew had this demerit. I have no reason to doubt his chastity, and every reason to believe he was competent and devout, but it was unsettling to watch him mince up the aisle and flop his wrist.
And then there are the priests who have not foregone female companionship in a spirit of heroic sacrifice, but because no woman would have them or because they are haunted by a weird kink they cannot work out. In either case, these men are four quarts short of healthy masculinity and thus bring weakness and creepiness to the center of the Church.
The Catholic Church would be much stronger if it were manned by men who could get a date, and who could enjoy the date they could get.
But it was the second part of Maclear’s suggestion that really made me think. Maclear is some sort of medievalist—he can read The Dream of the Rood in the original Anglo Saxon—so he knows a thing or two about monasteries. Most of us, on the other hand, have a very romantic view of monks, monasteries, nuns, and nunneries. We imagine that these people and places were pious in the extreme, Maclear says monasteries and nunneries were more like partial prisons where medieval society kept its weirdos and degenerates under lock and key.
Rejection of equality is at the heart of all reactionary thought. Men are not created equal and no amount of social engineering will make them equal. Every society is therefore saddled with a large population of degenerates who lack the mental and/or moral power to take care of themselves. These defects also disqualify them to run loose in society. They are degenerates, and if left to themselves they will take themselves and their society into terrible swamps of degradation.
Liberals deny that natural degenerates exist. Darwinists say that natural selection should do its work and freeze degenerates under highway overpasses on cold winter nights. A Christian reactionary says to a degenerate what Hamlet said to Ophelia:
“Get thee to a nunnery.”
Or a monastery, if that degenerate is a man.
Monastic discipline saves people without personal discipline from themselves. It makes them get out of bed at three o’clock in the morning, sing their prayers, eat a healthy breakfast, and then settle down to a day of regular employment. Monastic discipline also saves people who do not lack personal discipline from the destructive anarchy that degenerates invariably cause when they are set free to do as they please.
A Christian reactionary does not, therefore, like a liberal lack the wit to see that degeneracy is real and a real problem. But he also does not lack a heart, and so hopes to save all these weirdos and freaks from degradation and Darwinian death. Because he has both a head and a heart, the Christian reactionary would institutionaliz all the not-quite-criminal degenerates in nunneries and monasteries.
(I must note that the cloister is also eugenic, because everybody wins when degenerate men and women are kept apart and under lock and key.)
The Orthosphere 
Professor, if you could, I’d like to get your reaction to a video (about 8 minutes long) of a Priest talking about celibacy. Thanks.
https://www.wordonfire.org/videos/bishop-barrons-commentaries/bishop-barron-on-priestly-celibacy/
Thanks for sending this along. The simplest answer to your question, is that the Bishop’s argument that some people in the faith should practice celibacy as a “lived exemplification” of worldly detachment is not an argument that those people should be parish priests. In the system envisioned by my “Modest Proposal,” the Church could easily have celibate orders of monks and nuns, but it could recruit more and better priests. So, I can grant everything the Bishop says and still ask if these embodiment of the “anti-idolatry principle” need to be priests and bishops.
I do not, however, grant everything the Bishop says. If, as he says, Being=Good, why on earth do we confess our sins and fight against Evil? I know the funky arguments where Being is redefined to mean that part of Being that is Good, and Evil is said to be some sort of deprivation or absence of Being. But if God is Love and Being is Good, my question is what need have I of bishops, or a Church, or an Incarnation, or a Crucifixion, or a Resurrection?
But more importantly, I would challenge the Bishop to show me, empirically, that celibacy does in fact engender detachment from creation and attachment to the creator. Is he himself a greater lover of God than some pious grandma with twelve children? Here we have the good Bishop signaling his worldly achievements by sitting in front of a giant bookcase and asking us to believe that innocence of intercourse has brought him closer to God! Well, maybe in some cases it works this way, but I still say the enormous costs I have described outweigh these dubious benefits.
The demand for celibacy skews vocations very heavily towards sexual eccentrics of various descriptions, and it artificially shrinks the applicant pool to a point where a priest can be less intelligent than his average parishioner. I’m not denying the existence of many good and godly priests, but the small sample of priests I have personally experienced contained some that were manifestly “slow,” and others who were at least mildly insane. They were different, but not necessarily in a good way.
Thanks for your response Professor. As a former student of yours, its nice to get your opinions outside of the classroom. I would be glad if you taught a course based on your writings here on Orthosphere, maybe something on Udemy. I’m sure something you put up would be well worth $5-20.
I’m sure 99% of the present curia could (ahem) get behind that — provided they got first dibs on the inmates.
Begin the Beguine.
I follow the blog of the immensely erudite Father John Hunwicke (married, and to, it appears, his intellectual equal), now a member of one of the Ordinariates. A far cry from the muddle-headed bog-escapees of my Oirish-infested Downunder Catholic childhood (a better inoculation against any sense of the transcendent one could hardly imagine). JH is much closer to the platonic ideal. But any improvement would be good.
I wonder, though, about the ‘Greeks’. What do they get up to on Athos and Meteora? After all, one cannot be a Orthodox Bishop without having been a monk first, no?
As you probably know, sexual hijinks at the nunnery was a popular theme among early pornographers. And there was a reason for the rule forbidding “special friendships.” I expect the early infidel propaganda contained salacious tales of monastic sodomy, but having been awake for less than five minutes, I can’t think of any examples just now.
Good post, especially the paragraph starting, “Rejection of equality is at the heart of all reactionary thought…” Defining a 2024 “reactionary” that way is very clarifying. (The problem with “reaction” is that it depends too much on what is being reacted to.)
Aidan Maclear had barely come on my radar when he already disappeared. It’s a shame when such well-written blogs die. Though as your link reminds us, I guess it’s still a lot more accessible than many old books.
Thanks. I think many young men who stop blogging are just overwhelmed by life. Their children get to the time-consuming age, their real job demands more, etc. Others run out of things to say. Many in this class are the best because they are the most serious. Others despair or are frightened by, threatened with, potential real world consequences.
“Rejection of equality is at the heart of all reactionary thought…”
It depends what is meant by equality. If it means the idea that all men are born with equal talents or abilities or whatever, then this isn’t true: rejection of equality might be the beginning of someone going down the reactionary road, but it’s not the heart (one could be a reactionary and still be a blank-slatist). Equality is the second principle of liberalism (and equality for the liberal is primarily equality of preference satisfaction or individual autonomy), not its first: it’s a consequence of the more fundamental principle of liberty. So a thorough-going illiberalism must reject freedom.
For the traditional reactionary, I would say authority is at the heart of reactionary thought: so if what is meant by equality is that no man ought to be subject to another man’s rule, then I agree that rejection of equality is at the heart of reactionary thought.
Equality and liberty are two sides of the same coin, since equality abolishes authority. Of course we both know that, in reality, “equality” requires authority because hierarchy is natural and “equality” is artificial, but authority makes no sense where the doctrine of equality rules. What you call liberty is just equality of value preference. In any case, when you say one of these words, you imply the other, so it doesn’t really matter which one you say.
If we wish to push back against the doctrines of equality and liberty, I think it is best for us to push against equality, since not all liberty is bad and much authority is very, very bad. There will still be liberty in a world with zero equality, but there will not be equal liberty.
I don’t think we really disagree, my objection was to a conception of equality based on equality of ability or whatever: this is an empirical question – the sort of thing that the HBD folk address. Important, no doubt, but not as fundamental as the liberty-cum-equality principle with respect to value preference you describe in your reply.
Having read a good deal of the Philokalia and Evergetinos and else besides – I can concur that the monastic profession (is, and) was partially a means to sequester losers in a way that benefitted all.
When monks disparaged of themselves as the least of humanity and swore it the truth, they often meant it in plain terms. Not in a ‘I see what Man could be and thus how far we’ve Fallen’ way; but in a ‘I’d be wearing a prostitute’s skin like a nightgown if I was allowed around women’ way.
Of course these same men would then house travelers, nurse the ill, be at peace without heirs or property, and contemplate the noetic light. Showing what The Least can do, if put in their place. And of course, many extraordinary men just preferred God’s company to man’s.
I’ve long maintained that the monasteries helped humble and uplift all of Europe by showing the laiety how thin their excuses really were, when these happy wretched friars and monks were ambling about just fine.
There are people who require external discipline, and for such a person this “land of liberty” is a very terrible place. When the slaves were emancipated, many Southerners wrote that there would be a great division, with some rising to a better condition than slavery and some falling to a worse condition. Monasticism is really sanctified slavery, although the goal is not financial gain.
“The patriarch cannot have friends; he has his flock, and friendship in the everyday sense is practically impossible because he spends all his energy on being a pastor,” the head of the Russian Orthodox Church said in an interview with Moldovan, Romanian and Russian television channels in Chisinau, Moldova, the report said.
“Solitude will accompany me to the end of my days as patriarch, just as it did all my predecessors.” – Pat. Kyrill.
I like the rule that bishhops should not be married. It’s pretty strange to imagine a Mrs. Pope, for example. Or Mr. Pope, juggling tuition payments. Widowers qualify in Orthodoxy, btw.
Of course, with traditional Christian ecclesiology destroyed, I question Christian institutionalization and hierarchy. When the hierarchs made clear in 2020 that the State, not Jesus Christ, was the head of the Church institutional Christianity disappeared in my opinion. One could also say this was just the culmination of the long disappearance of Christendom and monarchy.
I don’t think the argument from undivided attention stands up to scrutiny. Married men with large families manage to run organizations far more complex than a parish or diocese. And many of these married managers are good fathers. If the argument from undivided attention were true, the Catholic Church should be the most capably managed organization on earth. It isn’t. Not by a long shot.
I would add that bachelors, whatever their reason for remaining bachelors, are not renowned for selflessness. In general they are remarkably selfish. Parenthood is a school of sacrifice and self-denial. Singles get to focus on themselves. This of course applies to bachelorettes as well–a fixation on personal comfort, happiness and well-being.
Defenders of priestly celibacy also make what I’ll call the argument from nepotism. I’ll answer this by saying that children make the future real, rather than an abstraction, and that children therefore make a man really concerned about the survival of things that matter. I’d like a man at the head of the church who was trying to preserve the church for his own posterity because I believe that would make him work harder to preserve it for mine.
I wasn’t arguing for priestly celibacy. As you note, that narrows the pool of qualified parish priests considerably. Given the ecclesiological norm of a parish for every 100 households, more or less, restricting the priesthood to celibate males is just not doable. Very few humans are capable of monastic life.
Catholic hierarchy is an example of hierarchy for its own sake. What in the world are the Cardinals for? And combined with celibacy requirements, you simply end up with the world’s largest bureaucracy of oddballs. Original Church hierarchy was notably flat: there were priests and bishops. Period.
The good bishops I’ve known simply are not marriage-material. They are just too “meta” in their orientation, so we put them in charge of meta-issues like theology and ecclesiology. Very different from running a secular institution.
Again, of course, this is a mostly academic discussion as Christendom has disappeared and Christian ecclesiology with it. (I’ll point out that any religious faith disconnected from tangible places and peoples is not really a religious faith any more but that’s another topic.)
I’ve never known a bishop even slightly. I have been in the same room with a few, and heard them talk. My impression was essentially that they were middle managers, seemingly overworked, but probably due to their own inefficiency.
Did those medieval monks and others get some training in polyphasic sleep?
Or did they suffer through brain fog daily from the scheduled interruptions and likely lack of REM sleep?
Or are there other plausible explanations for daily experiences?
I don’t know, but would guess that irregular sleep and brain fog is less of a problem when your day is filled with mindless routines. When I say mindless, I do not mean stupid or pointless. Only that they do not require much thought.
Well, I don’t know about polyphasic, but biphasic sleep at least was evidently the norm up until the 19th century:
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20220107-the-lost-medieval-habit-of-biphasic-sleep
And then of course military organizations would often have four hour watches or whatever.
Someone smart once said that there may very well be a good reason for tearing down a fence, but you had better understand fully why the fence was put there in the first place before doing it.
Not saying I understand fully the reasons for priestly celibacy, or am the one to defend it. But you demonstrate you don’t understand the reasons well enough to conclude we should do away with it. The unbelief that you’ve shown before on core Catholic tenets, such as the supremacy of the Eucharist, suggest that spiritual reasons for celibacy you would scoff at, however gently and civilly. Not intending to make this about you, but I see it as germane to the discussion.
Given the casual nature of a blog exchange, I think I have made a good faith effort to answer the main defenses of priestly celibacy. My answers may be no good, but I attempted to answer the argument from renunciation and otherworldliness, and also the argument from undivided attention. I didn’t discuss the argument from nepotism, but i mentioned it. Contra Chesterton’s analogy of the fence, I did not demanded that we tear down this “fence” before I took the trouble to understand some of the reasons the fence was put up in the first place. I watched a video of a bishop giving what he regards as the best defense of priestly celibacy, and then made some reasonable objections to his argument.
I think it is also significant that I did not simply attack priestly celibacy out of the blue. I am very clearly alarmed by the low quantity and quality of priests. If I were the person you seem to think I an, I would just laugh at this problem, not propose a solution. The present solution is to hire immigrants to do the celibacy than Americans won’t do, but I doubt this will really fix the problem. Parishioners need priests they can both identify with and look up to. I think this means priests from their own society, who are more intelligent than the average parishioner, and who are not oddballs. Do you disagree with this? Or do you thing we should have more unintelligible Nigerian priests who are subject to strange flashes of anger?
It would be better to have exclusively awkward and discomfiting Nigerian priests with valid orders than to have highly intelligent men who are stellar preachers – holding themselves out to be priests but having no valid orders, many examples of which have occurred in Christian history.
Why not intelligent, native to our soil, and also having valid orders? Yes, I’d take it if I could get it*, but it’s beside the point.
Am I mischaracterizing you in saying that you think delivering a good homily is more important than the ability to deliver the Eucharist validly? You did say once that you decided to stay home rather than hear your parish pastor moralizing in a worldly-acceptable way on social issues. I’m not scandalized by your decision to avoid going to Mass, I’m just noting that this sort of prioritizing shows that you aren’t on the same page as the Church historically. I’d say you are on a very different page, one that rightly brings into question whether you could know what’s in the best interest of the Church on this matter of priestly celibacy.
For the record, this is not me saying that as long as we have the Eucharist what could we possibly have to complain about.
*for what it’s worth, I live in an area of the country that is serviced by Dominican friars of the Eastern province in the US. I am not holding them out as an ideal (I don’t know enough about them to do so), but what I can say is that they are celibate, they are not cloistered, they are in the world, they are not particularly traditional (at least not holding it out as a “brand”), and they are burgeoning as an order, at least relatively so. And I have never met a one (and I’ve met many) who would sashay or do other odious things with body or limb. All to a man have struck me as the sort who would be able to attract a gal if they so chose. In fact, one thing that may be less than ideal is the effect I’ve seen these young men having on the young women under their charge in youth groups, retreats, etc.
I am a blogger, not a theologian or a doctor of the Church. I read something interesting or provocative, often while eating my morning oatmeal, and if I have the the time and inclination, I type some remarks on it. I have never written anything I know to be false, but I have written many things that may or may not be true. I am trying to keep this very small and obscure blog alive, and I therefore try to be as eye-catching and entertaining as decency and my limited talent allow.
Twenty-five years or so back, I was received into the Roman Catholic Church, and I was for at least twenty years very active by normal lay standards. I have described different aspects of this experience here at the Orthosphere, although I don’t think I have ever presumed to explain specifically Catholic doctrine. I’ve written well over a million words here, so I may have slipped up somewhere; but I normally use the word Christian and not Catholic.
I am still a member of the Roman Catholic Church, and in fact was at mass twice in the past few weeks; but it would be fair to say that my Catholicism is now more nominal than otherwise. I do not believe several of the distinctive doctrines of the Roman Catholic Church, although this does not in every case mean that I believe these doctrines are false. You raise the questions of Apostolic Succession and Transubstantiation. The first I do not believe because there have been too many scoundrels within the Succession and too many great Christians outside it. I will defend the Christianity of Catholics against any Protestant bigot that comes my way, but I equally despise all Catholic bigotry. I am more agnostic about Transubstantiation, but I can make no sense of the notion that the effect of ingestion of the Body and Blood of Christ wears off in a week.
I do not say any of this to scandalize or offend you. I think honesty is important and I try to be honest with others and myself. In any case, I believe reasonable men can discuss the costs and benefits of priestly celibacy without blasphemy or danger to their immortal souls. I think the question is worth considering, and I think the arguments so far offered for celibacy are post hoc and weak. If I were Pope—which I most certainly am not and do not wish to be—I would make celibacy a meritorious but personal devotion. But there is no reason anyone should be alarmed or offended by my opinion, since my opinion counts for nothing on this question, as it counts for nothing on almost all other questions.
I don’t get it – are you presenting an argument or not? Are we supposed to congratulate you if we agree on something, but let everything slide if we don’t because you were eating cereal while you wrote it?
I appreciate that you are airing your thoughts in a somewhat informal manner, maybe not quite as much as I appreciate your patiently approving my peanut gallery comments over the years.
But it’s a bit frustrating that you at least seem to be deflecting from having to defend what you wrote when you do approve my comments. If your defense of your argument is that you are not a theologian or doctor of the Church, then what are you doing putting out arguments that have important theological ramifications?
No, I’m not scandalized, though by that term it seems you mean the colloquial use in that I might be clutching my pearls at your irreverence. Yes, I am concerned about scandal in the deeper and truer sense, as in influencing souls away from the truth.
You can’t be held responsible for the choices other people make to read the blog I suppose. Nor for their carelessness in taking it too much to heart. I get that.
I thought I did present an argument. It was (a) that the quantity and quality of priests is too low, (b) that this problem is exacerbated by the requirement of celibacy, (c) that the cost of the requirement of celibacy is not justified by its doubtful benefits.
Against this it is possible to argue: (d) that the Church has more than enough high-quality priests, (e) that celibacy makes vocations more attractive to normal heterosexual males, (f) that the costs of the celibacy requirement is justified by the benefits.
Only counterargument (f) was advanced by dissenting commenters like yourself. This took two forms, the argument from otherworldly detachment and the argument from undivided attention. I don’t say I crushed those arguments, but I raised some reasonable objections and doubts (e.g. our evidence for the otherworldly detachment of priests is largely their own testimony).
Or I suppose there may have been a third counterargument, largely implied. This is that it is impudent and irreverent of me to put arguments (a), (b), and (c) out there for consideration. The “unclean hands” argument.
Well, not sure that my challenge is encapsulated in one of your counterarguments. It is that how can someone who is agnostic about transubstantiation be taken very seriously in addressing the priestly vocations crisis. If you don’t believe in transubstantiation (and by that I mean the reality represented by that theological term), then you cannot comprehend what the Church’s mission is when she sets out to ordain this or that priest.
I can be agnostic about transubstantiation and yet understand its importance in Catholicism. Its connection to the priesthood is not hard to understand. It is possible to believe these doctrines without understanding them, and to understand them without believing them. It is possible to understand and believe at the same time. Now I grant that you are using the words “comprehend” and “understand” in a fuller sense than I am. You mean not only to grasp what is happening with one’s intellect, but also to feel it in one’s heart–to be awestruck with the majesty of what it all means. I don’t wish to profane any of that. But I would suggest that your sense of awe at the mystery of the eucharist may be blinding you to mundane but serious staffing problems. You know the sisters Mary and Martha who were friends of Jesus. Mary adored Jesus, Martha got dinner on the table. So you are Mary, awe-struck with admiration, and I am Martha, worrying about who will do the work. We can both help in our own way.
Without apostolic succession you have no transubstantiation. This is a very Martha consideration – nuts and bolts, rather than requiring contemplation. You say you understand these things, but if it were up to you to figure out whom to ordain as priests, we would most certainly end up with no transubstantiation occurring in the Church.
At any rate, I gather this may be tiresome for you. I’m good with leaving it here if you’d like. Thanks for the discussion.
You may be right that we’ve said what we have to say. I do not want this to become a quarrel, since I think of you as an old and valued internet friend. Presumably God can permit transubstantiation under any circumstances he pleases, it being by his power and not by any power of man that the miracle is effected. God may restrict the operation to the persons and places you believe he has, but I trust you will agree that it is in God’s power to lift this restriction and make anything he pleases into the body and blood of Christ. I would never presume to ask God to do this, and so respect the office of a priest, but I remain ready to receive any sacrament that comes directly from the hand of God.
This is interesting. I remember commenting at Zippy’s site once, citing the old (purported) Mormon missive stating that, “any unmarried young man over the age of 25 is a menace to society.” Zippy responded to the effect that, ‘that’s why Catholics long ago invented monasteries.’ Probably not the first time I was unwittingly the butt of Zippy’s good natured jokes of a kind.
A mass of single young men is a serious menace to society, as can be seen in mining camps and oil boom towns. Our society aims to castrate virile energy, but no society that wishes to survive lets it run wild.
Masses of single women are even worse. They’ll vote in the most tyrannical, busybody government you’ve ever seen, paid for by taxes on the labor of men.
Getting back to bishops, a genuinely good one has to be half manager and half mystic; Bishop Anthony in the US Antiochian Archdiocese is a good example. Again, these types are really just too meta for a marriage and physical intimacy.
The Mormon missive is kind of ironic, considering that polygamy means inevitably you end up with numbers of unattached men.
To my knowledge, there’s never been a time in the history of the Church when priests were allowed to marry – there have been times when married men could be ordained, but they could not remarry if their wives died (the same rule applies to deacons today). Married bishops aren’t unheard of historically, but were very rare.
In any case, letting married men become priests would be an unmitigated disaster. The onerous requirement of celibacy (combined with the Church’s loss of social standing) has produced the hopeful situation where younger clergy tend to be more conservative than their elders. Removing the main disincentive to becoming a priest would, barring divine intervention, place the Church on the same path of terminal decline affecting all other traditional social institutions.
I don’t know, but I think there are several hundred years when the organizational side of church history is rather murky. We know a lot about heresies, but much less about day-to-day operations at the mundane level. There is also a question of definition. Perhaps we should not call church officers priests until they are celibate and celebrate something like the mass,
I didn’t discuss the argument you allude to here, which I’d call the argument from high cost of entry. I think this is a good example of a historically contingent argument. In the middle ages, the priesthood was an attractive line of work. A younger son of aristocrats or an unusually intelligent peasant had few other options. Thus it made sense to weed out mere opportunists with this higher demand (although many priests were celibate but not chaste). This no longer holds. An intelligent young man with verbal skills has millions of alternatives, and would not choose the priesthood on careerist grounds. In this sense modernity has been good for the church. On the other hand, the celibacy filter mow makes the job very attractive to an intelligent young homosexual with verbal skills who wants mom and dad to stop asking when he is going to get married.
The problem isn’t highly talented careerists, it’s mediocre careerists. The sort of people who work for non-profits for a living. Such people will follow the spirit of the age just as slavishly as talented careerists but without providing competent leadership. As can be seen in the case of the Boy Scouts.
When you hand a person too many choices, they will have to take some shortcuts and follow the crowd. We are all “cognitive misers” because forming an opinion is hard work. So we look for an authority and today’s authority is public opinion, the crowd, the many-headed monster. That is our pope and our king.
Deacons are almost always unpaid volunteers, so comparing priests to them is unfair. Having married priests would turn the priesthood into just another career – this is not an issue with deacons.
This is why it is embarrassing that deacons are sometimes more capable than the priest. I’ve seen this first hand. The deacon ran a business, raised a family, worked in local government, and on top of that visited the sick and delivered very good homilies. I don’t think the priesthood would become just another career because the pay is lousy and, outside the Catholic community, Catholic priests have low status. Taking away the celibacy requirement does not make this job attractive to anyone without a religious vocation.
You make a compelling argument. The Catholic Church can allow married men to become priests if they are married first, but once they become priests they can never marry again. Eastern Catholics to include but not limited to the Byzantine Ukrainian Catholics, the Iraqi Chaldean Catholics, the Lebanese Maronite etc. can marry. However, bishops must be single or widowed.
I am not as keen as you to have married priests as you for a few reasons. It is easier to move a single priest from one parish or diocese to another to an a priest with a family. A single priest is cheaper to pay for. A married priest’s children and and especially may cause more problems than they are worth such as juvenile delinquency and filing for divorce in a secular courthouse etc. As the old saying goes, be careful of what you ask for because you may get it.
I think a ban on marriage while in holy orders would be advisable. We don’t want all the old maids and widows in the parish vying to catch the eye of the priest. Your argument from cost has real weight, although I do not know how much a priest. I have a vague idea that the popular ones get gifts from grateful parishioners. So they may be low-cost labor in the say way college football players are low-cost labor.
We Latin or Western Catholics will need to talk to our fellow Eastern Catholics as to how works, and we may still decide married priests is a bad idea for a bunch of reasons. The 2% Eastern Catholics are united with us 98%Western Catholics under the same Pope in the same Catholic Church, but Eastern Catholics are Sui Uris or of their own right churches and are semi-sovereign unlike the Latin Church. The Western Latin Church is like being in the states such as Alaska, California, Hawaii, Texas, Florida, South Carolina, New York, Illinois etc. while the Eastern Catholic Churches are like being Commonwealth territories or Indian Reservation like Puerto Rico, Guam, U. S. Virgin Islands, American Samoa etc.
The worse potential problem is a man’s family especially his wife and not the money.
The New Testament says that church officers must exercise control over their wives and children. It is not clear that a church officer complies with this rule by having neither wife nor children. Some Protestants see success as head of a household as a test of man’s capacity to serve as head of a church, and they are probably right. Some good men have been cursed with wild wives and children, but a happy and well disciplined family tells you something about the man who heads it.
I am confused. Volcels are voluntary celibates and Incels are involuntary celibates while asexual men do not want to have sex with anyone be they men or women etc. Incels are usually less popular with men, women and children especially with the ladies than the other two on average although there are exceptions and degrees as virtually always. Maybe what you should have said is we need priests who know how to handle people and are charming and charismatic for most people to be around and not the opposite. I have a tendency to agree but the problem is to at the popular people are often the ones to tell the people what they want to hear which is often lies instead of the truth which is what they need to hear.
What I mean by volcel is celibate owing to weak libido or sex aversion. I understand that the word can cover heroic renunciation, but I am throwing some light on the fact that heroic renunciation is not all that heroic for some men. Low-testosterone males are not charismatic and they do not tell people what those people do not want to hear. They are bland, conformist, conflict-shy and risk-averse. They are, to put it bluntly, old men in young men’s bodies. In any case, they are cannot lead.
When Jesus threw the money-lenders out of the Temple, he showed that he was not a low-testosterone male. This was not a hissy-fit, but was a straight-up, manly attack n his enemies. One sees the same manliness in his verbal altercations with the Pharisees. There is noting beta, or passive-aggressive in those. They are alpha-aggressive, and alpha-aggressive is what men and women follow.
You have a valid point about men being able to exercise control over their own wives and children is a better indicator if he can do so over other men, women and children not their own in the parish than single men who are untested. However, the government and culture effectively makes women or wives the head of the household if she wants it and is the final arbiter of what a parent can do with his children so this is a lot more difficult to do in the past. Protestant laity have a lot more authority to send clergy they don’t like away than Catholic and Orthodox clergy so Protestants are a lot more likely to send away truth tellers clergy they do not like that the Catholic and Orthodox laity can do to their clergy. The Protestants are much worse about turning their men into Pussy-whooped cuckold simps for their women on average with some exceptions and degrees of course than the Catholics and Orthodox Christians and the Catholic and Orthodox Christians are very bad in this regard as an example. Christianity teaches that men should be they head of the household but most Western households are headed by women due to government and cultural enforced wife dominance over her husband in the marriage couples who stay together as well as divorce, single motherhood and widowhood for those couples who do not stay together. Widowhood is the only acceptable manner in which women should be head of the household according to Christian doctrine with the only exception is if she unjustly killed her husband due to murder or manslaughter yet justifiable killing of him by her is allowed but a very rare occurrence.
Not all protestant churches have congregational government. Some are episcopal and others presbyterian. With hundreds of years testing under our belt, I think we can see the unique weakness of each form of church government. Episcopal government clearly does not guarantee strong meat from the pulpit. What it seems to yield nowadays is a mix of pablum and propaganda.
The most important thing is to have good people doing good things in charge. Every system whether in Church organization or administration has its strengths and weaknesses. The same could be said for government, corporations etc. Every system and every person eventually fail, but some fail faster and harder than others.
I almost forgot. Don’t be so hard on men who are not successful with the ladies. Sometimes if the men are too successful with the ladies then they fornicate or commit adultery which causes its own disastrous set of problems. Unchecked hypergamy etc. among Western women these days is making an ever increasing percentage of men into losers with the ladies with fewer men enjoying ever increasing numbers of women who are in virtual rotating harems which these same men financially pay little to nothing to have sex with these women. These popular men with the ladies are called Chads or Tyrones. The real thing the church needs is for clergy be they men or women to call these sinful women out to change their sinful nature which is seldom to never done these days although they have no problem saying what they find wrong with men.
Maybe I should have written volcels and not incels. I think asexual is the preferred term nowadays. There is no doubt that the structure of a church triggers female hypergamy, and that sexual scandal can very easily result. Female hypergamy lusts for the big man in the room, and it is not at al hard to see the man in the pulpit as the big man in the room.
An associate priest’s duties are difficult and a pastor priest’s duties are at least as doubly difficult.
I am sure they are difficult, but I very much doubt they are more difficult than the duties of an elementary school principal, or fire chief, or hotel manager. And they do not, in most cases, have to mow the lawn, or clean the garage, or read their children bedtime stories. In any case, under my modest proposal, these poor, overworked priests would get some help. Al married clergy are assisted by their wives, and an increase in the number of priests would allow more division of labor.
Some wives will help, some wives won’t help and some wives are more trouble than they are worth. Running a parish in the Catholic Church these days is more like running a branch store as the general manager of a corporate restaurant like say TGI Fridays as church attendance and donations are voluntary. Schools are government operations as are Fire Departments. The Catholic Church used to be like present day public schools where attendance is mandatory and government gave money for support in in the Middle Ages.