MARRIED PRIESTS

A parish in Lansing, Michigan, gets a married priest. He is a convert from, well, I don’t know, because the church won’t say and he has been forbidden to talk to the media. He’s not just married: he’s been married for 25 years and has three sons. There are, apparently, 200 married priests in the United States, proof that there is no good reason that married men cannot be good Catholic priests. So why continue the mandatory celibacy policy which has led to such a collapse in vocations in our current world, and has successfully selected some of the most sexually-screwed-up people on the planet to be priests? There’s no good answer – none, except bloody-mindedness from reactionaries and institutional inertia. Meanwhile, the Church is dying in this country for lack of good priests. And the Vatican would rather see the American church die than ever concede it could change its mind.