The American Spectator

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p>Priests who choose to become members of orders can be treated differently. They take vows of poverty, chastity and obedience. It could be the choice of any order to eliminate the vow of chastity and permit its priests to marry. As part of the vow of poverty, priests who are members of Orders are required to turn their earnings over to the Order. However, those same priests may also pull income, salary, out of the Order. They would need to for personal expenses, anyway. Thus, their income could reflect their own earnings. That, however, would be the decision of the Order, itself. br> -- Daniel V. Kinsella br> Chicago, Illinois /p> p> With respect to Mr. Lott, there are far more pressing issues facing Catholicism and religion in general than the issue of priests marrying. The Church has never endorsed a married priesthood and that should be the end of that, period, so in that respect, we are in agreement. The issues facing the church today are those facing every moral person. Those include the sexual issues of promiscuity, homosexuality, the issue of abortion, and the general decline in morality. As of this writing a new Pope has been chosen and the main scream media is livid over it. The new Pope is a traditionalist along the lines of the late Pope. The hopes of the immoralists of finally destroying the Catholic Church have been dashed. Liberation theology has taken another hit with the ascent of this man. Maybe, we will finally see a return of not only traditional Catholic teaching, but also of traditional Catholic morality. While I do not agree with everything the church stands for (outside of Biblical morality), I am free to chose my own religion, practice it as I see fit, but where the Church, I, and the Bible agree, I have no problem. If priests want to marry, let them become Protestants. After all, that is what Martin Luther did when he had issues with the church. br> -- Pete Chagnon /p>

With regard to Jeremy Lott's article of 19 April 2005, "Don't Let Them Marry," I need to point out that Mr. Lott refers only to the Tradition of the Latin or Western Church, and does not speak at all to the Tradition of the twenty-one Oriental Churches in communion with the Church of Rome, or of the myriad Eastern Orthodox, Oriental Orthodox and Assyrian Churches that are not. Speaking as a Byzantine Catholic, a member of one of those twenty-one Eastern Catholic Churches, I note that our unbroken Tradition for twenty centuries has been to ordain married men to the diaconate and presbyterate for service in the parish churches. From the fourth century onward, monastics have been ordained to these offices, and it has been from the celibate, monastic clergy that the Eastern Churches traditionally have selected their bishops.

This bifurcated clergy has served us very well. At the parish level, married men are called out from the community to serve as ministers of the Church at the Holy Altar. They remain close to the people they serve, share in their daily lives, and establish bonds of affection and affinity that make the parish priest a true father to his congregation. Contrary to the common usage among the Protestants, or even among Jews, the wife and family of a married priest share totally in his ministry. The wife of a priest in particular is more than a social hostess, but rather has a special charism as mother of the parish. The Presbytera, Matushka, Pani-Popadje, or Khouria (as she is variously called) has a special responsibility to look after the material and spiritual well-being of the women and children of the parish. The children, particularly the sons of priests, often follow their father into his ministry, so that in some parishes, one finds a priest being assisted at the altar by his elder son, a deacon, and his younger son, the subdeacon, and possibly a third son as acolyte.

Mr. Lott echoes a lot of Latin Catholics in dismissing the ability of a married priest to balance the demands of ministry and family. It can be difficult, but then, so are the demands of balancing any vocation, such as medicine, law, or soldiering with the demands of family life. The priests of the Eastern Churches have been doing it for two millennia. It works. Mr. Lott and other Latin Catholics seem to ask, "How can a priest cope with the demands of ministry and support a family?" We would turn that around, and ask, "How can a man bear the burdens of the ministry without the support of a family?"

In fact, the Eastern Churches do not see the fundamental choice facing a man as one of marriage vs. ordained ministry, but of monasticism vs. marriage. The monastic vocation is the personal calling from God, the one that calls for man to give up all and renounce the world for constant prayer, asceticism and spiritual warfare. The monastic, not the priest, is the exemplar and touchstone of Christian discipleship (a point Pope John Paul II emphasized in his Pastoral Letter Orientale Lumen). And there is more to being monastic than mere celibacy. Celibacy, in fact, is a very difficult burden in and of itself, and the Eastern Churches traditionally have been quite leery of celibates trying to live out their vocation without the support of a structured community--a monastery. For that reason, they have been quite reluctant to appoint monastic or even widowed priests as parish priests, doing so only for lack of a married priest.

Regarding the economic aspects of sustaining a married priesthood, Mr. Lott is on somewhat firmer ground. Whereas the typical celibate Catholic priest receives a stipend of some $15-20,000 a year (supplemented by a housing allotment and sometimes a car), the typical Orthodox or married Eastern Catholic priest receives a salary of $40-75,000 a year, plus benefits -- social justice doctrine demands nothing less than a living wage). By way of comparison, rabbis habitually make more than $100,000, while the rabbis of some large, prestige synagogues can make three times that much.

This imposes a considerable burden upon the parish, and money is often a critical issue in Eastern Catholic and Orthodox parishes. But, considering that the typical Orthodox or Eastern Catholic parish is quite small by Roman Catholic standards (a parish of 1000 people would be very large, indeed), somehow they manage to get by. Partly this is accomplished by cutting salaried staff to the bone and having only one full-time employee: the pastor himself. Volunteers and part-time workers take up the slack. This not only makes for greater involvement of the parishioners in the life of the Church, it also helps cut back on the paid church bureaucracy that is a perpetual drag on Roman Catholic parishes. However, Roman Catholics who advocate married priests ought to consider carefully the economic demands the institution makes on the parish.

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