You may as well grow to tolerate it, at least, because lay-run parishes is what we're going to have over the next ten years. The number of men being ordained is simply insufficient to replace those who die, leave, or retire.
The hierarchy has dithered over this issue for 20 years, with Rome shutting off all discussion of any solution.
It's wonderful to pray for vocations, and we should be doing more of it. But God can't force men into the priesthood, and celibate men are not responding, for whatever reasons.
So we are left with an older and older priesthood, with priests having to do more and more.
My pastor has one lung due to lung cancer, and he may not make the five year maximum for lung cancer survivors. He celebrates three Masses every Sunday, and does at least one wedding every single weekend, somewhere. The poor guy has to go to bed at 8:00 every night because he's exhausted.
The men who are priests TODAY have to be given some kind of relief, if only so that they can live a little longer.
"You may as well grow to tolerate it, at least, because lay-run parishes is what we're going to have over the next ten years."
Check out NY and Boston. You will not have more "lay-run" parishes. You will have more consolidated and CLOSED parishes. You still don't get it, do you? The days of the "parish administrator" are running out. This is no longer a viable model. It is ending. It is no longer the 1970s or '80s, thanks be to God.
Get with the times.
So say we get two married priests in a parish to replace the busy celibate one priest. Will they have more time to minister to their parishioners considering they also have family obligations and presumably they will have many children.
What I don't get is how on the one hand Catholics are supposed to be dirt cheap but on the other hand it is a given that the laity will contribute enough $$$ to pay a salary which will support a couple of families.
And the dwindling number of priests... I thought we had a dwindling amount of parishioners as well?
We supposedly have a priest shortage in Boston but the bishop won't allow the FSSP to come in and take over even one closing parish (which happens to be the Indult one).