“You cannot serve 2 masters, you will love one and despise the other, you cannot serve God and mammon.”
Is this something the Latin Church figured out since it adopted celibacy as the norm at the 2nd Lateran Council? Does it only apply to Latin priests or are all Eastern Rite married Catholic priests and all Orthodox married priests in a position where they hate God and love their wives or vice versa?
I have got to say, I am aware that you belong to a rite that allows married priests. I belong to a rite that has celibate priests.
I am fully aware that I am not going to change your mind, nor will you change mine. My study of the WHY has convinced me that celibate priests are preferred. I do not intend to convert you, and my observations are not church law, they are my observations. If you are secure in your belief, then my observations are no threat to them. I speak from the Roman Catholic rites point of view.
Well, those weren’t my words...and I think it’s perhaps an excessively strong way of putting it! However, I will say that my experience with Catholic priests and Orthodox priests does lead me to say that Catholic priests are more focused on serving the Church and have far less to worry about in terms of the effect of their decisions on the lives of their immediate families.
Orthodox priests, while obviously having as much of a range of good and bad as another other group of people, do have to worry about the adequacy of the salary, whether their wives will have to work, what the schools are like, etc. Also I will say I have seen some very dysfunctional families among the Orthodox clergy simply because there are enormous pressures on the wives and children (mostly to be “perfect”).
So I would argue that it’s not a matter of serving Mammon, that is, serving something that is arguably not that good in itself, but simply of undivided service to the Church.