Dating Priests,
Divorced Priests,
Roaming Priests,
....what could go wrong?
lol! It THIS isn’t a future Oprah episode, I don’t know what is..
The question the Pope of Rome is raising is, as the article amply pointed out, whether the discipline peculiar to the Latin Rite, might be replaced with the normal practice of the Eastern Churches, both us Orthodox and the Uniates: priests may not marry, but married men may be ordained to the priesthood.
In Eastern usage, ordination to the priesthood, or even the diaconate, requires the consent of the wife. Either married couples embark in the route toward the husband’s ordination together, or an unmarried man, who does not wish to embrace life-long celibacy, having completed seminary, waits (usually as a reader, since in Russian usage, even subdeacons may not marry) until he finds an marries a woman who wants to be a presbytera (or matushka or khouria, depending on which Old Country language you favor) who wishes to marry him, marries, and is ordained.
Very often daughters of priests find the idea of living less fully immersed in the rhythm of church life than they were while growing up unappealing, and if celibacy and a monastic profession not for them, try to marry seminarians before their ordination.
That’s why priests can’t get married.