**In the early centuries of Christianity, it was common for priests to be married, though churches in both the East and West have always valued celibacy.**
Whatever happened to that tradition?
...ask any former Episcopalian.
The tradition, going very far back, in both East and West, Catholic and Orthodox, is that a cleric may not marry after ordination. That's a clarification of "common for priests to be married" -- common for married men to be ordained, never common for ordained men to be permitted to marry.
The difference is that, in the West, married men are ordained to the diaconate but not to the priesthood or the episcopacy; in the East, married men are ordained to the diaconate and priesthood, but not to the episcopacy.
The divergence goes back to the early 4th Century (Council of Elvira) or before.
Where did it come from? One claim is that married priests were supposed to fast from relations with their wives the night before offering the Eucharist. When daily Mass became the norm for priests in the West (it isn't traditionally the norm in the Byzantine church; NYer would know if it is in the Maronite church) that made married priests problematical.
Others argue that ordaining celibate men, or requiring married men to live in continence with their wives (with their wives' permission, one assumes) after ordination, was the original tradition, and that the Eastern practice is a derogation from that.
The oft-repeated canard that the Western requirement of celibacy dates only from the 12th Century, and had something to do with the inheritance of church property by priests' children, is clearly false and doesn't even make sense. The church's property was never the priest's to bequeath (whether or not he had children), and (diocesan) priests can bequeath their personal property to their heirs both then and today, just as you or I can.
Whatever happened to that tradition?
********************
It became impossible for poor congregations in the dark ages to support a priest and his family... simple economics.
This?
http://history.hanover.edu/texts/trent/ct24.html
CANON X. -If any one saith, that the marriage state is to be placed above the state of virginity, or of celibacy, and that it is not better and more blessed to remain in virginity, or in celibacy, than to be united in matrimony; let him be anathema.