[Trapped Behind Enemy Lines]

Good point.

So a Catholic priest in Eastern Europe or the Middle East is permitted to be married. But a Catholic priest in western Europe or the Western Hemisphere is not permitted to be married. The policy is not universally applied and is flexible according to geographic factors. Another good reason to reconsider it. It is not universally applied.

[Mrs. Don-o]

Confusingly, the distinction between "Eastern Catholic" and "Western Catholic" is no longer strictly geographic, that is, there are Easter Catholics all over the West (for instance, 2 out of 3 Maronites live outside of Lebanon.) And (to a lesser extent) there are Western Catholics in the East.

So it's now a distinction between "rites" and not between geographical jurisdictions or even languages.

Of the 22 Churches which comprise Catholicism, 21 will ordain married men to the priesthood. There is just one which has an (almost exclusively) celibate priesthood, and that is the Latin Church. (Which also, confusingly, no longer retains Latin as its predominant liturgical language.)

This is probably more info than you wanted, but my point is that it doesn't seem unreasonable for ONE of the 22 united Catholic Churches to retain its distinctive celibate priesthood. It's for men who have a vocation to celibacy. In the Latin church, married men with a vocation to serve as clergy, become deacons.

Either way, it's a choice, and a vocation. It is imposed on nobody.