Replies

Your premise here is wrong. The Catholic Church has never had a doctrine married men cannot be ordained priests. If you knew the FIRST THING about the discussion about this in the Catholic Church, you would have known that.

It's not my premise...it's Roman Catholic doctrine. If the Council of Nicea proclaims a that after ordination a priest cannot marry that is a doctrine. This was reinforced over time by various Popes and other Councils.

But again....this was not was is witnessed in the New Testament.

Even the disciple ya'll claim as the first pope was married!!

This even degenerated into such evil as promulgated by Pope Urban II who had the wives of priests sold into slavery and the children abandoned.

Urban was a piece of work. He also promised forgiveness of sins for those who fought and died in the Crusades....a Roman Catholic form of jihad.

There were also rulings that a priest could no longer sleep with his wife. It sure seems Roman Catholicism is hung up over sex.

1) There have always been married priests in the Catholic Church, continuously, for 2,000 years. They are to be found in the 21 churches (out of 22) which comprise the Eastern Catholic Churches. And yes, they are Catholic, in communion with the See of Rome.

We're discussing Roman Catholicism...not the Eastern church. You can't mix and match when it suits your argument.

2) Even in the Western Church (that 22nd church) there are married priests, mostly converts who were married Anglican or Lutheran clergy, and later became ordained to the Catholic priesthood.

Then they are in violation of prior rulings "handed down" from your popes....or there's been another change in the group that claims they never change.

3) There was never a theological "inability" for there to be married priests, as you mistakenly suppose. The Church has never asserted that. There has been a "discipline" (not "doctrine") of celibacy for priests in the West for over an millennium. But marriage is not intrinsically incompatible with Holy Orders.

Your trying to argue semantics and the attempt fails.

The First Lateran Council in 1123 decreed all clerical marriages as invalid. So much for what God has joined together let no one separate.

What this shows is the Roman Catholic Church has introduced something new which is not in accord with the NT.

A married man may be ordained. This is not only NOT, as the Catholic Church sees it, a theological impossibility, this is the reality of the Church doctrine and practice from Day One.

An unmarried priest, once ordained, may not subsequently marry and function as a priest. (A matter of timing: ONCE ordained, he is not to marry). If he wants to get married, it's possible he could be laicized, and then could marry but would not have faculties (permission) to function as a priest.

The Church has not the power or authority to invent Sacraments (they were instituted by Christ), but the Church may regulate by whom or when or where or in what order they may be received. This is one of the ways the Church exercises her authority, given by Christ, of "binding and loosing." Read your Bible. Who "binds and looses" in YOUR demurely unnamed denomination, by the way?

The Catholic Church comprises 22 churches in communion with the Pope. Their doctrines and sacraments are the same; their ceremonials (rites), customs, and disciplines may be different.

Therefore, it is wrong-headed to speak about "Roman" Catholic "doctrine," when in fact doctrine is something the whole Catholic Church has in common. A requirement that only celibates may be ordained is not a "doctrine" of the "Catholic" Church. It has been a "discipline" (one of those binding-and-loosing things) in the Western part of the Church for over 2,000 years, but even in the West it is not an exceptionless norm.

As for St. Peter, we know he had a mother-in-law. The text does not mention a wife on the premises, who, if living, would reasonably have been mentioned in connection of her concern or care for her own mother. So it's a fair guess Peter was a widower. I don't know: do you?

Of course "disciples" were married. Yikes! If they were not, the Church could have died out after one generation! God has highly honored Matrimony by making it a Sacrament, an effective and outward sign of a spiritual reality, at many levels and most sublimely as a "Magnum Mysterium" of the unity of Christ and the Church (cf Ephesians).

Interestingly, sexual intercourse is a constitutive element of a Sacrament (Matrimony) but celibacy is not a constitutive element of any Sacrament (not even Holy Orders.) Something to think about, y'know?

If a marriage was invalid, then God had not "joined them together." Because what God has joined together, no power on earth can dissolve. So there was something decisively wrong with invalid marriages from the git-go: force, or fraud, or some canonical delict or ineligibility of some kind. God does not join together null (invalid) marriages.

As for various sins and scandals, they are sins and scandals. Those responsible for them will have to answer for it to a just God Who does not tolerate sin at all: they are moral defects in these sinners, not defects in the doctrine of His Church.

Now again I implore you: as regards Catholic doctrine, ask, don't tell.

I go back to my Apricot Semifreddo. It is a metaphor, I hope, for my approach to life: all the taste, half the fat!! :o)

Have a good Saturday, and I'll send you the recipe if you want.