I think it has already happened.
Stopped reading right there.
Regards,
As I understand it, Eastern Catholic churches do allow married priests, but under THREE conditions:
One: That a man be already married BEFORE studying and being ordained.
Two: That if his marriage is annulled while a priest, he is forbidden to remarry,.
Three: The highest a married man can go is to be a priest. Any higher, he is to be unmarried.
It is CURRENT law in the Catholic Church that all clerics observe perfect, perpetual continence. This includes those who are permitted to be ordained even though married. I.e., it includes deacons, and those who have been ordained priests after converting from another ecclesial body.
A few ‘snippets’...
The Church was a thousand years old before it definitively took a stand in favor of celibacy in the twelfth century at the Second Lateran Council held in 1139, when a rule was approved forbidding priests to marry. In 1563, the Council of Trent reaffirmed the tradition of celibacy.
SO - celibacy became ‘mandated after around 1139. HOWEVER...it wasn’t all that ‘easy’.... I will post an interesting paragraph from 18th Century Historian David Hume (from Volume 1 of his History of England):
After the canons, which established the celibacy of the clergy, were, by the zealous endeavours of archbishop Anselm, more rigorously executed in England, the ecclesiastics gave, almost universally[427] and avowedly, into the use of concubinage; and the court of Rome, which had no interest in prohibiting this practice, made very slight opposition to it. The custom was become so prevalent, that, in some cantons of Swisserland, before the reformation, the laws not only permitted, but, to avoid scandal, enjoined the use of concubines to the younger clergy; and it was usual every where for priests to apply to the ordinary, and obtain from him a formal liberty for this indulgence. The bishop commonly took care to prevent the practice from degenerating into licentiousness: He confined the priest to the use of one woman, required him to be constant to her bed, obliged him to provide for her subsistance and that of her children; and, though the offspring was, in the eye of the law, deemed illegitimate, this commerce was really a kind of inferior marriage, such as is still practised in Germany among the nobles; and may be regarded by the candid, as an appeal from the tyranny of civil and ecclesiastical institutions, to the more virtuous and more unerring laws of nature.
LET THAT SINK IN....one of the reasons the Church wanted celibacy because they didn’t want a priest’s estate to be passed to wife and children. Everything had to stay within the church....so - they mandated celibacy, even if they didn’t actually ‘enforce’ celibacy!