Really? Then why has the Vatican allowed over 400 converts from Anglicanism and Lutheranism, 98% of them married with children, be ordained?
Why does the Catholic Church accept non-Catholics (and even keeps some former non-Catholic priests bound to their marriage vows)? For the same reason that Satan possesses and tortures a child.
A soul is a soul.
Many priestly converts have already finished raising children. Thus, they can cowboy up some souls for Christ and focus on this most important mission. Not all Protestant clergy converts are married priests. Furthermore, not all Catholics who help minister Grace are Priests. Perhaps statistics for Eucharistic ministers and Deacons should be examined. They don't say Mass, but they participate in a vital function for the Church. How have their numbers been in the last 100 to 200 years?
400 hundred sounds like big number at first. But how many converts to the Catholic Faith have their been in recent living history?
sinky, you know I agree with you completely on this issue, so I will just say "DITTO" to all your posts on this thread.
Celibacy is an unnatural state.
"It is not good for man to be alone"...God, The Bible
Because it's not particularly fair to ask an adult head of household to give up the only job his education and career history suit him for purely for a disciplinary stricture which exists solely in the Latin Rite. It's like telling him that his children have to suffer for him to convert.
(I'll note parenthetically that these situations seem to be developing their own rite separate from the Latin Rite, as the details of this case bear out.)
And 99% of the advocates of a married priesthood draw zero distinction between an unmarried ordinand and a married ordinand, as if a married man becoming a priest and a priest becoming a married man are equivalent situations, when historically no apostolic branch of Christianity has ever accepted the latter.
my youngest brother--RC like me--married the daughter of the former rector of Trinity Church in Boston. This man is about as spiritual and Holy as anyone I have ever met.
Much of the reasoning behind a rule of celebacy centered around preventing bishops and cardinals from handing down these titles to their sons.
Furthermore, I believe that even if these married men come into the church as priests, they are required to take vows of celebacy to become bishops.
To vindicate the parable of the workers and the vineyard?