The broad outline of the last fifty years of celibacy scholarship shows that something has occurred that not infrequently causes misunderstandings in historical research: a one-sided formulation of the question has produced one-sided answers. Scholars took the present discipline of celibacy in the Roman Catholic Church as their point of departure and searched for a pattern of clerics in the unmarried state in the first centuries. This, however, they did not find -- at any rate, not for all clerics. The question that they should have asked is whether the early Church perhaps knew a different discipline of continence. This was the approach of the older German scholarship in the nineteenth century. But that was though to have been refuted scientifically, and so these contributions were consigned to oblivion. Actually, if this deficit has not become evident already, it ought to when on looks at the Church's legislation. That is to say, according to canon law an exclusively unmarried clergy, as we know it today, existed at all only after the Council of Trent (1521-1545). Even the above-mentioned Second Lateran Council, which is repeatedly cited as the beginning of the history of celibacy, did not intend to exclude married men from holy orders; it merely declared marriages contracted after the reception of orders to be invalid (canon 7). [Emphasis added.]
I'm obedient to Church authority. Celibacy is a discipline. It can be changed. The Holy Spirit has not moved the Church to do so. Therefore, I'm not worried about it.
If they change the discipline tomorrow, which could indeed be done by the simple stroke of a pen, I have no problem with that.
Until they do, I will defend the prudence of the current discipline.
If they do change it in my lifetime, I would have to discern whether I have a vocation simply to the Permanent Diaconate (I do) or whether God is calling me to more than that. Until then, I simply cannot campaign for a change that I honestly believe would be terribly imprudent at the present juncture.