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Is it feasible for Roman Catholicism to allow men already married to be priests?  the Eastern Catholics and Orthodox do it, why not us?  thoughts?

Nevertheless, when the Old Catholics abolished compulsory celibacy for the priesthood, Dr. Döllinger, as we are told by the intimate friend of his, an Anglican, was "sorely grieved" by the step, and this seems to have been one of the principal things which kept him from any formal participation in the Old Catholic communion. In reference to this matter he wrote to the same Anglican friend:

You in England cannot understand how completely engrained it is into our people that a priest is a man who sacrifices himself for the sake of his parishioners. He has no children of his own, in order that all the children in the parish may be his children. His people know that his small wants are supplied, and that he can devote all his time and thought to them. They know that it is quite otherwise with the married pastors of the Protestants. The pastor's income may be enough for himself, but it is not enough for his wife and children also. In order to maintain them he must take other work, literary or scholastic, only a portion of his time can be given to his people; and they know that when the interests of his family and those of his flock collide, his family must come first and his flock second. In short, he has a profession or trade, a Gewerbe, rather than a vocation; he has to earn a livelihood. In almost all Catholic congregations, a priest who married would be ruined; all his influence would be gone. The people are not at all ready for so fundamental a change, and the circuмstances of the clergy do not admit of it. It is a fatal resolution. (A. Plummer in "The Expositor", December, 1890, p. 470.)

A testimony given under such circuмstances carries more weight than long explanations would do. Neither was it the only occasion on which the historian so expressed himself. "When a priest", Döllinger wrote in a letter to one of his Old Catholic friends in 1876, "can no longer point to personal sacrifice which he makes for the good of his people, then it is all over with him and the cause which he represents. He sinks to the level of men who make a trade of their work [Er rangiert dann mit den Gewerbetreibenden]." (See Michael, Ignaz von Döllinger, ed. 1894, p. 249.)

Supposing always that the vow of celibacy is faithfully kept, the power which this practical lesson in disinterestedness must lend to the priest's exhortations when addressing his people is too obvious to need insisting upon. Numberless observers, Protestant and Agnostic as well as Catholic, have borne the obstacles to really confidential relations and more especially to confession in the case of the married clergy — even if this difficulty is often quite unfairly exaggerated in the many current stories of Anglican clergymen sharing the secrets of the confessional with their wives — are certainly real enough. When the once famous Père Hyacinth (M. Loyson) left the Church and married, this was the first point which once struck a free-thinker like George Sand. "Will Père Hyacinthe still hear confessions?" she wrote. "That is the question. Is the secrecy of the confessional compatible with the mutual confidences of conjugal love? If I were a Catholic, I would say to my children: 'Have no secrets which cost too much in the telling and then you will no cause to fear the gossip of the vicar's wife'."

Again, with regard to missionary work in barbarous countries, the advantages which lies with a celibate clergy can hardly need insisting upon and are freely admitted both by indifferent observers and by the non-Catholic missionaries themselves. The testimonies which have been gathered in such a work as Marshall's "Children Missions" are calculated perhaps, from their juxtaposition, to give an exaggerated impression, while the editor's bantering tone will sometimes wound and repel: but the indictment is substantially accurate, and the materials for a continuation of this standard work, which have been collected from recent sources by the Rev. B. Solferstan, S.J., in every respect bear out Marshall's main contention. Over and over again the admission is made by well-qualified observers, who are themselves either indifferent or opposed to the Catholic Faith, that whatever genuine work of conversion is done, is effected by the Catholic missionaries whose celibate condition permits them to live among the natives as one of themselves. See, for example, to speak only of China, Stoddard, "Life of Isabella Bird", (1906), pp. 319-320; Arnot Reid, "Peking to Petersburgh" (1897), p. 73; Professor E.H. Parker, "China Past and Present" (1903), pp. 95-96.

The comparatively slight cost of the Catholic missions with their unmarried clergy need not be dwelt upon. To take a single example, the late Anglican Bishop Bickersteth, the much-respected Bishop of South Tokio, Japan, describes in one of his published letters how he had "a good deal of talk" with a Catholic vicar Apostolic, who was on his way to China. Whereupon Bickersteth remarks that "Roman Catholics certainly can teach us much by their readiness to bear hardships. This man and his priests are at times subject to the most serious privations I should fear. In Japan a Roman priest gets one-seventh of what the Church Missionary Society and the Society of the Gospel allow to an unmarried deacon. Of course they can only live on the food of the country." (See "The Life and Letters of Edward Bickersteth", 2nd ed., London, 1905), p. 214) With regard again to the effect upon a priest's work the following candid testimony from a distinguished married clergyman and professor of Trinity College, Dublin, is very striking. "But from the point of view of preaching", writes Professor Mahaffy, "there can be little doubt that married life creates great difficulties and hindrances. The distractions caused by sickness and other human misfortunes increase necessarily in proportion to the number of the household; and as the clergy in all countries are likely to have large families the time which might be spent in meditation on their discourses is stolen from them by other duties and other cares. The Catholic priest when his daily round of outdoor duties is over, comes home to a quiet study, where there is nothing to disturb his thoughts. The family man is met at the door by troops of children welcoming his return and claiming his interest in all their little affairs. Or else the disagreements of the household demand him as an umpire and his mind is disturbed by no mere speculative contemplation of the faults and follies of mankind but by their actual invasion of his home." (Mahaffy, The Decay of Modern Preaching, London, 1882, p. 42.)