The Saint Euphrosynos Cafe

http://worldnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2013 ... snhp&pos=3

• He said that "for the moment" he was in favor of maintaining the celibacy rule "because we have ten centuries of good experiences rather than failures."

  But, he added, "It is a matter of discipline, not of faith. It can change."

This link, http://www.aleteia.org/en/religion/docu ... acy-582001, is the source of the NBC story above.

Well, that's a step in the right direction.

No, Lydia, you must have been a little dazzled by the ad there - which REALLY interferes sometimes with absorbing the words
of the last part of posts, I note.

You probably read that Pope Francis would keep to the Catholic rule of celibate Priesthood.

To me, though, it sounds like he is laying the groundwork to -- CHANGE that, gradually, watching and waiting to see how much
the Catholic public would condone in this disastrous idea of converting to married priests.

It's too late in the game for the Vatican II shipwreck to start introducing "popularity measures" like that. It would not make a particle of difference to the
numbers of Mass attendees if the Catholic Priests were to be permitted to be married.

I strictly oppose this for Catholicism. They should not abandon the rule of the ages just to curry favor with liberals and the American Catholic Church.

Yes, sorry about that. I did mis-read it!

I think I see what you're saying Barbara: this is not about returning to an authentic Tradition, such as we have, in which there is a married priesthood, but rather conceding ground to secular demands. They would be doing the right thing for the wrong reasons.

Yes.
By the way, some readers may not realize that most Roman Catholics have NO CLUE that Orthodoxy allows a married priesthood.
They have limited contact with Orthodox, and so are simply are not aware of the Orthodox Church's existence, let alone
the rules.
So it is a boiling hot bone of contention for Catholics because not having any history of this practice, it is a scandalous notion
for reverent, devoted members of the flock who are used to a 2000 year history of unmarried priesthood. More or less, of course, since at the beginning Church rules were not yet systematized. Married priests AND Bishops occasionally did occur. But few Catholics today study back about the early days.
Hence it is a very unfamiliar proposal,
regarded as introduced by radical reformers who are not pious but seizing upon this and any other pretexts
so to tear apart traditional Roman Catholic ways, thereby to devour the entire 1.2 billion-member Church.

I wouldn't say they have a 2,000 year history of married priesthood; remember that originally all priests could be married (who were not monks). The celibate priesthood is something that crept into Western practice in the second half of the first millennium, and even after the schism many parts of the West continued to have married priests.

However, it's not as if allowing married priests is suddenly going to restore the Papacy to Orthodoxy. If they "return to Tradition" by allowing married priests, will they also return to Tradition by abandoning ecumenism, restoring the fasts, imposing stricter standards of purity, etc? I doubt it. The renovationists want the "easy" bits of Tradition, not the hard bits.