Bishop Zavala & Celibacy

Bishop Zavala & Celibacy by MSW

My response: The reason the orthodox have a two track system for married men who stay priests and unmarried men who can become bishops (and you can't marry after ordination) was because they did not want the children of bishops inheriting Church property. That can be avoided by abandoning a feudal personal ownership model for church property and institutions and joining the 21st century. Then both bishops and priests can marry and have kids.

More importantly, priestly celibacy must be abandoned because of the way it affects how the Church teaches about sex in the culture. While the kingdom of God is not of this world, it is IN this world. We don't obey sexual norms to get to heaven but to make life bearable - and when those norms make life unbearable they can't be from God and cannot be the result of natural law reasoning. Indeed, celibacy in the Latin rite has, in its origins, ideas on Continence that are offensive to married people and to womanhood in general that must be abandoned for their own sake. There is nothing incompatible with celebrating conjugal love and the Eucharist on the same day - and anyone holding to a belief otherwise should not be allowed to teach about sexuality or sexual ethics. Indeed, such a view is responsible for the warped clericalist views on contraception and unitive love and resistence to accepting homosexuality in a loving marital relationship.