Last night SuperHusband observed that one reason protestant ministers struggle so much with employment, is that there is a glut of bible-college and seminary graduates. You want your child to attend a Christian college. Christian colleges specialize in preparing students for church work. Christian students are eager to do church work. Ten years ago in a boom economy, the roofing companies knew it and circled like vultures*.
Celibacy is a definite barrier to entry. You may have had an inkling.
So we asked ourselves last night, what would happen if you did open the gates to ordaining married men? Would the catholic church face a vocations-glut the way protestants do?
We suspect what we would see is a significant jump in late vocations. The inability of a priest to re-marry is a strong discouragement for younger men with families, for good reason. Men rightly don’t want to find themselves with a brand new baby and no mother to care for it. If your wife dies, you need to have a plan B for who is going to help you rear your children, and remarriage is a pretty good plan B under ordinary circumstances.
These exact reasons are why young, pious catholic married men aren’t rushing off to become deacons. Who are the deacons? Older men whose children are grown. Or at least grown enough, and the wife past the age of childbearing.
So that’s what we guess. Open the gates of priestly ordination to married men, and we’d expect to see a vast conversion of deacons-into-priests. Not 100%, necessarily. But that is where the married priests would mostly come from — or reasonably should come from.
Economically there all sorts of interesting implications, but I’ll refrain from more crass calculating. Suffice to say that celibate young men are still your best value per sacramental-salary-dollar.
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FYI Even though I can see the practical benefit to ordaining a significant percentage of our permanent deacons to the priesthood, I’m not convinced it is “the solution”.
Two reasons: One is concern that the former-deacons will end up in an employment vortex of a similar nature to what our protestant kin suffer. And that reason alone is enough to proceed very cautiously. The other, more pressing, is concern that ordaining the permanent deacons is a band-aid of a solution. Maybe even a bad band-aid.
My sense is that our shortage of vocations is caused by a deeply spiritual wound in the church. One that can only be healed by precisely the kind of self-abandonment and commitment to the gospel that lifelong celibacy entails. We as a church suffer from a case of “Do you really mean what you say?”
A young man willing to pass over all the joys of marriage in order to serve Christ? That’s a guy who means what he says.
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*In our area, since that time we’ve had a surge in immigration. The would-be youth pastors have been supplanted by workers even more cash-hungry. The best of whom are strong, competent, hard-working, loyal, and unlikely to be called off to the mission field without notice. And legal, too. Good for the roofing companies, not so great for the bible students.