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May 24, 2005

On a Married Latin Rite Clergy

It won't happen soon.

A commenter on my priestly numbers post brings up a married and female clergy and the Episcopal Church. I'm going to set the ordination of women aside (and ask that anyone interested in that topic read some serious institutional history of the Episcopal Church and learn how that process actually took place in the 1960s and 1970s before coming back to talk about it here). I pointed out to him that:

...1. the education track to the Episcopal clergy is (for many of them) more like that for deacons in the Latin Rite -- part time study for people with first careers (like my parents' opthamologist).

...2. the Episcopal Church may not be a useful comparison -- despite a certain shared history it's tiny (the figures are a mess, but it's often reported to be about 2.5 million, about the same size as the Catholics on the rolls of the archdiocese of New York.

...3. He points out that we've only had this arrangement for a millennium. I'd point out that we've had this arrangment for a thousand years. That's about half the time-span of the whole church -- which side of a balanced equation wins?

...4. In all my discussions about this I say "fine, I don't mind a non-monastic clergy." Because, you see, I don't. I even know some pastoral provision priests who ARE married!! Do you? One of my godsons is the grandson of one of the first of 'em. However, let me ask what I think of as The Question:

How much more money per week will we have to give in order to support a married clergy? That entails an expansion of housing, health-care benefits for families, automobiles, retirement benefits for spouses who outlive the harried priests, and so on.
Let's see - our Roman Catholic Community of Geneva, NY reported on Sunday a deficit of $21,922 for the year-to-date out of a budgeted-to-date $581,884. I guess the year's budget for us is about a million dollars. How much more are we talking about? I don't know, but I hope someone does. One of the main problems in the middle ages with a married clergy was the alienation of property (and remains so in churches with married clergy today - we have it in the Latin Rite church, but on a purely anecdotal level I hear much less of it than in the almost entirely Protestant city of my childhood). That is to say, the diversion of what is properly Church money and property into the hands of the immediate family of the priest. The problem may be more pronounced when the priest has children to finance. See the Borgias.

What about the role of clergy spouses? Believe me, it's a real problem. I have a childhood friend whose father was a radiologist/priest in the Episcopal church. Her older sister married an Episcopal priest. She chose to attend an Episcopal parish in Nashville other than the one at which he was an assistant pastor, because she decided not to be a clergy spouse. The Orthodox and the Eastern Rite have some ideas about this, but we in the Latin Rite don't!

Which leads to the question of clergy divorce. Google produces 294,000 hits (lots of them irrelevant, I'm sure) on clergy+divorce. The relevant question isn't "do we allow a divorced clergy," but "do we allow a divorced and remarried clergy?" Believe me, it's a problem. Indeed, the remarriage question was the last straw for some of the early partakers in the Pastoral Provision. They asked "what can a church mean by "sacramental marriage" if it allows its own priests to remarry without even a form of annullment?"

Talk to some clergy spouses and see how things go for them. Then decide if a having a married clergy will solve more problems than it creates. I am not convinced that it would. Again, I'm not opposed to a married clergy on other than utilitarian grounds -- but those ugly utilitarian arguments are important.

Does anyone have a good idea of the priest/parishoner ratio in the Episcopal Church? We can include the part-timed here, because Lord knows the Annuario Pontificio does for us.

Further: Here's a quite interesting comparative article from America. The author asks the age-bracket question that I ask in the comments below and agrees that other denominations are also having the late-vocation situation (with some attendant problems).

Posted by CrankyProfessor at May 24, 2005 9:44 AM