On the way to the altar: should priests be allowed to say 'I do'?

I admit to having no very decided convictions on the burning question of whether the Catholic church should create a class of married priests--either by permitting priests to marry or by ordaining married men. Still, from time to time I tune into the marriage-celibacy controversy, and both sides in the debate astonish me by the weakness of their cases.

The procelibacy side astonishes by its reluctance to argue at all. For the most part its attitude seems to be this: "We are in possession, and possession is nine points of the law. We occupy all the powerful positions in the church. So why waste time with arguments? The celibacy of the clergy is a solidly established fact, and solidly established facts don't need to be defended with good reasons. They are their own good reasons."

In an earlier age this may have been realistic, but not today. It is a prudent thing to let sleeping dogs lie. But this particular hound has been wide awake for some time now, and is barking like the devil. To pretend otherwise is folly. Silence is no longer golden.

If the procelibacy folks don't rouse themselves and offer a spirited and persuasive public defense of their position, they will eventually lose the game by default. True, they may hold onto key power positions for another generation or so, but with time these will slip away. "Ideas govern the world," said Auguste Comte. And so they do, at least in the long run. Once Catholic lay opinion accepts the idea--as today it largely does in Europe, Canada, and the United States--that a married priesthood makes sense, it will not be long before the hierarchy swings round to the same view. Even in the Catholic church the rule holds that the customer is always right. It just takes a little longer for customers to prevail in the church.

On the other hand, the promarriage folks astonish by the triviality of their argument, which largely boils down to this: The problem of the priest shortage in the United States--a shortage, they add, that will grow steadily worse over the next generation or two--will be solved by having married priests. But this assertion raises a number of critical questions which the promarriage people rarely or never address.

First, if married men are ordained priests while women are still excluded from the priesthood, won't this exacerbate the church's already troubled relations with women?

Second, how do we know there is a shortage of priests? If we speak of a "shortage," there must be some "right number" we have in mind. But what is this standard? What is the correct ratio between laypersons and priests? Absent an answer to this question, the concept of a "priest shortage" makes no linguistic sense.

Third, predictions that there will be small numbers of priests a half-century from now are based on the assumption that current trends will continue. But there's this funny thing about trends: they always come to an end. That, s why we call them "trends" and not "laws." Roger Bannister broke the four-minute mile in the mid-1950s. If the downward trend in mile records for the past forty years continues for the next four hundred years, by the year 2400 some human will run the mile in less than two minutes. But don't bet on it.

Fourth, while the married-priest solution will no doubt increase the number of priests in the short run, how will it work out in the long run, say, over the next century? Once the first wave of enthusiasm has passed and Catholic priests become indistinguishable from, say, Presbyterian ministers, will a life in the priesthood continue to prove attractive?

Fifth, what about the law of unintended consequences? For a thousand years mandatory celibacy for priests has been a pivotal characteristic of the Catholic church. And in the millennium before that, priestly celibacy, though not required, was clearly the ideal--from which the mandatory celibacy of the second millennium was a quite logical deduction. Can any organization drop an institution that has played so critical a role in its history without provoking revolutionary transformations, perhaps even dissolution? Remember Gorbachev, who had no intention of destroying the Soviet Union when he detotalitarianized it.

The oddest thing of all about the promarriage party is that it seems to have little sense that the Catholic priesthood is a sacral institution trying to survive in a largely desacralized world. At least this is the situation that prevails in the United States, Canada, and Europe. But enchanted plants cannot grow in disenchanted soil. If the Catholic priesthood is to flourish, one of two things must happen: either the larger society must be resacralized, or Catholics must create a sacralized enclave for themselves within the larger society. (Neither alternative seems likely at the moment.)

The promarriage party is correct in having an acute sense that there is a fundamental incongruity between the celibate priesthood and contemporary culture. It would like to eliminate this incongruity by allowing priests to marry; which is to say, by bringing the priesthood in line with contemporary culture. But won't this produce a desacralized priesthood? And isn't a desacralized priesthood a contradiction in terms?

The Catholic church has a rich intellectual heritage. It is a pity this heritage is so little drawn on in the present controversy. Instead the promarriage party says silly things like, "This will solve the priest shortage," while the procelibacy party acts as though it had taken a vow of silence as well as a vow of celibacy.