These essays offer a historically rigorous dismantling of Western claims about the superiority of celibate priests. Although celibacy is often seen as a distinctive feature of the Catholic priesthood, both Catholic and Orthodox Churches in fact have rich and diverse traditions of married priests. The essays contained in Married Priests in the Catholic Church offer the most comprehensive treatment of these traditions to date. These essays, written by a wide-ranging group that includes historians, pastors, theologians, canon lawyers, and the wives and children of married Roman Catholic, Eastern Catholic, and Eastern Orthodox priests, offer diverse perspectives from many countries and traditions on the subject, including personal, historical, theological, and canonical accounts. As a collection, these essays push especially against two tendencies in thinking about married priesthood today. Against the idea that a married priesthood would solve every problem in Catholic clerical culture, this collection deromanticizes and demythologizes the notion of married priesthood. At the same time, against distinctively modern theological trends that posit the superiority, apostolicity, and “ontological” necessity of celibate priests, this collection refutes the claim that priestly ordination and celibacy must be so closely linked. In addressing the topic of married priesthood from both practical and theoretical angles, and by drawing on a variety of perspectives, Married Priests in the Catholic Church will be of interest to a wide audience, including historians, theologians, canon lawyers, and seminary professors and formators, as well as pastors, parish leaders, and laypeople. Contributors: Adam A. J. DeVille, David G. Hunter, Dellas Oliver Herbel, James S. Dutko, Patrick Viscuso, Alexander M. Laschuk, John Hunwicke, Edwin Barnes, Peter Galadza, David Meinzen, Julian Hayda, Irene Galadza, Nicholas Denysenko, William C. Mills, Andrew Jarmus, Thomas J. Loya, Lawrence Cross, and Basilio Petrà.

In 1980 Pope John Paul II and the American Bishops agreed to accept married Episcopal priests into the Roman Catholic Priesthood in a program known as the Pastoral Provision. While many Catholic priests had left their active ministries for marriage, here the Catholic Church made an historically unprecedented invitation to the priesthood for already married men. This is the true story of the journey of one such priest and his wife. Father Peter Dally, an Episcopal priest for twenty-eight years, was one of the first men to apply to the program. In a tale that exposes the complexities and uncertainties, the personal challenges and emotional trauma, the religious politics, and precarious financial difficulties surrounding such a change of churches, the Dallys discover a renewed strength in their relationship and are ultimately rewarded with success, though they must first leave Washington State and move to Tulsa, Oklahoma, before Peter is ordained after five years of struggle. This book is religious history in the making, but it is also a warm, human story of a loving married couple, their mutual support, and profound faith. This book is the revised and updated second edition. The first edition, published in 1988 by Loyola University Press, received and Oklahoma Writers Federation Award for the Best Nonfiction Book by an Oklahoma Writer in 1989. From the Foreword by Bishop Eusebius Beltran, Bishop of Tulsa: "....I never fully recognized the depth and intensity of her own experiences until I read this, her own account. Until then, The Pastoral Provisions pointed merely to the men who were to be ordained. Now I see them encompassing the wives and families, indeed, the whole Church."

Based on one hundred fifteen interviews augmented by biographical, survey, and historical research, Keeping the Vow tells the story of married priests and their wives, their unusual and difficult journey from Anglicanism, and their life in the Catholic Church. The book combines personal narratives and sociological analysis to provide a clear view of the priesthood's collective features, and discusses the implications of the married priesthood for the future of the Church.

When Mary Vincent married Peter Dally, an Episcopal priest, she expected to raise their family cradled in the security of a normal pastoral ministry somewhere in the Pacific Northwest. However, that all changed in 1980 when the Roman catholic Church announced that it would ordain married Episcopal priests in a program known as the Pastoral Provision. One of the first to apply, Father Peter was ordained a Catholic priest in 1985 in Tulsa, Oklahoma. He served congregations there with Mary beside him until 1998 when he retired. Mary describes for the reader the challenges the couple faced in this very dissimilar religious culture, the warmth of the people of Oklahoma, the humor of their unusual situation, and the poignant events that make up their days. She tells how she and Peter coped with his mysterious occasional exclusion as a married priest, and the isolation and loneliness she experienced as the wife of a priest. This true story is an exciting and challenging adventure in living an improbable lifestyle. You're sure to enjoy this heartwarming personal account.

“The Catholic Church saved my marriage and, quite possibly, my life.” So begins David Anders in this remarkably forthright book. In it, David reports that by the early 2000s, his marriage was so painful he actually longed for death. It wasn’t simple incompatibility; he and his wife had just one thing in common: contempt for each other. Today, David and his wife are happy together – not because of marriage therapy, but because they came to know and fully embraced the Catholic Church’s teachings on marriage. Many people who encounter such teachings are shocked by their rigor. Yet the Church offers much more than rules about sexual restraint; she offers a way to make marriage into something supernatural, even mystical. Here Dr. Anders shares his personal discovery of the Church’s teaching on marriage and offers a robust defense of the Church’s most controversial teachings, including divorce, remarriage, gay marriage, and contraception. With the Church’s teachings and the writings of the saints as his guide, he also offers practical, time-tested ways to improve your marriage, such as how to live in peace despite an unhappy marriage, the value of suffering, and ways to overcome your reluctance to forgive grave offenses. In a culture that breaks apart marriages and undermines human dignity, Dr. David Anders offers a hope-filled alternative for those who live moral and spiritual lives in union with Christ and His Church.

“The Church today demands a profound renewal of celibate priesthood and the fatherhood to which it is ordered.” Priestly celibacy, some say, is an outdated relic from another age. Others see it as a lonely way of life. But as Fr. Carter Griffin argues in Why Celibacy?: Reclaiming the Fatherhood of the Priest, the ancient practice of celibacy, when lived well, helps a priest exercise his spiritual fatherhood joyfully and fruitfully. Along the way, Griffin explores: the question of optional celibacy some pitfalls of celibate paternity the selection and formation of candidates for celibate priesthood why biological fathers are also called to spiritual fatherhood the powerful impact of celibacy on the Church and the wider culture In a critical moment for the Catholic priesthood, Fr. Griffin brings light and hope with a new perspective on the Church’s perennial wisdom on celibacy.

One of the greatest and best-loved spokesmen for the Faith here sets out the Church's beautiful understanding of marriage in his trademark clear and entertaining style. Frankly and charitably, Sheen presents the causes of and solutions to common marital crises, and tells touching real-life stories of people whose lives were transformed through marriage. He emphasizes that our Blessed Lord is at the center of every successful and loving marriage. This is a perfect gift for engaged couples, or for married people as a fruitful occasion for self-examination.

Long before Jesus Christ instituted the sacrament of holy orders, God the Father commanded Adam and Eve and their descendents to be fertile, increase, and multiply and fill the earth, and this command includes candidates for the priesthood in the Latin Rite. It is the author’s firm conviction that the law of celibacy is a serious violation a priest’s basic rights. Most men and women not only need to love God, but also to love a person of the opposite sex at the conjugal level. It is natural, it is healthy, it is most rewarding, and it is a right the church did not enact and require the vow of celibacy to help priests grow spiritually, but for all of the wrong reasons. Eliminate it NOW.

Deals with the moral, psychological, and social challenges faced by Roman Catholic priests who left the active ministry in the 1960s and 1970s to get married--men who chose responsible sexual relationships over a life of obligatory celibacy.

“Courageous and inspiring.”—Karen Armstrong, author of The Case for God “James Carroll takes us to the heart of one of the great crises of our times.”—Stephen Greenblatt, author of The Swerve An eloquent memoir by a former priest and National Book Award–winning writer who traces the roots of the Catholic sexual abuse scandal back to the power structure of the Church itself, as he explores his own crisis of faith and journey to renewal NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY PUBLISHERS WEEKLY James Carroll weaves together the story of his quest to understand his personal beliefs and his relationship to the Catholic Church with the history of the Church itself. From his first awakening of faith as a boy to his gradual disillusionment as a Catholic, Carroll offers a razor-sharp examination both of himself and of how the Church became an institution that places power and dominance over people through an all-male clergy. Carroll argues that a male-supremacist clericalism is both the root cause and the ongoing enabler of the sexual abuse crisis. The power structure of clericalism poses an existential threat to the Church and compromises the ability of even a progressive pope like Pope Francis to advance change in an institution accountable only to itself. Carroll traces this dilemma back to the Roman Empire and the Middle Ages, when Scripture, Jesus Christ, and His teachings were reinterpreted as the Church became an empire. In a deeply personal re-examination of self, Carroll grapples with his own feelings of being chosen, his experiences as a priest, and the moments of doubt that made him leave the priesthood and embark on a long personal journey toward renewal—including his tenure as an op-ed columnist at The Boston Globe writing about sexual abuse in the Church. Ultimately, Carroll calls on the Church and all reform-minded Catholics to revive the culture from within by embracing anti-clerical, anti-misogynist resistance and staying grounded in the spirit of love that is the essential truth at the heart of Christian belief and Christian life.