Saints and Sinners: Does Catholic Church have right idea?
“Love and marriage go together like a horse and carriage” says the song. “You can’t have one without the other.” Is the same true of the clergy? In most cases it is. Of the nearly 17,000 clergy members listed in the Clerical Directory of the Episcopal Church, only about 2,000 never married. This is not true of the Roman Catholic Church, however, where a rule of celibacy virtually guarantees the clergy will be unmarried. (Exceptions do occur, however, when a Protestant clergyman who is married becomes a Catholic priest.)
A Roman Catholic bishop once said to me, “We Catholics are fortunate to have a celibate ministry. A lot of Protestants wish they had it.”
He pointed to the time-consuming demands of the ministry and to the broken marriages among the Protestant clergy.
Is the bishop right? Would Protestant ministers be more effective if they were unmarried?
Many ministers — like many priests — work 12 to 15 hours a day. Is this fair to their wives and children? Then there is the problem a minister’s wife has of living up to the expectations of the congregation her husband serves.
Those expectations are not what they used to be (“Did you notice that Rev. Palmer’s wife wasn’t wearing stockings?”) but in some parishes, even today, a clergy wife is the subject of gossip about how she raises her children and a thousand and one other things.
All this adds to the tensions in the parsonage and cannot help but distract from a pastor’s effectiveness. Those who defend married clergy members contend that someone who is married is better able to counsel people with marital problems, but I wonder how strong that argument is.
Being married gives a person certain insights into the married state that he or she wouldn’t otherwise have. On the other hand, as one priest pointed out to me, the minister’s marital experience is confined to one marriage (or maybe two), and that will only be of limited help to him in dealing with the variety of marriage problems that come to him.
Nearing the end of his earthly ministry, Billy Graham has only one regret: he hasn’t spent enough time with his family, especially his wife, Ruth. In his book “Just as I Am” (Harper San Francisco, 1999), he writes that often he was too far away from his wife and even failed to recognize his own children at one point, because he had been away from them for so long.
Many other Protestant clergy know the feeling. Today, even stories of clergy infidelities have become commonplace.
When I was a parish pastor in Boston, three of the outstanding ministers in the city were bachelors. All of them were much sought after by husbands and wives in distress. Many would go to the Rev. Theodore Ferris, an Episcopal clergyman, one of America’s great preachers, for advice and comfort (which usually is more helpful than advice) on marital or family matters, although Ferris was a bachelor.
In this respect, many bachelor ministers are like those unmarried schoolteachers who may understand family life and problems better than those who are married.
As for the virtues of a celibate ministry (whatever they may be) over a married clergy, the Protestant churches will probably never adopt a singles-only lifestyle for their pastors. The question they must grapple with now is how to live with the problems of married life — especially the lack of quality time spent with their families. Unfortunately, not even Billy Graham has the answer to that one.
(George Plagenz is a syndicated columnist.)