No. 2 of To Feed The Flock’s 10 suggestions for extending ordination reads as follows:
“ (ii) celibacy is already waived to permit convert Anglican clergymen to be
ordained as priests. It would still exist, of course for religious orders.”
Part 1.
(Obviously, this blog will not take up an anti-celibacy position.
We are old-fashioned enough to still pay heed to the Gospels, in this case
to Matthew 19:12 . The positive merits of celibacy are encapsulated on many websites,
and are particularly valuable to the religious orders, the engine room
of the Church to come.)
What we will take exception to is when it keeps the Eucharist from the Flock.

Thackeray is said to have leapt and danced round the room several times when “Vanity Fair” as a title occurred to him. When the expression “married priest” comes up in any conversation dealing with why we are not allowed to get the Eucharist, it is tempting to do the same,for very different reasons.
The expression “married priest” immediately creates a contra-cultural roadblock in any discussion about how the Eucharist is to given to the world as Christ asked.
The image of the Tridentine celibate parish-supported secular priest is part of the very fibre of the Western Church, gathering about itself even among the more rational of us certain expectations and suppositions. Dr Halliday Sutherland
in his “Irish Journey” reminded us that there can be less rational expectations and suppositions when he met someone who had given up the Church for two years having heard that priests used the toilet.
“Married priest” for some seems inevitably to bring to mind children’s jammy fingers among the chasubles , bell, book and candle for recalcitrant mothers in law, and a wide range of other distinctly distracting matrimonial situations.
The problem appears to have solved itself. There can never now be married priests supported by a parish, except in the case of Anglican converts.
The secular priest as a phenomenon has almost disappeared, taking with it the distinctly dodgy concept- given its obvious track record in recent years- of “vocation”. The real “problem” with celibacy of course has been compulsory
celibacy , to avoid claims on Church property by a priest’s children, embarrassing short-sighted and ludicrous though this may seem to us, but one which made sense in its way to small agricultural mediaeval communities. The past is another world, the mediaeval world another universe, and yet the provision of the Eucharist for the Flock still depends on it in 2014, in the world of the megapolis,of instant world-wide communication , of sex as a dominant, pervasive
element of society.
Does celibacy really have anything at all to do with Christ’s imperative that we change our lives and our world through the Eucharist ?

(to be continued)