Forty-Four Years as a Married Priest: Lessons Learned

Reverend Carl Hemmer

This year, 2012, I’ll turned 80 and will finish 44 years as a married priest. Fifty years ago, in 1962, when I was ordained, I could not have imagined writing these words. Now, I cannot imagine any lifetime that I would have preferred to live.

Looking back, I’ll try to answer three large questions: (1) why did I decide to marry after ordination? (2) How did marriage and priesthood shape my subsequent life? And (3) what have I learned about myself and the Church through this experience?

(1) Why did I marry seventeen years after I entered the Jesuit Order and a few years after I accepted celibacy as a condition for my ordination? It was in 1966, several years after my ordination that celibacy became an unforeseen life-decision for me. Before this time, it had never occurred to me that I might someday choose to become a married priest.

While studying for a doctorate at Columbia University, a lay student at my dormitory asked me to comment on a critique of priestly celibacy that he had run across in Cross Currents magazine. The study opened my eyes to the origins of the Church’s rule of celibacy. For the first time, I came to understand why celibacy had been imposed on priests and why priests of the Latin rite were beginning to question this rule and argue that the Church should restore the right of priests to marry.

Over the next half-year, I consulted with respected Church officials, including one Cardinal, and had made a Jesuit retreat to examine my new understanding of celibacy. I concluded that I should personally volunteer to take a leading role in the evolving efforts to restore a married priesthood to the Church. As a priest whose training would let me support myself through teaching or professional work, I could help pioneer a return to optional celibacy by eliminating the common objection that the Church couldn’t change the rule because it couldn’t afford financial support for married priests and their families.

Working with other American priests who wanted a restoration of optional celibacy for Catholic priests, I helped to launch the National Association for Pastoral Renewal and, for several years, gathered proof for American bishops that a broad body of American priests wanted this change in their lives. The bishops quickly said “no” to our proposals, a view underlined firmly by Pope Paul VI’s letter on celibacy in June, 1967. With only one life to live, I chose to follow my conscience, marry, and seek a secular job to support my wife and subsequent family of two children.

(2) How did marriage shape my life over the last 44 years? First of all, the indispensable key to success as a married priest is to marry the right person – someone who is a willing and helpful partner in your ministry from the start.. I met my wife, Pat, at her Long Island parish shortly after I made the decision to marry, and we married in June, 1968. She’s been my invaluable partner over the years in promoting a married priesthood and in supporting my continuation of ministry.

A married priest needs a special kind of wife, one who is sufficiently brave and loyal to tell you when you’re wrong or repetitive in your sermons, one who insists on the best from you and who bears with the unrewarded task of being your most dependable critic, and one who insists on a balanced life that respects both your priesthood and your responsibilities as a husband and father.

After we married, I started working for the federal government in Washington. On the side, I helped found the Federation of Christian Ministries and CORPUS, two reform groups committed to the acceptance of a married priesthood. My background as a priest was widely known since I continued a series of TV and print media appearances with my wife, published several accounts of my decision to become a married priest, and occasionally officiated at marriages and baptisms for my colleagues.

I refused laicization after I discovered that it is designed to intimidate priests into abandoning all ministry. Soon after moving to Washington, I became a regular presider for weekly liturgies of a local lay group that had gathered to oppose Humanae Vitae. Later on, another home liturgy group formed that welcomed my service as a liturgical presider over the next twenty-five years. I also began to officiate at weddings in 1969 and have continued to preside over weddings, baptisms, and occasional funerals to the present day.

After retiring in 1998, I volunteered to serve as a non-denominational chaplain for Hospice and unofficially served many Catholic patients. For the past two years, my wife and I have been living in a 700+ resident retirement community for seniors, and I’ve presided over many services of an inter-faith church that meets on the campus. I don’t expect to retire from ministry as long as my health allows me to serve.

(3) Let me turn now to my final question: what did I learn over nearly 44 years as a married priest? Looking back, I’ve learned three important lessons. First of all, married priests would be welcomed by Catholics if the Church would permit optional celibacy. Even without Church approval, countless Catholics have told me over the years that they like married priests and support the right of priests to marry. Why is this so?

In part, it’s because the marriage of a priest says clearly that marriage and normal lay life is not a step down from a full living of Christian life. Celibacy is nearly impossible to separate from clerical separation, from an implicit claim that priests are somehow holier and better than those who are immersed in marriage and family. These are all good things, the Church says, but not as good as lives that forego them. A married priest fully experiences the lives most believers live, especially if he carries on a secular world job to support his family. A married priest speaks the same language as lay members, and is more likely to lean on personal experience of the meaning of the gospels than the reflections of those withdrawn from what are often viewed as “worldly distractions”. I’ve often found that lay Catholics see a married priest as a conscious affirmation of the goodness of the lives they have chosen.

A second lesson I have learned over my married life is that, apart from marriage, it’s very difficult if not impossible for a celibate priest to fully respect the worth of women. A celibate priest is supposed to work with women but never cross the line of attraction that God built into human beings. How can a priest genuinely know qualified women and yet maintain a belief that women who meet the same qualifications as men should be excluded from ordination simply because of their gender? How can ministry really embody the insights and perceptions that are gifts based on gender-experience if one gender is excluded from serving as priests? How can your partner in marriage and the raising of a family be your equal if she is excluded, precisely because of her gender, from being a leader in worship?

My wife has not only supported my choice of married priesthood but has been my indispensable partner in serving as a priest. I am richer because of her insights and lessons-learned that need to be included in homilies. Her sense of what others need – for example, couples preparing for marriage – gives me the benefit of her perceptions to fill in what I miss.

If my wife wanted to be a priest (she doesn’t), marriage has confirmed my conviction that an all-male priesthood is just as much a changeable human Church rule as celibacy. The partnership that marriage requires teaches any married priest that men and women were destined to work together and be each other’s helpmates without exclusion for any particular walk of life.

The third and final lesson I’ve reluctantly learned has been that one should never count on the Church to accept major changes in centuries-old rules in one’s own lifetime. The Church is above all an institution that intends to survive and that selects leaders who are very risk-averse. Priestly celibacy has been a valued trademark of Latin Rite ministers for more than a millennium. Church leaders tend to think that celibacy works well. It creates a corps of ministers that is largely free of competing family needs, that forms a family of brothers with its own internal rules and rewards, and that functions as a reliable distributor of Church services.

Priests are not expected or encouraged to excel as prophets and reformers. The theology and spirituality that makes celibacy into an indispensable identifier for priests is inspired in its principles and discipline more by monastic experience than from gospel accounts of the married disciples who accompanied Jesus.

It’s likely that not even John XXIII could have introduced optional celibacy without enormous resistance and turmoil from senior churchmen. Working with other priests who wanted the right to marry, we naively thought that what the Church might make optional celibacy happen if we proposed a familiar and proven institutional mechanism to handle the issues that would arise in creating a new corps of married priests. In 1966-67, we proposed a special ordinariate that would coordinate the work of married priests with the rest of the Church.

The Church’s response to our proposal was silence. In contrast, we learned that the Church was quietly welcoming convert married ministers to receive ordination and take on pastoral assignments for the Church. It was hurtful and insulting to learn that the Church would grant to convert ministers what it refuses to offer to born-Catholic priests. Two generations after our initiative in the 60s, again with converts in mind, Rome has now created a special ordinariate – like the one we proposed -- to manage the transition of convert ministers who are married Anglican priests. The new proposal foresees an end to optional celibacy from its start by ruling that, with the decease of their wives, these priests would remain celibate in the future. Married priesthood in the Latin Rite would be tolerated for a limited period but not welcomed as a continuing practice.

In short, I learned over more than four decades that it was right to follow my conscience and marry, but it was naïve to believe that the Church might, in my lifetime, accept a change in its long-established law of celibacy. Church leaders rarely welcome even minor changes in the way the Church operates. Church leaders are institutionally chosen to be its caretaker who will follow proven and safe paths. They are uneasy with prophetic and reforming voices. The Church is historically more likely to cannonade its pioneers and prophets before it decides to embrace their message and canonize them.

In God’s good time, in some future day we cannot yet see, perhaps after more years of married convert ministers have turned married ministry into a familiar experience for Catholic parishes, the Church may conclude that the restoration of optional celibacy is a change whose time has finally come for all Catholics. Those of us who have chosen to pay the price of dismissal from Church ministry because we chose to marry can only hope that, somehow, our witness to the value of marriage for priests will hasten the day of change and encourage generations of future priests to follow our paths.

Carl's reflection published on July 17, 2107 on the occasion of his 50th anniversary of ordination can be read at the blog site of Ruth Eberhart by clicking here

Carl entered the fullness of life on May 24, 2020. You will find his obituary by clicking here