Shadow Minister,

You're probably right.

I've been doing some research and Church history provides
a context here. The law was universally imposed on the
Western Church in the second half of the 11th and the
first part of the 12th centuries. Even the apostles
were married and all three synoptic gospels speak of Saint
Peter's mother-in-law, so the first pope must have had a
wife (Matthew 8:14-15; Mark 1:30-31; Luke 4:38-39). During
the first millennium the vast majority of clergy and bishops
were married, as were many of the popes and, despite the attempts
of some reformist local councils to impose celibacy, clerical
marriage was the recognised norm. It has never been universally
imposed in the eastern Orthodox Church and there are a number
of eastern-rite Catholic Churches in union with Rome which have
always had married priests.

What we have inherited from the medieval world is the clerical
system the notion that priests are somehow sacred , separate
from and superior to "ordinary" Catholics.
The whole issue is not about celibacy. It's about authority,
leadership, and power.

Foxy,

The Orthodox church has no problem with married priests. Their only requirement for celibacy is if one wants senior positions in the church such as Bishop or higher which are very few, and which tend to have a less direct connection with the community.

Shadow Minister,

The Catholic Church's authorities still hang onto the
requirement of celibacy as a precondition for ordination.
This requirement was imposed on the clergy of the
western church in the 11th century for reasons that make
absolutely no sense today. Even then it apparently had
nothing to do with improving the spiritual or moral life
of priests. Celibacy apparently was used in the 11th century
as a way of maintaining a primitive form of ritual purity,
and of preventing the alienation of church property by laity
and stopping priest-fathers from passing on their parishes to
their priest-sons. Nowadays the requirement of celibacy is
seen for what it is: a requirement of church law that could
be changed today.

But despite the massive shortage of priests and the fact that
many Australian bishops would probably ordain properly trained
married men immediately, they are hamstrung by popes and Roman
authorities who stolidly refuse to face up to the problem of the
shortage of clergy. In the process Catholicism, according to
former priest Paul Collins, is in danger of losing aspects of
its essential core - that is worship, Mass, and the Sacraments,
the heart of the church, and a defining element of what it
means to be Catholic.

cont'd ...

One explanation for the Church's policy on celibacy and
why Church authorities resist any changes was explained
by experienced church lawyer and former Sydney Auxiliary
Bishop, Geoffrey Robinson who stated that:

"I believe that the Catholic church is in a prison...
It constructed the prison for itself, locked itself in and
threw away the key. That prison is the prison of not being
able to be wrong ... Far too often the Catholic church
believed that it had such a level of divine guidance that
it did not need the right to be wrong ... even when clear
evidence emerges that earlier decisions were conditioned by
their own time and that the arguments for them are not as
strong as they were once thought to be."

This imprisonment in the past has been reinforced by the
doctrine of infallibility, which also conveys a sense that
the church can never be wrong.

It is precisely this that the church needs to confront -
especially today - with the issues of the seal of the
confessional and of child abuse.

Foxy,

I don't disagree with you at all. However, for the purists, the Catholic church is the only one that hasn't changed their teachings with the vagaries of opinions of the times, and with a large portion of their followers in countries for whom abortion, homosexuality etc are not accepted this is a huge plus.

Celibacy was only ever practised by a handful of priests & I'd imagine the same would apply to Nuns.
I recall when I was a kid when they apparently found tunnels leading from the priests' quarters to the Nuns in on old fortress in Europe. Rumour had it that many skeletons of babies were discovered in secret caves.