From The New York Times-
On New Year’s Day, the Vatican announced the formation of a nationwide ordinariate — kind of a diocese without borders — for Episcopal priests and their congregations who want to move together into Roman Catholicism. The big news is not that some Episcopalians will have a zippier express lane into Catholicism, but that there will soon be even more married Catholic priests in America.
And married priests raise provocative questions for the Catholic Church, whose shortage of clergymen is worsening by the day.
Most Americans, perhaps most American Catholics, do not know that the church allows married priests. But there have always been married priests in the non-Latin rites, like Ukrainian Catholicism or Maronite Catholicism. These churches are fully Catholic, obedient to the pope, but they ordain married men, although they do not allow unmarried priests to get married.
There were always some married priests in Roman Catholicism, too, until the First Lateran Council, in 1123, banned the practice. And there have been married Roman Catholic priests again since 1980, when the church said that Protestant clergymen who became Catholic priests could stay married to their wives.
More here-
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/07/us/married-roman-catholic-priests-are-testing-a-tradition.html
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