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	Priests Are Happy without Wives By Andrew Greeley Chicago Sun-Times December 5, 2007 http://www.suntimes.com/news/greeley/681158,CST-EDT-greel05.article It is time that knee-jerk Catholic liberals give up their knee-jerk response to the sexual abuse problem. "Let priests marry, let them have legitimate sexual pleasures and then they won't become pederasts." This argument, heard usually from those who would claim to be feminists, reduces the wife in a marriage to the role of satisfying a man's sexual needs so he won't have to victimize little or teenage boys. The recent study of schoolteachers as pederasts leaves little doubt that some married men and women will prey on students whenever they think they can get away with it. Nor are such predators necessarily gay. They might just be the kind of people who enjoy variety in their sexual partners. I never have been able to understand lay folk who are obsessed with the abolition of celibacy. It may well be an appropriate modification of the church in a time when most American young men do not find the priesthood an attractive way to spend their life. However, a cursory reading of the research literature on the personal and professional satisfaction among the clergy and reports from the spouses and children of Protestant (and Greek Orthodox and rabbinic) clergy indicates that family relations are an enormous problem for many of them. In addition to the usual problems of spouse and children to which all humans must respond, married clergy are subjected to pressures from their parishioners (who often assume that the spouse is an unpaid member of the parish team) and ecclesiastical authority who often assume that ministerial families must be like Caesar's wife -- beyond reproach in every way. Those crusading Catholic lay leaders, far from making life easier for their parish priest by permitting them to have spouses, might consider the possibility that they would make the priest's life even more difficult than it is. Survey data gathered at the National Opinion Research Center in its biennial General Social Survey indicate that clergy score higher on measures of personal and professional satisfaction than any other professional group. While there are problems for the professional cleric (not enough money to raise an upper-middle-class family, complete with a couple of cars and college education for all offspring), there are rewards and satisfactions that seem on balance to be better than in any other profession. Moreover, another NORC project found that Catholic priests had higher scores on measures of personal and professional satisfaction. They are in fact (despite the grumpy and grouchy ones you sometimes encounter) on the average the happiest men in America. Priests don't want to admit this because it deprives them of their self-pity. Nothing is more satisfying than feeling sorry for yourself, whether you be a doctor, lawyer, cop, accountant or priest. I see by the papers that priests in Milwaukee are sending a delegation to meet with their archbishop about the terrible state of their morale. Their plight may be worse than the average American priest's (as recorded in our surveys), but I kind of doubt it. We live in a vale of tears where things routinely go wrong and bad things often happen. There is no immunity from aggravations and heartache in life. Otherwise, why would so many priests seem to think that a wife would solve all their problems? The myth of a "morale problem" and the shame of the sexual abuse crisis probably explain why so many priests do not recruit young men to walk in their footsteps. The "vocation crisis" may well be a self-fulfilling prophecy. Self-pity does not attract others to walk your path. Most priests are happy in their work. It is time that they reveal this dirty little secret. Contact: agreel@aol.com
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