Clerical Celibacy (Catholic Church) - Eastern Catholic Churches

Eastern Catholic Churches

In general, the Eastern Catholic Churches allow ordination of married men as priests. Within the lands of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, the largest Eastern Rite Catholic Church, priests' children often became priests and married within their social group, establishing a tightly-knit hereditary caste. In North America, for fear that married priests would create scandal among Latin Rite Catholics, Eastern Catholic bishops usually ordained only unmarried men; but since the Second Vatican Council called for restoration of Eastern Catholic traditions, some of them have returned to the elsewhere traditional Eastern practice of ordaining married men to the presbyterate. A condition for becoming an Eastern Catholic bishop is to be unmarried or a widower.

Read more about this topic:  Clerical Celibacy (Catholic Church)

Famous quotes containing the words eastern, catholic and/or churches:

    Your Beauty, ripe, and calm, and fresh,
    As Eastern Summers are,
    Must now, forsaking Time and Flesh,
    Add light to some small Star.
    Sir William Davenant (1606–1668)

    A vegetarian is not a person who lives on vegetables, any more than a Catholic is a person who lives on cats.
    George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950)

    Can you conceive what it is to native-born American women citizens, accustomed to the advantages of our schools, our churches and the mingling of our social life, to ask over and over again for so simple a thing as that “we, the people,” should mean women as well as men; that our Constitution should mean exactly what it says?
    Mary F. Eastman, U.S. suffragist. As quoted in History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 4 ch. 5, by Susan B. Anthony and Ida Husted Harper (1902)