Why Catholic Priests Practice Celibacy

IN AN interview with a German magazine earlier this month, Pope Francis suggested that he would be open to the idea of allowing married men to become priests. Such a change, though momentous, would be a return to, rather than a break from, early Christian tradition: nowhere does the New Testament explicitly require priests to be celibate. For the first thousand years of Christianity it was not uncommon for priests to have families. The first pope, St Peter, was a married man; many early popes had children. How did celibacy become part of the Catholic tradition?