Proposal for Married Clergy Raises Interesting Complications

Not only was celibacy not the rule in the Western church for the first millennium, it is still not the rule for Eastern-rite churches, both those in communion with Rome and those that are not. I remember one of the first times a friend of mine said, "Yeah, I'm a priest's kid," and I was taken aback for a split second until I remembered that he was Greek Orthodox. A 1,000-year-long tradition is nothing to shake a stick at, to be sure, but it is not indelible either.