A day in the life of a Married Priest
Mr. Priest: Honey, I'm home.
Mrs. Priest: So how was your day at the office?
Mr. Priest: Busy as usual and I spent about five hours hearing confessions.
Mrs. Priest: Really, tell my some of the juicy bits.
Mr. Priest: We have gone over this before. You know I can't reveal what I heard in confession.
Mrs. Priest: I don't like you keeping secrets from me. It's not good for a healthy relationship. You know you can trust me to not tell anybody else.
Mr. Priest: Revealing what goes on in confession leads to an automatic excommunication. St. John Nepomucen was killed because he would not reveal the queens confession.
Mrs. Priest: Well if you don't tell me anything, then your next. Well, never-mind. Don't forget that little Jimmy has his soccer game at ten tomorrow.
Mr. Priest: Ten? You know I will be saying Mass then.
Mrs. Priest: Your work is always interfering with our family. You spend way too much time there and you are so full of excuses You need to reevaluate your priorities and put our family first.
Mr. Priest: Being a priest is not just a nine to five job. After the Vatican approved optional celibacy and we got married, I told you that it would be a rough life and full of sacrifice. Remember that the Bible says You are a priest for ever after the order of Melchizedek.
Mrs. Priest: Well I am sure that Mrs. Melchizedek had a couple things to say to her husband also. Going around and offering heads of tribes a sacrifice of bread and wine instead of taking the garbage out. Which reminds me, you need to take the garbage out.
Mr. Priest: I will as soon as I am done praying evening prayer.
Mrs. Priest: It is always something. Prayer, rosaries, retreats, picketing abortion clinics, marrying people, baptism, et cetera, et cetera. Maybe one day you will be holy enough that you can levitate the garbage outside. You would think that you are married to the Church or something.
Mr. Priest: As a priest I am responsible for the souls in my parish. It is a heavy responsibility and it is difficult to balance the parish life and the family life.
Mrs. Priest: Another thing comes to mind. Could you get people to stop calling you Father? Little Susy keeps wondering just how many brothers and sisters she has in this city.
Mr. Priest: I am a spiritual father just as St. Paul called some of his converts children.
Mrs. Priest: Your no St. Paul and just look at all the hours you spend at work and look at your pitiful salary. Do you think that we can afford college and a mortgage? Monthly bills like Life and Martyrs Insurance have to be paid. Tomorrow I want you to march right down and tell your boss that you need a raise.
Mr. Priest: But honey, I just can't walk up to the Bishop and demand a raise. It just isn't done.
Mrs. Priest: I should have been suspicious when I found out that Bishop meant overseer. Those bad aliens in Alien Nation were also called overseers. With their fancy robes, colored socks, and mitre they forget about their workers. What is ever more unfair is that they won't advance married priests to the episcopacy. Just because the Orthodox have maintained a similar tradition since the beginning is no reason for us to copy it. It is just not fair that there is a stained glass ceiling for married priests. I could picture myself as Mrs. Pope. Though we would need to update the Pope Mobile so that it could fit our family. A papal SUV or family van would be more fitting.
Phone Rings...
Mr. Priest: That was the parish secretary. I need to go to St. Luke's Hospital to hear a dying man's confession.
Mrs. Priest: I know, anything to get out of taking out the garbage.
Known as 
You think your funny, but your not. I did not know part of Catholic Doctrine was "thou shall mock....".
Though I think a bit over exaggerated, I think you hit the nail on the head. These are some of the problems that would arise should priests allowed to be married, though I think the wife of a priest would be more understanding and less demanding. From personal experience I know how empty a rectory can be sometimes. While I was stationed in a parish for 3 summers, I can remember going three weeks without a call after the office closed at noon. No sick calls, no nothing. Then again, I also know how it is to work in a busy parish with no rest. Anyways, on this issue I submit to the authority of Holy Mother Church. Whatever she decides is best, I will agree with, though married priests would definitely be a tough thing to have.
If you think "your" funny, you're right. This is hilarious, and highlights some considerable problems, especially concerning the confessional; if absolute trust is needed in a relationship, it'd be tough to acknowledge that some things just need to remain secret in the priest's life.
You're also not "mocking" any individual personally, since this is a piece of situational satire. And there is no piece of doctrine that says satire and irony work against the Catholic faith.
Good work, Jeff.
I think you're funny because you are. This is hysterical. And I even spelled "you're" right.
I think you hit the nail on the head.
Some people might say it is unrealistic or too outragious...but I think it is a real look at what could happen, heavens forbid, if optional celibacy was allowed!
And since when does the absence of "thou shall mock" mean you can't have some fun? I never read "thou shalt go to the bathroom when thy needest to" but I'm gonna do it anyway.
Since I come from an Anglican use parish, we have a married priest. He is also my confessor, and I have no doubt that my confession is complete safe with him. I have never feared it being the dinner table conversation.
Our priest's wife does have an extremely difficult job, though. Fr A told her 40 years ago, when they married, that the church would always come first. She agreed, and that's the way it has been.
She's done some amazing work through the years, and it's been a tough life, in some ways, for her and the kids. Not one that *I* would pick.
One thing I will say, and this is from experience over the past 3 years--when some priestly emergency comes up on the holidays (a suicide one year, annointing of the sick the other 2 years), the only priests to be found in our whole area after Christmas Day masses were the married ones--who left home and family to do their duty.
You know I LOVE you, Jester. I just had to put in a little of the other side!
Based on my experience with married Protestant clergy, I'd say Mrs. Priest would know much of the content of confessions, not because Mr. Priest broke the seal, but because many of the penitent would have "rehearsed" their confessions in the Priest family kitchen, when they knew the Mr. would be away and the children asleep.
Greetings!
I think the conversation portrayed, while humorous, is also pretty realistic if we had married priests.
AND, it is precisely WHY we should have married priests. Priests should have to take out the trash and learn to balance family life with work and so forth just like other Christians!
I am not knocking celibates - and there were always celibate priests even when priests married widely for the first 1139 of Church history.
And other married Christians than priests should have to say Evening prayer when they come home, etc....
Regarding the incident with confession, psychologist have the same issue, as do married clergy in other denominations and religions, doctors, and many other professions. Indeed, in some cases, it is not only immoral to violate privacy, but illegal. The seal is confession is not threatened by married priesthood, though I am sure the conversation portrayed above would happen on occassion.
And priests CAN balance the load, because, as another reader already commented, priests do not ACTUALLY receive sick calls every night. Like the reader who spent 3 months in a rectory, I spent a full year and several summers!
While there are times a priest may work late, the hours are not that much different than the hours I work now in a secular profession. The main difference is that priests have very little to do in the middle of the day, but a lot in the morning and early evening and weekends - the times most others are off. But just like a man working night shifts at a hospital, an odd work schedule is NOT justification to forbid a man to marry!
Peace and Blessings!
jcecil3
Humor me as I get this off my bosom:
jcecil3, I don't think you have to be married in order to "take out the trash and learn to balance family life with work and so forth just like other Christians." Surely you aren't implying that unmarried persons, religious or lay, are somehow missing the true Christian mark?
On to more pressing matters:
Mr. Miller, I really enjoyed this post. However, it appears to be more a comment on the female sex than married priests.
As Terry (see above) and I are both members of the Roman Catholic Church's Anglican Rite, our priest is married and we are in the unusual position of being led to Heaven by a married Catholic priest.
Okay, I *did* laugh, but I agree that this is more of a commentary on female character than married priests.
No man ought to put up with such a nudge (as my Yiddish religion professor in college would have said) -- clergyman or not.
However, having come from a Protestant background and worked in a church office, I know that many of the issues that you touched on really do occur. The life of a diligent, service-oriented clergyman is very difficult for his family. Missed soccer games, sudden calls in the night -- that's all a reality.
My best friend's father died suddenly one night, and her family tried to contact her church so that her pastor could tell her of his death personally rather than giving her the news over the phone. However, it was discovered that the wife of the particular pastor on call that night routinely turned the ringers off on the family telephones so that if her husband got paged after a certain hour, he wouldn't know it and thus wouldn't disrupt "family time."
Since it was a staff of 5-7 pastors the whole time he was in service with that particular congregation, the pastor in question was only on call overnight once or twice a week. It's not like every night of the week was given over to serving the congregation, but even that little was "too much" for the wife, and she did what she could to prevent such "intrusions."
On the other hand, I do know some pastor's wives who work diligently to support their husbands' calls to ministry, not only managing things at home virtually as single mothers, but also logging in countless hours of unpaid service to the congregation.
Either way, though, the pressures of being available to the congregation are difficult to balance with the obligations of husbandry and fatherhood.
That is a funny conversation! Anyone who is married and has a demanding job (or even a *normal* job these days) should be able to identify with it. Both marriage and celibacy surely have their trials and their rewards, and I agree with jcecil3 that there are good reasons we *should* have married priests.
That woman, that would be me. Even though I would know better, and try to be better, I am too selfish and too much of a pain in the posterior to deal with my hubby having a higher calling/vocation than moi.