Father Josh Whitfield is a married priest in Dallas who believes celibacy should be the norm in the Catholic Church: “I get that it’s hard to understand. But that’s sort of the irritating beauty of Catholicism.
DALLAS — The priest wakes up at 4 a.m. on the days he celebrates the early Mass, sipping coffee and enjoying the quiet while his young children sleep in rooms awash in stuffed animals and Sesame Street dolls and pictures of saints. Then he kisses his wife goodbye and drives through the empty suburban streets of north Dallas to the church he oversees.
Surveys of Catholics show widespread backing for a married priesthood. A series of reports in recent years by the Pew Research Center showing 62 percent support among U.S. Catholics, 56 percent among Brazilians — the world’s most populous Catholic nation — and 63 percent in Central and Eastern Europe.
The Catholic Church, which includes nearly two dozen rites, allows married priests in its Eastern Rite churches. It also allows in some married priests like Whitfield, a former Episcopal priest who converted to Catholicism with his wife, Alli, in 2009 and was ordained as a Catholic priest three years later.
Whitfield, 41, became a Catholic priest in 2012 through the Pastoral Provision, a set of rules crafted by Pope John Paul II in 1980 that gives married Episcopal priests who have converted to Catholicism the chance to apply for ordination in the Catholic church. “We are these very conservative men who have left the Episcopal church and now meet all these left-wing Catholics who are celebrating our presence,” said Father Paul Sullins, a married priest, father of three and longtime professor at Catholic University. “It can be uncomfortable at times, but we try to love each other.”“Whatever their politics on marriage, by the way they live their lives they show it’s entirely possible to have a married clergy. They are effective in their ministry.
Whitfield is a gentle-spoken man who beats himself up over his bad Spanish and wonders sometimes if he spends enough time with his children. He’s a relentless reader — his shelves hold everything from Jane Austen to Dickens to Ta-Nehisi Coates to treatises on Catholic theology and a biography of St. Benedict.The demands on Whitfield are relentless: Masses, confession, church administration, counseling, bureaucratic issues with the church’s school, regional clergy meetings.
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