Why are Catholic Priests forbidden to marry?
The simple answer is given above (i.e. Priests are not married in order to be free of other responsibilities so that they can devote their entire lives to their people). However, as in other cases this it only the basics. Some other reasons follow: 1. Priests are require to remain celibate in order to imitate Christ, who was celibate. 2. Sex, according to Catholic teaching is a sacred act that is to be confined to marriage. Marriage, itself is a Sacrament which means that it (and the people who are married to each other) is to be a sign of God’s love to the world. Like all seven Sacraments, it is a source of Grace (the free and unmerited favor or beneficence of God). Ideally, a married couple should, by the power of this Grace, model some of the various aspects of God’s nature: Love, Forgiveness, Permanence, Unity, Life Creating, Parenting, etc. The Sacramental married couple should order their lives so that the world can get a glimpse of some of what God is really like. And the marrie
There’s the doctrinal answer: that priests sacrifice worldly pleasure in order to be closer to God. Nuns, for example, are the “brides of Christ” and they don’t engage in sexual activity because that would be a betrayal of their “wedding” vows. There’s also the real world answer. The earliest Christians actually believed that Jesus Christ would return “any day now” and avoided having children. This was obviously a self-defeating policy, as the numbers of believers would decrease with every succeeding generation, and as time passed people realized that Armageddon wasn’t coming any time soon. The taboos about childbirth were relaxed and everyone enjoyed families. However, after the collapse of the Roman Empire and the rise of feudalism, with local lords holding fiefs, and many of those lords being bishops, archbishops and cardinals, the Church faced a crisis of heredity. Centralized power would be greatly diminished if Church lands passed onto the sons of the bishops who were already the
