69000 Lost Shepherds

The number of priests who have married since the Second Vatican Council.

11200 found their way back after separation or death. Just over a thousand priests a year are leaving to marry. About 200 will come back sooner or later.

The headline figure is dreadful but the number who come back is surprisingly high.

Ex-priests also more often than not marry ex-nuns. It should be drummed into nuns how wicked it would be to marry a runaway priest.

Like St John Nepomuk, consider your vocation. He decided to be ordained to substitute for a runaway priest.
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Unknown said…
"Ex-priests also more often than not marry ex-nuns. It should be drummed into nuns how wicked it would be to marry a runaway priest."

It is a diriment impediment, and the marriage can never be valid. That's my understanding of religious who are under vows.
6:26 PM
knit_tgz said…
Please, be charitable. I know very closely someone who is a child of a priest and a novice (she had not made her perpetual vows yet), and that child has been shamed by "faithful Christians" who seem not to understand that the child has no fault whatsoever. Also, the parents' Catholic marriage is valid, the priest-father received the ecclesiastic dispensation. And also, please do not suggest, as some people did when that friend of mine was a child, that the father should leave his wife, stay-at-home mother, and their small children, to be a priest again. As, in first place, that is against the Law of Church (as long as his wife is alive he cannot do that, though if she dies first he can), and it is also very uncharitable for the children, who had their father as their breadwinner.

And I say priest, and not ex-priest, because if a man was consecrated a priest, he never ceases to be a priest, according to Canon law, even when he gets the special dispensation to get married from the Vatican. To such extent he is still a priest that he is recommended not to have visible helping functions in a church, so as to not confuse the faithful.To such extent that her father never ever utters the consecration words, because if he did that, the consecration would be valid, though irregular. To such extent that, by Canon law, if there is some situation where a sacrament is needed and there is way a regular priest can do it, he MUST celebrate the sacrament. But only in extreme situations, like someone is in imminent death and asks for the sacraments and there's no way to get a regular priest in due time.

Of course it is regrettable that priests leave, but please consider your language and also consider the children of those people. We are called to hate sin, but to embrace the sinners, as we all are sinners.
10:00 PM
Catholic Conclave said…
It is a bit more than regrettable.

Think about the Poor Souls who would have been assisted by their Masses.
9:28 AM
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