the last book I ever read (Jesus Wept: Seven Popes and the Battle for the Soul of the Catholic Church, excerpt four

from Jesus Wept: Seven Popes and the Battle for the Soul of the Catholic Church by Philip Shenon:

The church faced another important debate about sexuality. Many priests around the world dared not say it out loud, but their greatest hope for Vatican II was that the world’s bishops would rewrite church law to allow them to marry. The Vatican had always portrayed the so-called doctrine of priestly celibacy as eternal and irreversible, but it was neither. It is not demanded in the Gospels, nor was it a way of life followed by the twelve apostles. There is a traditional understanding among Christian theologians that Jesus was celibate and unmarried, but the New Testament does not state that explicitly. There is, by comparison, compelling evidence in scripture to show that most of the apostles, as well as most of Jesus’s larger band of disciples, were married. The apostle Peter had a wife whose ailing mother was healed by the Savior, as recorded in three of the four Gospels. For a thousand years after the Crucifixion, priests almost always took wives and experienced both the comfort and the chaos of a family. Like Peter, other early popes were married. That changed in the eleventh century with the election of a strong-willed pope, Gregory VII, who rewrote church law to demand lifetime celibacy for all priests and bishops, including those already married. Historians believe the decision was motivated in part by Gregory’s disgust over the scandals of a group of shockingly promiscuous Roman bishops. Other accounts suggest he was equally motivated by money—by the struggle to balance the Vatican’s budget. By demanding celibacy, he guaranteed the estates of dead priests—their homes and anything else of value—were turned over to the church. Since churchmen were often drawn from families of great wealth, including royalty, his decision promised a vast new source of income. Nine centuries later, the doctrine was blamed for a worldwide shortage of priests, which had become a crisis for the church by the 1950s, when thousands of men left the priesthood each year, most to marry. In many countries, there were not nearly enough new priests to replace them, in part because so many millions of young men died in battle in World War II, which emptied out seminaries. The situation was especially dire in South America, a continent where virtually every man and woman was born Catholic. The centuries-old migration of European-born priests to serve parishes in Latin America largely dried up. In some urban areas of Brazil, the world’s most populous Catholic nation, there was a ratio of one priest to every twelve thousand people. Brazilians born deep in the Amazon rain forest might see a priest only a few times in their lives. It was well-known inside the Vatican, but never acknowledged publicly, that South American bishops turned a blind eye to the fact that many priests in rural areas had common-law wives and children.