What can a contracepting couple say about marriage?
What can one who cohabited before marriage say about marriage?
What can someone who opens up internet porn say about marriage?
What can someone who has had multiple sex partners, whether before or during marriage, say about marriage?
What can one who, while making love with his wife, watches or fantasizes about other naked women say about marriage?
What can someone who has had an abortion, or encouraged one, say about marriage?

There. That just about includes anyone who thinks that a celibate priest has nothing to say about marriage.

Celibate priests speak this truth every day. Spacing children is, of course, only one of the valid reasons for recourse to the infertile time through the use of NFP. There are many others: illness, necessary spousal separation such as that which our married military men and women undergo, living the hormonal ups and downs of the return to fertility after childbirth, pre-menopause. Though this list is by no means comprehensive, these particular reasons can often require extended abstinence within marriage. Sometimes the abstinence is so extended that husband and wife live a temporary celibacy within their own marriage.

This is not unlike the sort of temporary celibacy lived by single men and women before marriage, if they are faithful to the Church. It also mirrors the sort of celibacy that can remain when a widow or widower chooses not to re-marry — sometimes permanently, sometimes temporarily. Finally, accident or disability can lead married couples to be physically incapable of the marital embrace for an extended period of time — or even permanently.

The faithful priest offers hope in the reality of his life well-lived to people in situations like these, and these situations are commonplace. Everybody is single until married. Married couples experience myriad difficulties that lead them to extended abstinence. A priest’s celibacy, therefore, is not only the reflection of an eschatological reality; it exactly mirrors the (sometimes temporary) physical reality of single and married people who struggle with the Church’s teachings in a sex-saturated society.

Priests should talk about this. It is not easy to live the Church’s teachings faithfully when you get ridiculed by other people in the pews for doing so. Those who struggle honestly with the Church’s teachings deserve the support of their priests in their struggle. Those who do the ridiculing, quite frankly, deserve to be rankled by a priest who speaks honestly about this issue. I have heard it described, somewhat pithily, that the Church’s role is to comfort the afflicted and to afflict the comfortable. This is almost always cited in the context of economic wealth and poverty. But our sex-saturated society offers a spiritual poverty so barren that one is sometimes left without hope.

Those who ridicule the Church for her teachings and those within the Church who selectively reject the Church’s teachings on married sexuality within a sex-saturated society are, among other things, comfortable. They deserve to be afflicted, not only out of concern for the eternal welfare of their souls but also out of proper justice for those who struggle honestly with the Church’s teachings and have to deal with the scorn of those who do not.

And no one is in a better position to talk about the lived realities of faithful laity than a celibate priest because a celibate priest does exactly what many of the Catholic laity do: he struggles to live the Church’s teaching on married sexuality in an honest way.