So, now a senior Vatican official is making the case for a married priesthood:
Priests are allowed to marry in the Eastern Rite of the Catholic Church as well as in the Orthodox, Protestant and Anglican Churches.
Opponents of a married priesthood say celibacy allows a priest to dedicate himself entirely to the Church.
In 2021, the pope dismissed a proposal to allow some elderly married men to be ordained in remote areas in the Amazon where in some places the faithful saw a priest as little as once a year.
You know, if it was REALLY the case that the sacraments are the centerpiece of Christian life, that the sacraments are essential for salvation, or anything like that, then this would be a no-brainer. Of course, you would allow the salvational needs of lay people to trump a mere discipline of the Church, a discipline that has been permitted in the past, and is currently established otherwise within various other liturgical-sister organizations. In fact, the discipline of married priests is even permitted within the Catholic Church in 20 of the 21 rites of the Church.
So, if you cared about the salvation of people in the Amazon, or lay people anywhere, for that matter, the discipline would have to be relaxed in order to help assure the salvation of the laity who rely on the priesthood as the sole officially recognized conduit of saving grace, i.e., sacramental grace. Without this discipline relaxation, the lay faithful are cut off from the sacrament of the Eucharist, the "source and summit" of Catholic faith.
But, that's not how Pope Francis or previous popes see it. The laity can literally go to hell, and the Church still won't relax a mere DISCIPLINE. Keep in mind, the Church is happy to bless homosexual persons who are engaged in an intrinsically evil relationship, but she won't grant the actual saving grace of liturgical sacraments to Latin-rite laity if those sacraments need to come to said laity through a married priesthood. Other rites can be saved by the sacramental action of married priests, but Latin-rite laity can literally go to hell unshriven due to lack of priests to absolve in confession or confect Anointing of the Sick.
It is increasingly hard to see how any of this makes sense.
Now, I will readily grant that once celibacy is no longer required in the Latin Rite, then celibacy will be gone FOREVER. It will never come back.
Vocations come from large families. Large families come from poor families with high infant mortality rates. The TFR for all first-world countries is below 2.1 children per woman. The TFR for sub-Saharan Africa is still well above that, but over the course of the next century, those countries will leave poverty behind. As poverty drops, education increases and more children survive into their teen and adult years. As they do, the TFR of sub-Saharan countries will drop to that of first-world countries. As family sizes drop, ordinations will drop. Every country in the world will soon occupy the same space the remote Amazonian tribes live - far from priests, far from sacraments, far from the Mass, no way to remedy any of it.
Without high TFR there simply won't be any ordinations to speak of, and that spells the end of the Church or at least the end of the celibate priesthood. Allowing married priests is a sea change that cannot be undone or walked back. Given that a married priesthood won't have any effect on TFR, it will only incrementally extend the life of the Church.
But, which does the Church value more?
The discipline or the sacraments?