(14 Feb 2020) In a Catholic world where debates over clerical celibacy have flared from Brazil to the Vatican, the Rev. Joshua Whitfield is that rarest of things: A married Catholic priest.
"You know the difference between a married priest and say my celibate brethren, is that you know, when my celibate brethren go home, they go home to basically a quiet house. I go home to four kids," Whifield says.
Whitfield wakes up at 4 a.m. on the days he does the early Mass, sipping coffee and enjoying the quiet while his young children sleep in rooms awash in stuffed animals and Sesame Street dolls and pictures of saints.
Then he kisses his wife goodbye and drives through the empty suburban streets of north Dallas to the church he oversees.
Whitfield's wife, Alli, says, "I just knew, I was in college and I knew if I wanted to meet someone I wanted them to have some kind of faith and we could go to church together and, you know, I just thought it, easy, something easy. But I guess God had other plans. I do think he kinda thought this would be funny."
The Roman Catholic church has demanded celibacy of its priests since the Middle Ages, calling it a "spiritual gift" that enables men to devote themselves fully to the church.
But as a shortage of priests becomes a worldwide crisis, liberal wings in the church have been arguing that it's time to reassess that stance.
On Wednesday, Pope Francis sidestepped the latest debate on celibacy, releasing an eagerly awaited document that avoided any mention of recommendations by Latin American bishops to consider ordaining married men in the Amazon, where believers can go months without seeing a priest.
It is "the mark of a heroic soul and the imperative call to unique and total love for Christ and His Church," Pope Paul VI wrote in 1967.
Whitfield, 41, became a Catholic priest in 2012 through the Pastoral Provision, a set of rules crafted by Pope John Paul II in 1980 that gives married Episcopal priests who have converted to Catholicism the chance to apply for ordination in the Catholic church.
The process, which can take years, includes everything from psychological interviews to exams on Catholic theology and, in the end, a special dispensation from the pope.
"Me being a married priest, my family supporting me as a priest in the Catholic church, it seriously is a sacrificial form of existence. And not to say that we're sort of valiant martyrs or anything. But, it's sacrificial and we signed up for that," Whitfield says.
The convert priests see themselves as narrow exceptions to centuries of Catholic rules, part of a drive in the Catholic church to reunite with some branches of Anglicanism.
They live with special restrictions, including that they cannot become bishops.
They also cannot remarry if their wives die, and must spend the rest of their priestly lives as celibates.
Whitfield says, "You know I grew up in a very beautiful Episcopal church among great Christian people in the Anglican way. And it's a beautiful expression of Christianity. And the greatest compliment I can pay to my Anglican past and my Anglican sisters and brothers today is that, that experience made me a very good Catholic."
Many of the married converts had become disenchanted with the Episcopal church as they watched it grow increasingly liberal in recent decades, amid bitter battles over such issues as women priests and gay marriage.
Ironically, they often find themselves heroes to liberal Catholics, who see them as a modernizing force in the church.
For Whitfield, celibacy should "I think celibacy is good and should be the norm.
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