Married Priests

From Rome every year a number of black-cassocked seminarians go home on vacation, take unto themselves wives, bed them legally. Presently, with the sanction of the Roman Catholic Church, these youths are ordained subdeacons. Later, men of family though they may be, they become priests. Unique in the Catholic clergy, such married priests are members of certain Uniat sects once estranged from Rome, now reunited, differing slightly in practice but accepting the full authority of the Pope.

In one such Uniat sect, the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, two friends began laboring years ago. Nicholas Shumsky and Andrew Sarmatiuk took wives, each performing a marriage ceremony for the other. They went to Canada, a mission field of their church. Father Sarmatiuk begat two children. Used as they were to married priests in the old country, the Ukrainians whom they shepherded saw nothing unusual about the status of the two fathers. But Mother Church did. In her ponderous, methodical way she discovered that the marriages, respectively 20 and 14 years old, were invalid. Fathers Shumsky and Sarmatiuk had broken the rules by marrying not before but after their ordinations.

Two years ago Bishop Basil Vladimir Ladyka, resident in Winnipeg, commanded the errant fathers to petition the Vatican for a ruling on their cases. To the two small Ontario parishes where the two were settled--Oshawa (200 Ukrainian Catholics) and Brantford (400)-- last week went reply. The fathers could remain in the priesthood by separating from their families, continuing, however, to support them. Otherwise the two would be unfrocked.

Husbands Shumsky and Sarmatiuk declined to give up their families. Mr. & Mrs. Shumsky took themselves off to a farm. Mr. Sarmatiuk said he was pondering going on relief. Commented sympathetic Ukrainian neighbors: "Poverty in the priesthood has less appeal than lay poverty, with a family for company."

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