Why Did I Get Married?

CEBU, Philippines — There are about one hundred thousand priests all over the world who have gotten married. No two of them are exactly the same as to the circumstances leading to their decision to enter into marriage and suffer the consequence of being suspended from the active ministry of the Roman Catholic priesthood.

For my part, it’s a long story. As a seminarian, I was sent by the Society of the Divine Word (SVD) to Rome to finish my theological studies at the Pontifical Gregorian University. After I graduated A.B. theology there, I was tempted – not by an Italian though – to become a monk. So, with the consent of my SVD superiors, I went to the Trappist Monastery in Vina, California.

However, I did not last long there. The SVD took me back and sent me to St. Augustine’s Seminary at Bay St. Louis, Mississippi to teach Latin. After one year there, I got out of the SVD and moved to Torrance, California, in Los Angeles, where I taught Spanish at Bishop Montgomery High School, run by Franciscan fathers.

The vocation to the priesthood still lingered in me, so I returned to the Philippines, leaving behind my stable teaching job (in 1966, I was receiving $500 monthly plus free lunch) and forfeiting my green card because I did not go back to the States within two years.

I finished Theology at Seminario Mayor de San Carlos, in Mabolo, Cebu City. Julio Cardinal Rosales ordained me on April 6, 1968. Having served as an assistant Parish Priest of Mandaue City for almost two years, as chaplain of St. Catherine’s School, Carcar, Cebu for one year, as philosophy professor for four years at San Carlos Seminary College, Mabolo, Cebu City, I was sent by Cardinal Rosales to Rome to take up Doctorate in Sacred Scriptures at the Biblicum.

After two years, I finished Propaedeutic Greek and Hebrew and passed all the exams. But I got sick and had to come home via the United States, where I served for six months as Assistant Parish Priest of St. Bernard’s Church, West 14th St. Manhattan, New York City.

Upon my return to the Philippines, Cardinal Rosales first assigned me as an Assistant Parish Priest of the Cebu Metropolitan Cathedral for four months, and then as Parish Priest of Ocaña, Carcar, Cebu where I met the woman whom I married two years after serving in this parish.

I applied for a dispensation in 1979. It came 12 years later and Ricardo Cardinal Vidal officiated at my church wedding on March 27, 1991. Thus, Cardinal Rosales ordained me and Cardinal Vidal married me.

After 11 years in the active ministry of the Roman Catholic priesthood, I found out that I received the vocation to the priesthood, but not the gift of celibacy. I was called and was chosen, having been earlier ordained a priest forever. But due to my inability to remain celibate, my priestly powers were suspended, but not taken away. St. Pope John Paul II himself declared that celibacy does not belong to the essence of the Eastern Rite – who are just as Catholics as we are, but whose priests are allowed to marry except those who have the ambition to become bishops.

Our country is in the East, but we belong to the Western Rite of the Catholic Church due to the Spaniards who brought Catholicism here. And what type of example did they give to our people? According to our national hero in his novel “Noli Me Tangere,” Padre Damaso was the father of Maria Clara. This practice of professing to be celibate, but having querida or mistress has been handed down through the years. And some, not all, priests are continuing Padre Damaso’s example.

Realizing that I could not follow Padre Damaso’s unchaste celibacy, I decided to get married – in order to do justice to God, to myself, to the woman I love, to our children, to the people of God, and to the priesthood itself.

Paradoxically, now that I am married, I find more meaning for my priesthood (the essence of which is sacrifice) in the married state than in the celibate state. There are more sacrifices in being married than in being celibate.