I suppose this could happen. On the other hand, Fr Z has referred to priests who were persuaded to go in during the 1960s, when they were told that things would change any time now, so they could get married in a few years. The result, of course, wasn't good, for the priests or the Church. There was also the argument made during the sex abuse crisis, that allowing married priests would give them an outlet and keep them away from the altar servers. But the lack of conjugal sex doesn't cause pedophilia, and its availability doesn't cure it.
A bigger question to me is the great variability in the environments that produce traditional celibate vocations. Of two parishes we know, one has had only one vocation in 90 years, the other 70 in roughly the same period. A visitor tells me,
This may surprise you, but the Roman Catholic campus ministry at one educational institution in the Archdiocese of Boston has yielded more vocations to ordained ministry and religious life than all other campuses in the archdiocese combined over the past several years.The problem of vocations is clearly not monolithic. Some environments foster them, others don't. What problem are we trying to solve?That campus probably is the one that you would least expect to be a font of vocations -- the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
What made the difference is quite simple: emphasis on making a personal commitment of faith, and thereby yielding one's life in prayerful obedience to God. But this is what God calls all Christians to do.
