I think I’ve read that married men who become Catholic priests have to forego any marital relations with their wives. Is that a fact or am I not remembering/understanding correctly?
“I think I’ve read that married men who become Catholic priests have to forego any marital relations with their wives.”
What I heard is that they may still participate in all the activities of the marital union, but if their wife dies, they can’t take another one.
I believe that they have to abstain from certain relations for some period before mass begins.
As far as I know, if their wife dies, they can not seek to be married again. They must remain single at that time.
I think it was otherwise in the past. There was a really deplorable situation in the late 1800's when Eastern (Ukrainian-Byzantine) Catholic immigrants were coming over to the US with their married priests, and some U.S. Catholic Bishops refused to accept them as priests in their dioceses.
In one particularly lamentable case, the Catholic Archbishop of St. Paul, MN --- a brusque, rash, and unfortunately influential cleric named John Ireland --- insulted a Ukrainian priest named Fr. Alexis Toth, simply because Fr Toth had been married (he was a widower). Oh, it makes wince-worthy reading.
The upshot was that Fr. Toth stormed out of the Catholic church, taking 20,000 Ukrainian Catholics with him, and shepherded them all into the Orthodox Church.
Sometimes clerics are ignorant jerks. Painful, but it happens.