I speak as an outsider, being an inactive Episcopalian, but this has been my impression over the years: that there has been an increasingly lower number of straight men in the U.S. and in several other countries willing to sign on for a lifetime of celibacy . I am guessing that this is largely due to the huge increase in emphasis on sex in so many areas of life in the U.S., Britain, and Europe. BTW, twenty years or more ago, I heard from a family of Catholic friends who had a son in seminary that the place had a pretty gay subculture. The son did not stay in seminary, but I have never known the exact reason why.
IMHO, creating an order of parish priests who are permitted to marry (like the Orthodox practice) would seem to be a very reasonable action to me, but my background is Protestant so I'm comfortable with a married clergy. However, my experience with female priests in the Episcopal Church has been uniformly bad so I can't say I wish that alternative on the Catholic Church.
I hate to be picky, but Orthodox priests are not "permitted to marry". The Orthodox ordain married men. Once ordained, however, an Orthodox priest is no more permitted to remarry, if his wife should die, than a Catholic priest is.
The same is true of Eastern Catholics in their home territories. They don't "permit priests to marry," but they do ordain married men.
Incidentally, according to classical Orthodox practice, married priests are required to abstain from marital relations before they conduct the Divine Liturgy. (I'm not sure how long before ... sundown on the preceding night?)
However, the Orthodox typically celebrate the Divine Liturgy only once a week (except for important feast days). Western Catholicism developed the custom of daily Mass, which would mean that a married Western Catholic priest who followed the traditional disciplines of the faith would have to live continently with his wife anyway.
Will and Ariel Durant, in their eleven volume history of western European history state that, in the Middle Ages the Pope decreed that priests should be celibate.
One of the reasons given was that priests, bishops, archbishops, etc, were collecting unto themselves a lot of real estate and riches. These Churchmen passed this wealth on to their offspring as was the custom, thus denying it to the Catholic Church.
The Church wanted to control the production of wealth, thus the Pope stated that priests should be celibate and thus the Church would assume control of the means producing wealth.
I'm a Protestant. The above is not an anti-Catholic rant. It is a statement of what some historians have stated concerning the idea of priestly celibacy. If what the Durants say is true, it seems to me that if the Pope says something is so, then he can also say that it is "un-so".
Is the Pope or the Church afraid to say "we've made a mistake"?
OK, in the past I've had Jews call me an antisemite (not true) so now I guess Catholics will call me antiCatholic (also not true).
I've said what appears to me to be truth, like it or not.