Some Catholic priests may marry, if they belong to an Eastern church
The Catholic Church is not one church but 24: the Latin Church plus 23 self-governing Eastern churches, all loyal to the pope yet running their own liturgies and laws. About 18 million Catholics belong to them, and many ordain married men as priests, something the Latin Church does not normally do.
Each Eastern Catholic church is sui iuris, meaning autonomous, with its own theology, worship and history, while sharing sacraments fully with the Latin Church and accepting papal supremacy and infallibility. Between them they preserve all five historic liturgical families of Eastern Christianity: Alexandrian, Armenian, Byzantine, East Syriac and West Syriac. Catholics of either tradition may freely attend a service in any rite. As of 2022 the largest is the Syro-Malabar Church of India, followed by the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church.
Almost all of them, the Maronite Church being the exception, once belonged to other Christian bodies, whether Eastern Orthodox, Oriental Orthodox or the Church of the East, before various splits. That history makes them a sensitive subject in relations with the Orthodox. The old label Uniate, once used even by some Catholics, is now avoided in official documents because many regard it as insulting.
Their relationship with Rome has not always been easy. Pressure to copy Western customs led to what historians call Latinization, the erosion of Eastern practices. The Second Vatican Council's decree Orientalium Ecclesiarum reaffirmed their right to keep their own traditions, and in 1990 the Code of Canons of the Eastern Churches became the first body of church law covering them collectively. Under it, married men can often be ordained priests, though not bishops, and members follow their own church's rules on feasts and marriage.
Vocabulary has shifted too. Catholics long spoke of Eastern rites, but in 1999 the United States bishops pointed out that current law speaks of churches, with rite meaning a people's liturgical, spiritual and disciplinary heritage. These churches began in the Middle East, North and East Africa, Eastern Europe and South India; since the nineteenth century emigration, partly driven by persecution, has carried them to Western Europe, the Americas and Oceania.
Source: Eastern Catholic Churches
