The faithful, however, have adapted to other evolutions of discipline and tradition — think eating meat on Fridays and Mass celebrated in the vernacular. The practical argument carries more weight for me. Sharing my father with so many people rankled when I was a child. Repeated refrains: “But it’s the weekend!” “But it’s Christmas!” My mother often struggled to find her place in communities with no precedent of priests’ wives.

Many jobs, though, are all-consuming, like those of doctors, police officers and other clergy. And more important, the church needs priests. In the United States, the number has declined by about a third since 1980, to 37,578 from 58,398, according to the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate at Georgetown University. Globally, while the number of priests has been increasing in Asia and Africa, it has been declining in Europe and the Americas.

In concrete terms, almost one in four of the total number of parishes worldwide lacks a resident pastor. Clergy members often must divide their time among different churches, or handle an entire parish on their own. My father and a part-time priest, for example, serve about 2,000 families. That translates to roughly 10 minutes of dedicated time per family per month.

Would optional celibacy solve the priest deficit overnight? No. But it would certainly help. A great place to start: welcoming back to the priesthood the tens of thousands of men who left to marry. In a signal that Pope Francis might be considering such a scenario, when he celebrated the 50th anniversary of several priests in Vatican City earlier this year, five priests who had left their ministries to marry were in attendance. In another signal last November, the National Conference of Bishops of Brazil decided to study the possibility of ordaining married elders to shore up the priest shortage in underserved areas.

We need only look to the Catholic churches of the Eastern rite — which maintain their own liturgical and disciplinary heritage while in full communion with Rome — to see how it could work. Men may marry before being ordained, but not after, and bishops must remain celibate. We could also look at my father, one of about 100 Catholic priests who are married, and used to be Episcopal priests.

Would Catholics accept married priests? Most people in the five parishes my father has served over the past 30 years have welcomed him. And local church officials signaled their vote of confidence when they installed him as pastor of St. Mary’s in Norwalk, Conn., in May. Phyllis Smith, who is 90 and lives in Norwalk, liked my father as a priest in her New Canaan parish in the late 1980s in part because he was married, not in spite of it: “He was interested in families. I wish there were more married priests with his ideas — a lot of priests do not take the whole family into consideration.”

IF the church did allow married priests, it would need to resolve serious practical concerns for priests with families, such as living arrangements, salary and health insurance and retirement benefits for spouses. When he was ordained, my father was told he’d need to keep a primary job in order to support his family. My parents paid for our house, and their teaching salaries were our main income. His role as a priest took second place, until he retired from teaching at age 73.

In part, that’s why he still believes priests should be celibate. “The priest stands at the altar as the icon of Jesus,” he told me. “He has to be free to offer himself up in sacrifice the way he offers the sacrifice of the Mass.” I respect his opinion, and respectfully hold my own: Not all married men should be priests, and not all priests should be married. But the option should exist. I suppose that’s part of the baggage of being a married priest — your children, like all children, sometimes disagree with you.