Josh Whitfield, a married priest at St. Rita Catholic Community, was a featured in an AP story that also published in the Washington Post. The father of four is “a relentlessly good-natured priest beloved by the parishioners at Dallas’ St. Rita Catholic Community,” reads the story. “His life is spent juggling two worlds. He celebrates Mass, he hears confessions; he drives his son to karate practice, he encourages his oldest daughter’s love of baseball. He is, he says, ‘an ecclesiastical zoo exhibit,’ one of the tiny community of married priests — men who slipped through a clerical loophole created 40 years ago.”
Whitfield, who writes occasional opinion columns for the Dallas Morning News, became a Catholic priest in 2012 through the Pastoral Provision. This gives married Episcopal priests who have converted to Catholicism the chance to apply for ordination in the Catholic church. The AP says there are about 125 married Roman Catholic priests like Whitfield in the U.S.
Whitfield went to seminary in England at the College of the Resurrection. He holds degrees in theology from the University of Leeds and Duke University. He is also the author of “Pilgrim Holiness: Martyrdom as Descriptive Witness.”
“My job is just to do the tasks the bishop has given me as best I can, and try and make it work,” he said in the interview.
