The open letter sent to the pope by a group of Italian women who have been or are in relationships with Roman Catholic priests has cast a new light on the rule of priestly celibacy in his church at a time when its abolition was already under discussion as a possible response to the crisis over clerical sex abuse.
One aim of the letter was to make the point that the rule against marriage in the western Catholic church is not a dogma but a discipline.
In one of its most intriguing passages, the authors claim that "the reasons which prompted the ecclesiastical hierarchy, in its day, to insert this discipline into its legal system are well known – economic convenience and self-interest."
Those alleged reasons are, in fact, far from well-known outside church circles, though they were alluded to last month in the Guardian's Face to faith column by the dean of Southwark, Colin Slee: it costs a great deal less to pay for single priests than for priests with wives and perhaps children.
In the case of the Catholic church, moreover, there are additional, complicating factors. One is its increasingly queasy financial position. It has been calculated that, in the US, Roman Catholic dioceses have been ordered to pay out a total of more than $2.6bn in abuse-related costs. Now, the church faces another wave of claims in Europe, and especially in the German-speaking world. This is thought (the church's finances are supremely opaque) to be one of its main sources of income, and known to be an area in which large numbers of Catholics are abandoning their faith in disgust. That too has direct financial consequences because in those countries membership of a denomination is a formal matter, registered with the state, which decides whether a proportion of a worshipper's taxes go to his or her church.
Another factor is more ironic – the likely effect, were the Vatican to lift the ban on married priests, of its teaching on birth control. It is one thing for the leadership of the Church of England, say, to have to pay for a vicar with a wife and perhaps two or three children. It is quite another when the minister in question has a wife and five or six children.
Would married Roman Catholic priests have so many offspring? If they didn't, I rather suspect their bishops would be keen to know why not.