It’s very well-known that many priests, religious, bishops and theologians expected a change in Church teaching on contraception following the Second Vatican Council. That particular progressive hope was dashed by the weighty truths of Pope Paul VI’s Humanae Vitae reaffirming the Church’s perennial teaching. However, many forget that the other grand disappointment for those 70s agitators of aggiornamento concerned priestly celibacy. “Relaxing” Church teaching on marriage and sexual morality went hand-in-hand with the expectation that priestly celibacy, as Karl Rahner once predicted, would not survive the Church’s passage into modernity. Thousands of priests were laicized immediately following the Council. The seminaries and monasteries were greatly depleted, both in numbers and in holiness. The priest shortage was, in part, the result of a collapse of faith in the priesthood, the sacraments, the sacrifice of the Mass itself. And as the priests entered into the lay state, lay participation became the key to overcoming a diminished priesthood. To the delight of secular caricature, and Martin Luther, laicized priests sometimes even married laicized nuns. Yet many didn’t laicize. Many men remained faithful priests, and they continued to think that their experience of the Council — more spiritual “event” than teachings — called them to work for a more profound, epochal change which could take their whole lifetimes to see realized. This was not simply the view of ordinary men and women who were caught up in the zeitgeist. This sentiment was carried up into the highest reaches. In 1970, a group of Germany’s most prominent theologians wrote to the national conference of bishops, insisting that Pope Paul VI’s 1967 reaffirmation of priestly celibacy, despite so much momentum to the contrary, was simply not enough. They argued then that Paul VI’s serious reservations about ordaining married men (viri probati) cannot be the end of the discussion. They insisted that the Church should be confident enough to have a more open, more collegial discussion of priestly celibacy.