The absolute moral law that prohibits the use of artificial birth control has ceased to be a binding law on conscience.
The absolute disciplinary law that mandates celibacy has ceased to be a binding law on conscience.
1. 85% of Catholics use artificial birth control.
2. Over three thousand married men have been ordained priests.
Why has binding ceased?
a.) If the law giver permits exceptions to the absolute law (moral or
disciplinary) the absolute basis for the law ceases, therefore the
consequence ceases.
b.) By permitting exceptions the absolute law becomes prejudicial to the
absolute norm.
Therefore, item 1 and 2 are freed from the absolute binding of the law.
Consequently:
?A law, even though divine, is potent only so long as the conditions and circumstances of life, to meet which it was enacted, continue; when these change, however, the law also must be abrogated, even though it have God for its author. For God himself has shown indubitably that with the change of the circumstances and conditions of life for which He once gave those laws, the laws themselves cease to be operative, that they shall be observed no longer because they can be observed no longer.?
(Quoted on page 53 in, THE RISE OF CHRISTIANITY: How the obscure, marginal Jesus Movement became the dominant religious force in the Western World in a few centuries, By Rodney Stark, First HarperCollins paperback edition, 1997).
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