here's one (HRCC) perspective.

You in England cannot understand how completely engrained it is into our people that a priest is a man who sacrifices himself for the sake of his parishioners. He has no children of his own, in order that all the children in the parish may be his children. His people know that his small wants are supplied, and that he can devote all his time and thought to them. They know that it is quite otherwise with the married pastors of the Protestants. The pastor's income may be enough for himself, but it is not enough for his wife and children also. In order to maintain them he must take other work, literary or scholastic, only a portion of his time can be given to his people; and they know that when the interests of his family and those of his flock collide, his family must come first and his flock second. In short, he has a profession or trade, a Gewerbe, rather than a vocation; he has to earn a livelihood. In almost all Catholic congregations, a priest who married would be ruined; all his influence would be gone. The people are not at all ready for so fundamental a change, and the circumstances of the clergy do not admit of it. It is a fatal resolution. (A. Plummer in "The Expositor", December, 1890, p. 470.)

A testimony given under such circumstances carries more weight than long explanations would do. Neither was it the only occasion on which the historian so expressed himself. "When a priest", Döllinger wrote in a letter to one of his Old Catholic friends in 1876, "can no longer point to personal sacrifice which he makes for the good of his people, then it is all over with him and the cause which he represents. He sinks to the level of men who make a trade of their work [Er rangiert dann mit den Gewerbetreibenden]." (See Michael, Ignaz von Döllinger, ed. 1894, p. 249.)