WASHINGTON -- A priest from Pittsburgh was among those who came here to urge the nation's Catholic bishops to press the Vatican to make priestly celibacy optional, not mandatory.

The liberal reform groups Call To Action and FutureChurch collected 7,000 signatures and reported that about 500 came from the Pittsburgh Diocese. The groups said they were not responding to the sexual abuse crisis but to a growing national shortage of priests.

"Our campaign is young in Pittsburgh," said the Rev. Jack O'Malley, chaplain to the state AFL-CIO. "We hope to get 5,000."

Although not assigned to any parish, he often fills in and recently asked several hundred parishioners whether they would be open to a discussion on optional celibacy, he said, stressing that celibacy is valuable for some people.

"Only about five or six said they would be absolutely against it," O'Malley said.

He knows men who have left the priesthood and married who would be glad to come back and serve again, he said.

Bishop Donald Wuerl of Pittsburgh said he couldn't comment on O'Malley's participation since he hadn't witnessed it. O'Malley's views on the matter were already public and well known to Wuerl.

Bishop Joseph Galante, coadjutor of Dallas, noted that church discipline on celibacy has been subject to change and variation: Eastern Catholic churches in Europe and the Middle East have long allowed married men to be priests; married deacons have been permitted in the West since 1967; and married priests who convert from Anglicanism and some Protestant traditions have been accepted since the 1980s.

But sudden, sweeping change is not church practice -- in part because it is often good to be counter-cultural, Galante said.

"There is a tremendous need currently for the witness of celibacy in a society in which pan-sexualism is rampant and in which there is a sense that nobody can live chastely or celibately," he said.