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BillK
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Posted: Thu Jan 31st, 2008 05:42 am |
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A friend was listening to the radio and heard from someone that priestly celibacy was imposed by the leaders of the Church because too much property was being lost as inheritance to wives and children.
Has anyone heard of this before? Any ideas where I can turn to for a good history of the practice of celibacy?
Thanks,
Bill
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David W. Emery
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Posted: Thu Jan 31st, 2008 05:59 am |
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Yes, we’ve heard it before. Ask him how this applies to St. Paul, who was celibate for the sake of the kingdom of heaven as Jesus preached (Matthew 19;12), and not to avoid passing Church property on to wife and children. Then ask him if this same motive might not also be the real reason for the continuance of his example down through the centuries.
David
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CajunRick
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Posted: Thu Jan 31st, 2008 12:36 pm |
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Bill, I would go back even a little farther and look at Jesus and his cousin, John the Baptist. They were also celibate for the sake of the kingdom.
Celibacy has always been an optional discipline. No one is forced to be a priest, and no one in the Eastern Churches is restricted from the priesthood even though married. The discipline of celibacy literally goes back to Jesus and John and has always been present in the Church to a greater or lesser degree. In the western Church, celibacy for priests was first required in Spain in 306, but it was encouraged even sooner, as evidenced in the writings of Tertullian a hundred years earlier.
You can read more in this Faith Fact from Catholics United for the Faith.
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roxyorthodoxy
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Posted: Thu Jan 31st, 2008 01:49 pm |
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Hi,
I think that the Church in the West should allow both married priests and celibate priests because of the shortage of priests in the Church today.
Isn't it true that Pope Benedict has the power to change this?
In South Jersey several of our parishes have been merged, twinned, etc. because of the growth of Catholics and the shortages of priests. We do have many deacons though and they help with the shortage.
In my parish, the newly appointed administrator was married and is of course a now a widower. He was appointed a Deacon after his wife died and then became a priest. We are lucky to have him!
Roxy Orthodoxy
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Credo Catholic
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Posted: Thu Jan 31st, 2008 02:11 pm |
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I lovingly disagree with Roxy! I believe a priest should belong totally to God and not have a wife or family to divide his time, energy and soul. We have a priest who helps part-time at our parish who is married and has a family. He is great, he's smart and personable, and I appreciate having him there as we do need another priest. But it is different talking with him, going into confession with him, just knowing that he goes home to the same strife and stress that the rest of us do. I like to think that a priest has only God to answer to. IMO. 
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Annie
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Posted: Thu Jan 31st, 2008 02:16 pm |
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| It is interesting that the faith communities which allow married priests and even female ministers are suffering from severe shortages of ministers, some even more than the Catholic church. So allowing marriage isn't a solution. The issue is more probably that people don't want to be servants nowadays.
____________________
Annie
Ora et labora
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roxyorthodoxy
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Posted: Thu Jan 31st, 2008 03:23 pm |
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I believe a priest should belong totally to God and not have a wife or family to divide his time, energy and soul.
That is a good point....but there are ministers in other faiths that are doing a good job while being married. Also look at the wives of doctors, lawyers, and even the President (who is busier than most of us!)
It's called time management!
But it is different talking with him, going into confession with him, just knowing that he goes home to the same strife and stress that the rest of us do
I think - IMO  ...that I can relate more with a priest who was or is married.
I think there should be a choice...remember without the priests we don't have the Eucharist. Satan wants to destroy the Church and its priests.
I lovingly disagree, Marsha. You have posed some valid points, though....it looks like the Popes so far have agreed with you!
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sewnsew
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Posted: Thu Jan 31st, 2008 03:38 pm |
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| I come from the Episcopal church with married priests- I agree in principle that a married priest can be as good a preist as an unmaried one BUT the difficulites of him doing that job are multiplied drastically. I am all for the pastoral provision but I am not so ready to lift the celibacy requirements across the board. When I was in the process of joining the church a good friend from my old church was talking to me about the turmoil in the Anglican world- one statment she mad was "we need an absolute authority over the Bishops, they should have given the A B of CAnt. the authority. However we don't need a POpe" What exactly did she think that she was talking about:? When the issue of celibate priests came up she aknowledged that our priest and his wife had faced many many issues and stress due to the pull of family and two different careers. The wife( who don't get me wrong is a wonderful woman) occassionally complained about the middle of the night calls and the family stuff cancelled due to parish emergencies over and over.
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CajunRick
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Posted: Thu Jan 31st, 2008 04:18 pm |
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roxyorthodoxy wrote: Isn't it true that Pope Benedict has the power to change this?
Yes, he can.
In my opinion (and ONLY my opinion; I'm not speaking for anyone else) there is room in the Church for both married and celibate clergy. In the Eastern Churches, parish priests are often married but bishops and monks are not. I believe we can have full-time, celibate priests, and part-time, married priests who are ordained later in life in much the same way deacons are today. They can assist in sacramental ministry (as deacons do today) and even serve as pastoral administrators (under the supervision of a "master priest" as some deacons do today). They can be paid for services (as many deacons are today) but not draw a regular salary unless they also hold a full-time position.
In other words, take today's married deacons and allow them to become priests, with full priestly sacramental authority, but without the obligations and canonical status of pastors, bishops, etc.
One of the major arguments against married clergy is the case of a sick child or spouse versus a sick parishioner. An arrangement like this would allow the celibate clergy to give priority to the parishioner, while the married clergyman would give priority to his own family. In return, the celibate priest would be provided housing, salary, and retirement. The married priest would not, unless he also held a full-time position in which case he would earn as much as any lay employee, plus extra stipends for priestly duties.
I think it could work, based on the model of the Eastern Churches (which obviously have done it successfully for centuries). And if Pope Benedict should ever ask for my opinion, that's what I'll tell him. 
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sewnsew
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Posted: Thu Jan 31st, 2008 04:23 pm |
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| yes Rick that model would work- esp. if there was a mixture of celibate and married clergy, any parish with a staff of married clergy only will run into the smae problems I mentioned in my last post.
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CajunRick
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Posted: Thu Jan 31st, 2008 04:35 pm |
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kimdyuma wrote: yes Rick that model would work- esp. if there was a mixture of celibate and married clergy, any parish with a staff of married clergy only will run into the smae problems I mentioned in my last post.
I agree and that's why I don't think abandoning celibacy completely would ever work. Also I can't imagine a priest ever dating! But married men with secular jobs, their own salaries, homes, cars, and retirement, could assist a celibate priest by conducting RCIA classes, saying mass (I know many priests who celebrate four masses a weekend, not counting weddings and funerals), etc. IF at some point he should become widowed, he would then be free to join the celibate clergy, just as deacons are today. In other words, just like our current married deacons, except at the second rank of Holy Orders instead of the first, and with the sacramental ability and authority that would come with it (primarily, the ability to consecrate the Eucharist and to forgive sins).
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sewnsew
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Posted: Thu Jan 31st, 2008 04:49 pm |
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| I think that if any moves towards an Eastern Rite view of the Priesthood would need to be accompainied with A LOT of education in our overwhelming Latin rite view of the priesthood and of course with so many protestant denominations lialbe to add their opinions and misconceptions....
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CajunRick
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Posted: Thu Jan 31st, 2008 05:02 pm |
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kimdyuma wrote: I think that if any moves towards an Eastern Rite view of the Priesthood would need to be accompainied with A LOT of education in our overwhelming Latin rite view of the priesthood and of course with so many protestant denominations lialbe to add their opinions and misconceptions....
I see NO chance of any major change in celibacy requirements in the forseeable future, certainly not under the current pope. However, celibacy is a discipline and not a doctrine, so it could be changed at any time.
What is more likely to happen is that gradually, the Pastoral Provision will be opened to more and more married men coming in from other faiths. However, I doubt if 50 years from now there will be significantly more married priests than there are today, especially given the increased number of seminarians in the world today. My diocese has 15, which is more than ever before. As the Church settles into its post-Vatican II equilibrium, dioceses will stabilize Church teaching and the number of vocations to the priesthood and religious life will increase. The future actually looks bright. But of course, what else can you expect when God is in charge?
But again, this is strictly my opinion.
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MichaelStEdmund
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Posted: Fri Feb 1st, 2008 08:36 pm |
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BillK wrote: A friend was listening to the radio and heard from someone that priestly celibacy was imposed by the leaders of the Church because too much property was being lost as inheritance to wives and children.
Has anyone heard of this before? Any ideas where I can turn to for a good history of the practice of celibacy?
Thanks,
Bill
I'm sketching this out off of the top of my head, so anyone who can fill in the blanks of a "history of celibacy," please do.
The gist of this post is that THE EARLY CHURCH REQUIRED MARRIED CLERGY TO REMAIN CELIBATE AFTER DEATH OF SPOUSE, AND IN THE EAST AND WEST, THIS IS STILL THE CASE. THE ULTIMATE EMPHASIS IS ON CELIBACY AND THE HIGH VALUE HISTORIC CHRISTIANITY PLACES ON VIRGINITY AND CELIBACY.
CajunRick made a great point that both Christ and John the Baptist began the Christian tradition of celibacy. St. Paul continued this, as was mentioned. It should also be mentioned that St. Peter, although he had been married, was certainly celibate after the presumed death of his wife (who is never mentioned in the New Testament as being alive at the time of the Gospels). Ref. Mark 1:29-31.
How can we be certain that St. Peter never remarried? Look at the instructions of St. Paul in I Timothy 3:2 and Titus 1:6 that a bishop must be the husband of one wife. We read that today in our divorce-ridden culture and assume that he means "one wife at a time." That isn't the case at all. In the early Church, married clergy were meant to remain celibate after being widowed. St. Paul wasn't simply posting his own opinion in the pages of sacred Scripture - he was very obviously passing on something that was already part of Tradition.
Tertullian, in about the year 208, refers to this in his "An Exhortation to Chastity" and also in his treatise on "Monogamy." For Tertullian, there were various sexual states of being for clergy - married, widowed and celibate, and unmarried and celibate (these he calls "eunuchs" or continent).
This remains true even today, because permanent deacons and married priests (there are some, you know - they're usually either Eastern Catholic priests or former Episcopalian/Anglican priests) are required to be celibate after the deaths of their spouses.
As far as I know, this remains true among our Orthodox brethren in the East as well. In Russian Orthodoxy, for instance, there is what is called "the incompatibility of remarriage with the sacred ministry." They even have an interesting word for this kind of remarriage - "digamy."
Documentation: http://www.holy-trinity.org/morality/troitsky.html
At some points in the Early Church, celibacy was even required when the priest's wife was still living. That is, they were required to live as brother and sister and not have children. We find this in the canons of the Council of Elvira in Spain in the year 300. While this seems extreme to us, it's pretty clear that married clergy were expected to emulate celibate marriage as modeled by St. Joseph and the Blessed Virgin. St. Jerome (A.D. 400) has this in mind in his famous treatise on "The Perpetual Virginity of Mary" when he speaks about those who "even though they may have wives, cease to be husbands."
In the generation before St. Jerome, St. Epiphanius (a Jewish convert from Israel) made an even stronger stand for a celibate clergy in his book that is called, variously, "Panarion," "Against Heresies," or "Medicine Chest," depending on the translation.
So yes, in the Early Church you might find married clergy, but the emphasis was on celibacy even at that time. That was the norm, and in the West an unmarried priesthood became standard. Not as a matter of dogma or doctrine, but of discipline and practice.
THE ROOTS OF THE ACCUSATION.
Honestly, my knowledge of celibacy in later years gets much fuzzier, although I think that the issue that the accusation you heard - the idea that "too much property was being lost as inheritance to wives and children" - was at various times in the history of the Church A REAL PROBLEM.
Let's think about it for a moment. Part of the reason for the imposition of celibacy back in the day was to prevent a dynasty of priests, bishops and popes just as there have always been dynasties of kings. Within a dynasty there is a sense of entitlement by the sons for the position (and often the power) of the father - whether they are qualified or not. From time to time in the Church's history, there becomes necessary a violent disentanglement from the ways and influences of kings.
I've been wracking my brain for the name - I'm sure it's Pope St. Gregory VII in the eleventh century - who made priestly celibacy mandatory as part of an overall reform of the clergy for just these very reasons. The early Middle Ages were a horrific period in the history of the Church that makes the reign of the "bad popes" of the Renaissance look like the good ol' days, and Gregory made some heroic reforms in order to retrieve Christ's Church from the financial and sexual scandals so common in his day. This made him unpopular at most and hated at worst.
I just checked, and in the article on Pope St. Gregory VII in the Catholic Encylopedia at http://www.newadvent.org his reforms are listed as follows:- That clerics who had obtained any grade or office of sacred orders by payment should cease to minister in the Church.
- That no one who had purchased any church should retain it, and that no one for the future should be permitted to buy or sell ecclesiastical rights.
- That all who were guilty of incontinence should cease to exercise their sacred ministry.
- That the people should reject the ministrations of clerics who failed to obey these injunctions.
I guess you could ask your friend if he or she believed that the pastor of First Baptist should be able to buy his position, or if the pastor's partying frat boy son should be entitled to his dad's church when Rev. Jones dies (since, after all, Dad had bought it lock, stock and barrel). Should his local Distric Superintendent (often the Protestant analog of a bishop) be allowed to buy his office instead of being voted into it? I think if you phrase it that way, and include celibacy as part and parcel of the package of reforms, it defuses a lot of the argument and becomes much easier to identify with what Pope St. Gregory was trying to do.
Gosh, I hope all of this makes sense.
Thanks,
= Michael
____________________
"Faith seeking understanding" - St. Anselm of Canterbury.
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tedjenczewski
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Posted: Sun Feb 3rd, 2008 03:00 am |
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| In considering married clergy it is of interest to note that the big protestant TV ministries seem to pass from father to son for the most part. Apparently the fathers are not able to find suitable unrelated men to follow in their ministries. I suppose these ministries will be "family" ministries, family businesses so to speak. Similar kinds of things were going on in various parts of the CC in the middle ages.
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"...the church of the living God, the pillar and bulwark of the truth." 1Tim 3, 15
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Lyell
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Posted: Mon Feb 4th, 2008 08:15 pm |
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And, if we had married preists, we would have to pay them a living wage to support a family . What would that do to most church budgets! Not to speak of remodeling the Rectory into a real house that a family could live in, or move the priest and his family to an offsite house somewhere in town... I dont think we're ready for this.
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Ignorance of the Scriptures is ignorance of Christ - St Jerome
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