A Follow Up With Some Thoughts On Mandatory Celibacy

Rereading my last post several hours after it went up I came across a statement that unfortunately is very unnuanced and which I want to correct.  I had mentioned that Archbishop Laud, like many churchmen before and since “could make celibacy look like an option for holiness rather than a cover for psychological struggles.”  This sounds as if I do not think there is a positive value for clerical celibacy or that celibacy is indicative of a psychological disorder when in fact I believe that in a mature, or maturing, individual celibacy can indeed be “an option for holiness” and is totally compatible with a healthy psyche.  I do not believe, however, that celibacy, especially when it is not a choice one can freely make and still follow one’s vocational pursuit, is automatically healthy much less holy.  I know many priests and religious who are profoundly holy and mentally healthy; I also know many whose psychosexual development is severely arrested to the detriment of their own spiritual welfare and of the welfare and even safety of those with and to whom they minister. 

The celibacy of the clergy is part of a very ancient tradition.  While celibacy as a canonical requirement for ordination can be traced in the western Church back to the Councils of Elvira (306) and of Orange (441), it would be centuries before it became universal law in the Western Church.  There are a number of factors that contributed to it.  First there developed a very negative attitude towards human sexuality and there were various decrees insisting that priests abstain from sexual intimacy with their wives for a set period (usually 1-3 days) before celebrating the Eucharist.  It was, thus, a purity requirement.  Secondly, with the rise of monasticism in the fourth and fifth centuries, it became more and more common to choose bishops from among the monks—who were celibate—and not infrequently these monastic bishops did not have a positive appreciation of marriage or marital sexuality.  That may explain, to a certain degree, the decision at the aforesaid Councils.   Through the early Middle Ages celibacy became more and more expected of the clergy and the problem of hereditary churches—churches and church property passing from priest-father to priest-son to priest-grandson—would lead to proscription’s against clerical marriage.  This problem was limited more or less to the Western Church.  In the Eastern Churches after the fifth century bishops were invariably monastics and ecclesial preferment was limited to celibates, but the pastoral care, especially in rural churches, was entrusted to married priests and deacons.  In fact, most priests in rural parishes of the west were married as well, it was just that the Church did not recognize their marriages nor the legitimacy of their children which barred the children from themselves being ordained or inheriting property—thus solving the inherited church problem.  It was not uncommon for the secular clergy even in the large cities, and even for bishops and archbishops, to be in what today we would call a common law marriage.  While the Reform Canons of the 11^th century “Gregorian Reform” outlawed clerical marriage—and declared all such marriages to be invalid—it was only in the 16^th century reforms of the Council of Trent that there was any significant enforcement of clerical celibacy.  And even then—and now—it is not entirely successful as there are priests and even bishops who are for all practical purposes in a somewhat less than formal marriage.  Only recently I came across the story of a priest who has just retired from active duty as an Army Chaplain who has been civilly married at least twice with the knowledge of both his military and ecclesiastical superiors.  Some years back during a trip to Africa I was invited to lunch with a Bishop with whom I am acquainted.  His wife and three teenage children were all at the table.  Their presence was not explained to me in anyway but the priest-friend who accompanied me that day confirmed my surmises.  Both these men are highly effective ministers and neither is particularly “liberal” in their theological views. Those who do not know their particular stories would undoubtedly consider them both to be “good priests.”  While I must admit that I have found the chaplain to be a man for whom I personally do not have respect, it is not because of his marriages per se but rather what I perceive to be a general lack of integrity; I can’t but stand in awe of the Bishop whose selfless work in building a strong Church under the most challenging of conditions, I have seen over many years.  More to the point of this posting, whatever the irregularity of life of either of these two men, my dealings with them have shown them to be psychologically mature and well-integrated men. 

On the other hand, I have seen some of the grossest psychological and spiritual immaturity on the part of some priests who conform to celibacy.  I remember an American priest I knew in my Rome days—he was a confessor at Saint Peter’s where he was known for his rigid penances and the somewhat prurient questions with which he would interrogate penitents, going far beyond not only what is required but what is allowed a priest to ask a penitent.  Younger members of his Religious community learned to give him great distance as he had a tendency to “violate boundaries” in his relationships with them.  He was considered a saint by those outside his community but those who lived with him found him controlling, sly, untruthful, and manipulative. 

The fuss that some priest have created in refusing communion to those whom they suspect—even with good reason—of not conforming to Church teaching regarding human sexuality: abortion, masturbation, same-sex relationships, etc., and even more their self-righteousness in defending their position when summoned by their bishops or criticized by their parishioners, indicates a probable lack of psychosexual integration. Indeed, the choice of judgment over compassion might well be an indication of an arrested spiritual—and probably psychological—development.       

Growing up in the 50’s and 60’s I have vivid memories of how much many of the clergy drank and how common alcoholism was among priests.  In retrospect I wonder how much of this was triggered not simply by the loneliness of celibacy for those not called to it, but by the lack of psycho-sexual maturity that mandatory celibacy fosters.

At the same time I write this, I think back on my school days and a Jesuit who taught me junior religion and senior Latin.  He was a man of exceptional kindness and compassion, a man who could look into a person’s soul and see beyond all the superficial crap right to the best of what is in the human heart.  I also think back on a priest friend of my parents—a Diocesan priest—who was the epitome of priestly modesty and discretion, but in a way that was overwhelmingly joyful.  He never drank anything stronger than tea but could sit at the piano for hours making you laugh and making you cry with music ranging from Ragtime to Verdi.  This was a man who for all his natural dignity and grace, was not above doing the laundry for a shut-in or frying up some ham and eggs for a homeless man. Celibacy can be one man’s manna and another man’s poison.  It is clear from experience that just because a man is given a vocation to the priesthood, he is not necessarily given the vocation to celibacy.  And there are more than enough men there who have opted for celibacy but who have not the “shepherd’s heart” that is a sign of an authentic priestly vocation.  

Celibacy--Or Why Father Gets Cranky

Saint Jerome, an early propoinent of clerical
celibacy.  This statute stands in front
of St Catherine's Church, Bethlehem

Before we proceed to the Gregorian Reformation, we need to take a diversion on the topic of celibacy.  Our most recent entry spoke of Sylvester II attempting to impose celibacy on the Catholic clergy, and the idea of a celibate clergy go much further back, but it will become a central issue in the Church only at the time of the Gregorian Reform. 

     In the Apostolic and sub-apostlic eras (33 AD-100 AD) celibacy was a  highly admired but not required virtue for Christians of whatever status or ministry in the Church.  This was rooted in several saying of Jesus recorded in the Gospels and in the writings of the apostles, most notably Paul.  We do not know the marital status of any of the apostles except Peter who had been married, though as it is his mother-in-law and not his wife who is mentioned (and she is never mentioned) in the text whether he was married or a widower at the time of his encounter with Christ is not known.  It is generally taken from his writings in favor of remaining unmarried that Paul was not a married man, though there is a tradition going back as far as Eusebius that he was married but did not bring his wife with him on his missionary journeys.  The author of 1 Timothy says that a bishop should be married but once and have control over his children.  This text would indicate that married men became priests and bishops (in the sub-apostolic Church the distinction between these two ministries was not as precise as it is today).  However, by the fourth century Church fathers such as Jerome and Ambrose—neither of whom were married and Ambrose was a bishop, Jerome was not) were claiming that while married men had become bishops in the early Church they were obligated to refrain from conjugal intimacy (aka sex) with their wives once having assumed the office.  This is not anywhere in the scriptural text or any other source I know of from the first century so I am not inclined to think it holds up historically.  On the other hand, the oral tradition could have conveyed this condition through the two centuries separating these Fathers of the Church from the authorship of 1 Timothy.

      More likely an explanation for this interpretation, however, is the fact that in those two intervening centuries a very negative attitude towards human sexuality had begun to develop in the Christian community.  Tertullian (160-220), though himself married, wrote against sexual relations, and Origen (184-253) went so far as to castrate himself taking the admonition of Jesus that should an organ of the body be an occasion of sin, it should be cut away and cast off.  We also get in this period, the 3^rd and 4^th centuries, the rise of monasticism and its discipline of celibacy.  Indeed the number of men (and to a far lesser extent, women) who embraced the monastic life in Syria, Palestine, and Egypt in the late third and throughout the fourth centuries cannot be over estimated; certainly fourth century monastics in the eastern Mediterranean and north Africa would number over a hundred thousand and possibly three or four times that number.  As Christianity spread and monasticism spread from the deserts of Egypt and Syria-Palestine to the metropolitan centers of the Empire and westwards as far as Iberia and even Ireland, celibacy became linked with holiness in the Christian mind.  It became a frequent, but not universal, practice to choose a bishop from among the monks, and thus the celibates.   Nevertheless, the vast majority of clergy and even bishops were married men throughout this period. 

      Sometime in the first decade of the fourth century (probably in 306 AD) nineteen bishops and  twenty-four priests along with an unknown number of deacons and laity gathered at Elivra (modern day Granada) in southern Spain to discuss needed legislation for the Church in Baetica (modern day southern Spain).  They passed legislation prohibiting Christians from marrying Jews or pagans socializing with Jews as an attempt to keep the Christians apart and distinct from non-Christians.  They also forbad a bishop to reconcile to the Church a person who had been excommunicated by another bishop.  Also it was forbidden to give communion to those who had lapsed from the faith during the recent persecution of the Emperor Diocletian, even when the lapsed person was dying.  The Council forbad the use of images in churches.  And finally it declared that bishops, preists, and deacons, even those married, were to abstain from sexual relations under threat of being deposed from their ministries. 

      At the very end of the fourth century a Council of North African bishops meeting at Carthage made the same ruling for the North African Church.  In 385 Pope Siricius responded to those who claimed that since the priests of the Old Law had been permitted marriage and having children, priests of the New Covenant also had this right by reminding those critics of celibacy that because the Priesthood of the Old Law depended on being a descendent of Aaron, it was necessary for priests to beget children in their bloodline, but that the Priesthood of Christ demanded continence. 

      Hilary of Arles convoked the Synod of Orange (France) in 441 and like the Elivra Synod it dealt with a wide variety of ecclesiastical issues including unction of the sick, right of asylum and, once again—celibacy which it mandated for all the higher clergy (bishops, priests, and deacons).  It also cited a synod of bishops at Turin in Northern Italy which had apparently mandated celibacy in 401. 

      These various synods were all local and did not have universal jurisdiction.  There was a proposal for clerical celibacy at the Council of Nicea (325), the first Ecumencial Council, but it was rejected at the insistence of one Paphnutius who himself was celibate but who felt that mandatory celibacy would place too heavy a burden on many priests and be an occasion for them to fall into sin.  Nevertheless many of those at the Council felt that once a man had assumed the duties of the altar, married or not, he should practice continence and one of the canons implies that the clergy, married or single, should live celibate lives.

       In the end, all this legislation had little effect.  Priests and even bishops were still chosen from among the married and had families.  In the Eastern reaches of the Empire, it was the norm for parish priests to be married and have a family, though they were expected to refrain from sexual intimacy with their wives for a period of time, usually one to three days, before celebrating the Eucharist.  In the West—especially in the reaches of northern Europe where rural clergy were normal farmers Monday through Saturday and assumed the vestments for Mass on Sundays before heading back to the plow on Monday, marriage and family were almost as much an economic necessity for the priest as for any other man whose farming demanded help in the fields at sowing and harvest.  The monks practiced celibacy—and hopefully (at least for the most part) chastity as well—but there was a radical division between the monastic clergy in their abbeys among their books and long ceremonies and the parish clergy whose life was not so different from their parishioners .
More to come on this topic.