Reason for Celibacy: Protect the Property

this bas relief on an eleventh century Tuscan
parish church is actually a fertility symbol

Ok, here is the connection between Church finances and celibacy. 

The King of France dies, his oldest son becomes king.  The Duke of Aquitaine dies, his oldest son comes to the King of France and says: “Dad just died, the duchy is empty.  Make me Duke.”  The King has no choice, unless he can prove treason or some other good reason, not to invest the Duke’s heir with the duchy.  The Earl of Hereford dies, his oldest son comes to the King of England and says: “Dad just died, the earldom is empty. Make me Earl.”  The King, unless he can prove disloyalty on the part of the claimant, has no choice but to make him Earl.  The knight who is the warden of Rochester Castle dies; his son comes to the Duke of Kent in whose duchy the castle stands, and says: “Dad died, make me Warden of the Castle.”  The Duke—unless he can prove that the young man is not reliable—has little or no choice of making the young knight Warden.  Michel is the steward of the Duke of Berry; he dies and his son is appointed in his place unless the Duke can make for a very good case on why someone else should have the job.   Robert is the steward of the Abbot of Cluny—as his father was before him and his son expects to be afterwards. 

     Dad is the toll collector on the Canterbury road bridge over the river Medway and he dies.  The eldest son comes to the Abbot of Malmesbury who own the bridge and says: “Dad died, make me toll collector.”   It is his right to take his father’s place and the Abbot has no choice unless he can prove that the boy is incompetent.  The Reeve of Hampton dies; the Rector of the Church has to appoint his son to the job unless he can find good reason to the contrary. 

     Dad is a goldsmith and has a shop in Bourges.  He dies and his son who did his apprenticeship under his father’s best friend goes to the owner and gets the lease of the shop for his lifetime.   Dad is a silk merchant in Lucca and his son takes the business when he dies.  Dad is a butcher in Regensburg and his son is a butcher and takes the family business when Dad passes on.

     This is simply how things worked in the Middle Ages.

     So now we come to the Church.  We are talking mid-tenth century and Dad is the Rector of Fleury.  He dies.  Son number one goes to the Abbot of Duell who holds the Advowson and says—“Dad died last week, the church is empty, make me Rector.”  Of course—what is the problem. This is how the world works. The son had become a priest because Dad was a priest and Grandpa had been a priest and the Rector of Fleury in his day.  In a world of hereditary posts, everyone expects the church to pass—as does the duchy, the toll-bridge, the castle, the stewardship, the butcher-shop—from Father to Son.  My name is Smith because we are the smiths in the village.  My name is Taylor because we are the tailors.  My name is Chandler because we have made the candles and soap since God-alone-knows-when.  My name is Stuart because we have always been the stewards of the local Lord.  My name is Sexton because our family are the church sextons.  Got it?

      So what is the problem with junior taking over as village priest or city rector when his father dies?  Well don’t forget the parish church has land—sometimes lots of land.  Mrs. Jones left us this field.  Mr Brown left us that vineyard.   Mrs Green gave us that mill by the river.  All these rents come in to support the church and its rector.  And don’t forget the Glebe land that the priest farms—or rents to tenants to farm for him.   The Rector administers a lot of land.  And his daughter is getting married to the son of the sheriff and we need a dowry.  Well let’s give her that field.  And his younger son is becoming a monk at Rochester Cathedral priory—let’s give him that mill by the river as his monastic dowry.  And that vineyard—is that ours or the church’s, I can’t remember, but let’s give it to the nuns of Wapage Abbey to pray for Grandma’s soul.   Rectors are treating church property as their own personal and familial possessions.  Land belonging to the church (and thus the Church) is passing from the church (Church) into families.  The Church is losing its wealth.  How can we stop this?  How can we make sure that church property doesn’t go to the heirs of the priest?  Well, for one thing, we can make sure he doesn’t have any heirs.  But he has four children!  We can’t change that.  No, but we can take away their right to inherit by making them illegitimate.  And that solves a second problem as well.   Not only have bastards no rights of inheritance, but number one son (or number two, three, four or one-hundred-and-seventeen son) cannot claim the rectorship because bastards are ineligible for ordination.  He can neither be hereditary priest nor can he inherit the land.  All we need to do is declare that the marriage of the clergy is null and void and we have two problems solved at once.  Ain’t celibacy great?  

      Now this doesn’t mean that the priest can’t have a wife and children—it only means that the Church does not recognize the marriage and the legitimacy of the children and it is Church courts that settle inheritance issues.  Many priests, in the early and central Middle Ages most priests, were in a stable monogamous relationship.  They thought of  their partner as their wives; the women saw themselves as wives; and even the parishioners thought of the woman as the priest’s wife.   Celibacy may have been the law, but it was honored more in the breach than the observance.  The bishops didn’t mind; the pope’s didn’t mind.  Bishops and sometimes even popes often were—or had been—in such relationships and had children whom they raised as their own without apology.  As long as the property was safe from alienation, the Church was happy.  That would eventually change but celibacy would only be enforced with some degree of strictness throughout the Western Church after the Council of Trent.

      Well, why do we have celibacy today?  Isn’t that a good question.  Perhaps we can look at it in our next posting and from there on to our look at the next Reform—the Gregorian Reform.      

Celibacy: Follow the Money

I mentioned in the last posting that churches were usually constructed by a wealthy benefactor who usually either financed the construction of the church or endowed it with lands sufficient to provide the income from rents to build and maintain it.  And sometimes churches were financed by a combination of both building the church and providing the initial endowment to which other benefactors would add as time passed. The idea of supporting the church through the Sunday offerings as we do in modern America was unknown in the Middle Ages.  Even today in the United States some Protestant churches—most Episcopalian and Presbyterian—would have large endowments that finance much of the congregation’s programming, though Protestants are usually quite generous, certainly more than most Catholics, in the matter of supporting the church to which they belong. 

 


Selby Abbey in England

    Building a church in the Middle Ages wasn’t simply a pious act.  The founder of a church, in addition to whatever spiritual benefits might accrue, had some more temporal benefits.  The founder of a church was the “advowson,” and that carried certain rights.  He actually “owned” the church.  That gave him the right to “present” (i.e. nominate) a candidate to the bishop to be rector (we would say “pastor”) of the Church. The church was “in his gift.”  The bishop could refuse the nomination but he needed good—very good—reason and it was rare so to do.  If he refused the nomination, the bishop could not then name his own candidate, but had to wait for the patron to submit another nomination which would be even more difficult to refuse.       The Advowson not only had the right of presenting, but he also had a share in the church’s income.  I mentioned that the church, if it was a parish church, was also supported by the tithes of the parishioners.  Normally one quarter of revenues went to the Advowson, one quarter to the support of the rector, and the remainder to the maintenance of the fabric and expenses of the divine service—vestments, vessels, candles, furnishings, organ, singers and minor clerics, etc.  Thus building a church was a financial investment.  

      The Rector, for his part, was often a priest who held the title and received the income but who had other work.  Perhaps he was a tutor to the children of the Advowson.  Perhaps he was an important official of the bishop or even the King.  Perhaps he was a scholar at the university.  Being rector provided an income for him while he did other more important but unsalaried work.  From his salary—sometimes quite handsome—he paid another priest—a “vicar” to do the actual work of pastoring the church and its flock.  

      The Advowson might give the church—and its rights and incomes—away.  Perhaps it formed part of a dowry for one of his daughters at her marriage.  Perhaps it was given to a monastery as part of the dowry for a son or daughter who was entering the religious life.  Perhaps he gave it to the bishop—or another bishop—in payment for a debt. Perhaps he gave it to the cathedral to add to their endowment.  When he gave it away the “advowson” transferred to a new owner. 

        A church might be in the diocese of Winchester, for example, but be given to the Bishop of London as a gift.  Then the church became a “peculiar”—it belonged to the Bishop of London and was under his jurisdiction even though it was geographically in the diocese of Winchester.  The bishop of Winchester had the right to confirm (or deny) the nomination of the new rector, but otherwise the church seemed to be in the diocese of London.  Or perhaps a church in the diocese of Orleans was given to the Abbey of Cluny.  The Abbot of Cluny still had to submit the nominee for the rectorship of the church to the Bishop of Orleans, but this would be just a formality and in effect the Abbot of Cluny was the Ordinary of the church and its congregation.  Sometimes too the Abbot would go to Rome and have the jurisdiction transferred in its entirety to himself—and then the bishop had no rights whatsoever over the church.  All this made church organization very confusing and complex.  And the question of jurisdiction was mostly beside the point—what I wanted to point out was mostly that the Advowson had fiscal rights and benefits that made churches valuable property and sources of incomes to their owners.  Next posting we will look at the problem of inheriting the rectorship of churches and how it influences the imposition of celibacy.    

Celibacy--The Financial Foundation For a Sexless Clergy

The portal at Chartres Cathedral
Because of the relics it holds, one
of  the more significant
pilgrimage cathedrals in Europe. 

To understand why celibacy for the lower clergy, priests in particular, became such an important issue in the medieval period we have to understand several other factors.  Sex is not one of them; the real issue was not sex but property.
      First we need to understand how churches—parish churches in particular—were financed.  Churches almost invariably were built by a wealthy patron.  Often it would be a nobleman building a church for the serfs who share-cropped his land. Usually the founder of the church, if it is a rural parish, also sets aside land for the priest to farm to help support the priest and his family.  That land is called a “Glebe.”   In towns or cities it might be a wealthy townsperson (towns were fairly small –a “large” city like Paris might have 10,000 inhabitants in the Central Middle Ages, say for example, the year 800) who builds a parish church out of an act of devotion or penitence.  A King or major nobleman such as a Duke or Count might establish an abbey of monks or nuns and provide the lands that in turn would provide the revenue to construct their abbey Church.  A Cathedral would receive generous donations from the townspeople that would be collected and along with ecclesiastical taxes placed on the canons (the Cathedral clergy who were also usually rectors of the principal churches in town) would finance the various building stages of the Cathedral Church which more often than not would take several centuries to build (and often to rebuild in more up-to-date architectural styles).  As churches were built various persons would make bequests, usually in return for prayers for their souls after they died. These bequests were not usually money or gold, but lands that the church would own but rent out to provide more income.  Grandma dies, and she leaves a vineyard to the parish Church and the rector rents it out and the rent brings in ₤ 2 s10 d 4 (two pounds sterling, ten shillings, and four pence).  That would not be much today but in the year 800 it might be equivalent to a thousand dollars or more in purchasing power.  (You need to remember that is more than two and a half pounds of silver). Or uncle George dies and in his will he leaves a shop in town to the Church and rent comes in at  ₤ 1 s5 d3.  It all adds up. Of course Grandma or Uncle George might not leave their bequest to the parish Church, but to the monastery church or even to the Cathedral. 
      Another source of income for rural parish churches besides the rents from lands left them, are tithes.  Each Christian (which at this point is just about 100% of the population, the Jews living mostly in the towns) is obligated to contribute 10% of his produce to the support of the Church.  This is not a free-will offering.  Quite to the contrary.  At harvest a man called the Reeve shows up with the Sheriff and collects the Church’s share of the harvest.  And usually they choose the ten percent, the best ten percent, to cart off for the church.  Livestock and poultry are usually factored in to this collection as well.  Coinage or produce are often substituted for eggs, milk, and other perishables.  In fact, as the Middle Ages progress and coinage takes the place of barter, people might make a financial settlement with the Rector in place of the tithe of produce. 
       Urban parishioners did not usually farm, but they were expected to tithe as well—in coin or product or labor given to the Church.  Goldsmiths, cloth merchants, and other guild members might donate vestments or church ornaments or even finance the construction of a chapel, a sacristy, or other building project.  This would be especially true in the city where citizens vied for the opportunity to give rich gifts to the Cathedral Churches.  Rural nobility, on the other hand, usually preferred to give their gifts of chalices or vestments or artwork to a monastery or abbey. 
         Monasteries only had a right to the tithes of the tenants on monastic lands.  As they were not parish churches their only “parishioners” were those who worked for the abbey or were parishioners for a parish church that might belong to the abbey.  But they usually received a dowry from the family of each new monk—a land grant more often than not—and as the monks came from the land-owning nobility this built up monastic land-holdings often to great wealth.  In England at the time when Henry VIII dissolved the monasteries (1536-1541) the monasteries  collectively owned more land than the Crown!  That was one of the reasons he closed them down—and confiscated their lands.  In fact, the Church owned over a third of the land in England when Henry came to the throne! When he needed money who knew whose piggy-bank to break.  It wasn’t only about Katherine of Aragon or Anne Boleyn that we have a Church of England today. 
          Monasteries often received bequests from pious folks—again primarily the wealthy as they had the lands to give.  Land was given in exchange for prayers for the living and/or the dead.  Grandma dies and leaves her vineyard to the monks; in exchange every year on the anniversary of her death they are obligate to offer a mass or sing a litany or hold a procession with prayers for the repose of her soul. 
         Monasteries and Cathedrals—and sometimes important parish churches, most in the cities—also acquired (either by gift or purchase) relics of the saints. If they were truly lucky they might acquire a relic of Christ or the Virgin.  Chartres still has a veil said to be that of the Virgin Mary.  The Sainte-Chapelle in Paris was built in the thirteenth century (a little later than most of our other examples) to hold the crown of thorns and other souvenirs that King Saint Louis IX of France brought back from the Crusades.  Relics were great money-makers.  Pilgrims flocked from great distances, hundreds of miles, to see relics or visit a particular shrine.  At the shrine they paid for meals and lodging at various inns, spent money on different amusements, and left their donations for the privilege of seeing a piece of bone that allegedly  belonged to an apostle, a bloody tunic that had belonged to a martyr, a piece of Christ’s cross, or whatever the local attraction was.  When the left, the officials of the Church showed up at the Inn or tavern or house of prostitution and collected the Church’s share of the income the pilgrims had brought.  And I am not trying to be funny or shock about the local brothel being part of the pilgrim economy.  This is a religion that still believed in Original Sin and knew it made money. 
         All this provided income for Churches—great and small.  How does that contribute to the enforcement of celibacy?  Well stay tuned.  We can’t fit the whole story into one entry. 

Roots of the Reformation XIV: A Historical Take on Anti-Clericalism and the Protestant Reformations.

The medieval English Church at
Dartmouth in Southern England

I mentioned in our last entry that anti-clericalism is a very important monitor of danger for the Church.  Distrust of or discontent with the clergy undermines the Church as an institution and alienates people from the practice of the faith.  I want to look at this from a historical perspective.

One of the characteristics of the Churches that sprang out of the series of sixteenth-century Reformations that we call “Protestant” is the amount of control the laity exercise in Church matters.  Indeed for the most part in the Churches of the Reformation the distinction between laity and clergy is all but obliterated.  The roots of this declericalization was not doctrinal but rather a reaction to the abuses of clerical power in the late medieval Church.  Doctrines such as “The Priesthood of All Believers” which stamp most Protestant Tradition arose because of the strong anti-clerical mood in European society.  In other words, the doctrines were primarily a reaction to the exaggerated clericalism of the medieval Church.  And—by the way—we Catholics must remember that those doctrines are not heretical but at most an exaggeration of the authentic Apostolic Tradition which we call “The Baptismal Priesthood”  or the “Priesthood of the Faithful” which is rooted in the New Testament and in the Fathers and is celebrated in the official Liturgy of the Catholic Churchy, most notably but not exclusively in the rites of the Sacrament of Baptism.       

In the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries there was a serious rise of anti-clericalism in Europe and in retrospect we can see how it made the Catholic Church vulnerable to the Reformers as well as paved the way for the Churches of the Reformation where the authority of the clergy was almost invariably replaced by strong lay control.  Calvin’s Geneva is one such example.  While John Calvin was the preacher and theologian for the Reformed Church in Geneva, actual power was exercised not by Calvin but by the town council which had determined that the Catholicism would be replaced by the Reformed Religion.  The Council often went against Calvin in its decisions about Church polity.  The laity, not the clergy, would chart the path for the Church.  This was true in most Reformed and Evangelical Churches—the clergy could persuade and encourage in their preaching, but decisions of Church polity were ultimately in the hands of the laity.  In England from the time of Elizabeth I onwards, Parliament would make decisions regarding Church polity.  Even the Queen had to concede certain points of theology and practice to the anti-clerical parties (The Puritan faction) in Parliament in regard to the approval of the Book of Common Prayer that was issued in her reign.  The bishops had a voice, but they did not have final word and into the twentieth century you had a predominately lay body, Parliament, not all of whom by any means were Anglican, making decisions about worship and other matters internal to the Church of England.  

We have gotten somewhat ahead of ourselves here.  Let’s get back to the period of history immediately before the various Protestant Reformations.  We had spoken some time back about John Wycliffe (see entries for April 27^th and 28^th 2011).   Wycliffe’s followers in England were very distrustful of the clergy.  Wycliffe, though himself a priest and holder of several fairly lucrative benefices, had preached against clerical wealth and privilege.  It was at this same time the Geoffrey Chaucer in England and Giovanni Bocaccio in Italy had drawn scathing portraits of the clergy in their varied literary works.  Friars were seen to be greedy and womanizers; monks, fat and lazy sodomites.   The secular clergy were seen as nickel and diming people with fees for every imaginable service they rendered.  How truthful were these caricatures?   Well, there were good monks and friars and priests, but the caricatures would not have worked in the various poems and narratives if there had not been some truth to them.  It was a time marked by some strong reform movements in the religious orders, but also by religious who refused to embrace the necessary reforms.  In other words, like today, you had good priests and not-so-good priests. 

Celibacy then, as today, is a tricky issue to speak of.  Popular mythology often points the medieval clergy as satyrs, totally ignoring the demands of celibacy.  The fact of the matter is that the secular clergy were pretty much ignoring celibacy, but they were not necessarily promiscuous.  Church law from the eleventh century onwards had forbidden the clergy to marry.  This was mostly a matter of preventing Church property from passing out of Church ownership to the heirs of the priest.  Children, by law, had rights of inheritance only if they were legitimate.  Prohibiting the clergy to marry rendered the children illegitimate and prevented them from suing for a share in their father’s estate.  Church properties were preserved for the Church.  The celibacy legislation worked fairly well in despoiling children and widows of their claims but despite the law of the Church, many priests continued to marry and have children.  The marriages were not usually solemnized—i.e. “blessed” in Church—but neither were many medieval marriages, especially among the more common folk.  What we call “common-law” marriages were taken much more for granted in the Middle Ages, especially among the peasantry and the working classes.  Weddings were mostly for the nobility and, after the twelfth century, the bourgeoisie.  Many priests lived in a stable relationship with one woman, having children by her and raising their children together.  This would have been especially common in both rural areas and on the fringes of European society—Scandinavia, Scotland, Ireland, where priesthood was often a part-time occupation combined with farming and where the collaborative work of family life was almost a requisite for survival.   This is not to gloss over clerical sexuality.  Clerical concubinage (a prelate, priest, or major cleric having a mistress), as differentiated from such common-law relationships, was by no means unknown in the cities and towns and among the hierarchy.  The stability of these relationships varied from the same sort of common-law marriages of rural clergy to the successive monogamy of a series of mistresses.  And, of course, there were those among the clergy and hierarchy, as there are in every place and time and profession—promiscuous swine to take whatever opportunity presents itself for sexual gratification.   Popes were rarely in a position to clean up this mess as more than a few were sexually active themselves. 

All this is simply a way of making clear that there was not much to admire in the clerical state.  There were fine priests of course; priests beloved and admired by their congregants for their devotion and pastoral service.  Then too there were priests admired and loved by their parishioners who had common-law wives and children and whose parishioners did not see anything wrong with that.  There were priests who were celibate and who were loved and admired by their parishioners.  And there were priests who were celibate but whose parishioners disdained them, even hated them, because while celibate they still begrudged their congregants good pastoral care. 

It was common practice for priests to hold lucrative posts called benefices.  The benefice might be the pastorate of a wealthy church that paid a hefty salary.  The benefice might be a position at the Cathedral.  The benefice might be the chaplaincy at a hospital or a school.  When the salary was sufficiently high, or the priest held several high-income benefices at the same time, he might pay out of his salary a “vicar” to do the actual work.  Priests might often live in a degree of luxury, a high degree of luxury, and do little or no work.  None of this helped clerical reputation and by the early sixteenth century clergy were often held in contempt.

The Church in the Middle Ages had become incredibly wealthy.  Over the centuries immense amounts of land had been left in wills and bequests to monasteries, parish churches, cathedral chapters, schools, and other religious institutions.  Unlike family lands which were always being both added to and divided by dowries and divisions among heirs, (and bequests to churches), the Church did not pay dowries nor did it leave lands by bequest to others.  Thus the Church and its various institutions only increased in wealth and property.  It was always the receiver, never the giver.  Of course, it did pay salaries, and not only to clergy but to vast numbers of servants and workers required to maintain the various institutions.  It also spent huge sums hiring stonemasons, carpenters, glaziers, smiths and others in the vast construction projects of the Middle Ages.  It made heavy purchases in everything from beer, wine, food, and clothing for its clergy and employees to silks, gold and silver and jewels, organs, incense and other requirements for services.  In other words, the Church was a vital part of the economy.  In addition to its lands and the revenues its properties generated in rents and leases, the Church depended on the non-voluntary contributions called tithes of everyone from small tenant-farmers to powerful merchants.  It was required by Church law and enforced by the civil officials called reeves that the Church got ten percent of your income.  As the Church grew richer—in some places owning up to a third of the land in a kingdom—and more opulent in its display of wealth, many—especially in the merchant class—began to resent that they had to pay these tithes when the Church seemed to be so wealthy.  With the rise of the urban business classes, people began wanting to reinvest their spare capital in order to make more money yet.  They were not happy in seeing their hard earned money going to an institution that seemed to have so much already.     

Another reason for the lack of respect of the clergy is that in the early and central Middle Ages, that is from the eighth through the thirteenth centuries, the priest was most often among the best educated, or even in some places, the only educated person, in the town or village.  Even where the priest was no more educated than the peasants he served, his guardianship of the Sacred and his control of the Rites was seen as giving him a quasi-magical power.  But from the twelfth century on, with the economic revolution in Europe that created a strong and vibrant middle class, the educational level in European society rose fast.  Laity began to read and study—and develop areas of expertise such as law and economics.  Educationally the clergy began to meet their peers among their congregants.  Even in the rural areas reason began to replace superstition and magic.  No longer did the word of the priest have authority simply because he was a priest.  His words were weighed for their value as they corresponded to the knowledge and insight of his listeners.  An individual priest might be respected for his intelligence and wisdom but by no means was such respect automatic; much less would respect be given simply because a person was a priest.  In fact, people did not hesitate to question the opinion of a priest and counter with their own insights from their experience and from common sense.   It was a new age and not all the clergy recognized that their control over the faithful had eroded.