Celibacy for priests not always Catholic doctrine

By Michael Browning, Palm Beach Post Staff Writer
Sunday, March 10, 2002

It isn't in the Bible: The notion that priests should be celibate is one that has gradually taken shape over a period of centuries, as Catholic Church doctrine has evolved.

Worldly considerations have played a role in forming this most unworldly of lifestyles, and the writings of popes, not Holy Writ, have made celibacy obligatory for priests.

But now that an estimated 23,000 Catholic priests have left the ministry (the number worldwide is thought to be 100,000), and the church faces mounting criticism and legal bills over charges of sexual abuse or harassment by clerics, the institution of celibacy is facing a whole new cost-benefit analysis. Is it really worth it? Is it quite certain that this was meant to be?

Christ himself never married, though he is considered to have blessed marriage by appearing at a wedding in Cana and performing his first public miracle there, changing water into wine (John 2:1-11). But Christ consistently preached renunciation of the pleasures and desires of this world in favor of spirituality.

"And everyone who has given up houses or brothers or sisters or father or mother or children or lands for the sake of my name will receive a hundred times more, and will inherit eternal life," Jesus promised (Matthew 19:29).

Still, Christ chose a married man with three children, St. Peter, to lead his apostles and found his church. Other married apostles included James, son of Zebedee, Philip, Matthew, Thomas and the twin brothers, James and Judas, the sons of Alpheus.

Priests once married

For the first 12 centuries of church history, 39 popes were married, in addition to many priests and bishops. Three popes (Anastasius I, Saint Hormidas and Sergius III) produced pope sons of their own, two of whom went on to be declared saints (Saint Innocent I and Saint Silverius).  St. Paul tacitly acknowledged that plenty of early Catholic clergymen were married when he said bishops were bound by the laws of holy matrimony to have but one wife (1 Timothy 3:2) and to manage his household well, "for if a man does not know how to manage his own household, how can he take care of the church of God?"

And in a famous, oft-quoted passage from his first epistle to the Corinthians, Paul admits the power and lure of sex in human nature: "I say therefore to the unmarried and widows, it is good for them to abide even as I. But if they cannot contain, let them marry. For it is better to marry than to burn." (1 Corinthians 7:8-9).  But Paul himself, as he points out, never married. The view that the unmarried were somehow higher, stronger, holier than the married tortured St. Augustine, who speaks in searing terms of the guilt he felt over being unable to renounce sex, in the sixth book of his Confessions, Chapter 25.

Augustine took a mistress, had a bastard son by her, gave her up (apparently breaking her heart in the process; she "went back to Africa, making a vow unto Thee never to know another man, leaving with me my natural son by her"). The future saint, still "a slave to lust," found another mistress, and the following passage practically shrieks with repressed guilt:

"Nor was that wound of mine as yet cured which had been caused by the separation from my former mistress, but after inflammation and most acute anguish it mortified, and the pain became numbed, but more desperate," Augustine wrote.

In a long article in the Catholic Encyclopedia, Herbert Thurston traces the history of celibacy back to a church council held in Elvira, Spain, between 295-302. The council prescribed celibacy for priests and those about to become priests: subdeacons and deacons. Thurston notes that the Emperor Justinian's great legal code, the Corpus Juris Civilis, forbade anyone who had children or even nephews to be consecrated a bishop, "for fear that natural affection should warp his judgment."

Still, the rule seems to have been honored more in the breach than in the observance. We know this because as late as the seventh century we see the wives of bishops, priests, deacons and subdeacons having their own titles, "bishopess, priestess, deaconess, subdeaconess." The titles were just for identification and conveyed no priestly authority.

Corruption drives celibacy push

A turning point came around the 10th century with the breakup of the Carolingian Empire founded by Charlemagne. Suddenly, arguments in favor of celibacy for priests are put forward with a power and vehemence that seems surprising, until one looks at the underlying reasons for them.

By this point in history, the Catholic Church had grown extraordinarily powerful and wealthy. Thanks to a remarkable forgery known today as the "Donation of Constantine," by which the Christian emperor Constantine was supposed to have handed over a large part of Italy to Pope Silvester I, popes were persuaded they had temporal power and began to exercise it with gusto. So did their bishops. Being men, they naturally desired to pass on their wealth and power to their children.

"Impurity, adultery, sacrilege and murder have overwhelmed the world," cried the Council of Trosly in 909. Soldiers became bishops and bishops soldiers. "There were intruded into bishoprics on every side men of brutal nature and unbridled passions, who gave the very worst example to the clergy over whom they ruled," writes Thurston. "Not only priests but bishops openly took wives and begot children to whom they transmitted their benefices."

To save the religion, and the papacy's own moral authority, Pope Gregory VII (reigned 1073-1085) issued stern decrees against simony (buying clerical offices) and concubinage. Priests had to put away their wives and mistresses or be defrocked. They were barred from saying Mass or administering the sacraments.

Subsequent popes backed Gregory up, and celibacy became obligatory, once and for all, at the Second Lateran Council of 1139. The rule was most recently reaffirmed by Pope Paul VI in his 1967 encyclical, Sacerdotalis Caelibatus, or Priestly Celibacy.

Then, in June 1980, a chink appeared in the wall: In that year, Pope John Paul II quietly made special pastoral provisions for married Protestant ministers who converted to Catholicism, to be ordained to the Catholic priesthood, bringing along their wives and children. Many Catholics are unaware of this loophole.

Since then, notes John Horan in the February 1999 issue of U.S. Catholic, "about 70 Episcopalians and an assortment of Lutheran, Methodist and Presbyterian clerics -- most of them married -- have converted to Catholicism and been ordained Catholic priests in the United States. The practice continues worldwide. Cardinal Basil Hume of England has, as of June 1998, ordained six Anglicans, five of whom were married."

Horan urged the church to relax the celibacy rule for all priests.

michael_browning@pbpost.com