Married Priests in the Catholic Church

April is just around the corner, and that means that you can soon order my next book, Married Priests in the Catholic Church, which the University of Notre Dame Press is bringing out.

About this international and ecumenical collection, you should know this:

These essays offer a historically rigorous dismantling of Western claims about the superiority of celibate priests.

Although celibacy is often seen as a distinctive feature of the Catholic priesthood, both Catholic and Orthodox Churches in fact have rich and diverse traditions of married priests. The essays contained in Married Priests in the Catholic Church offer the most comprehensive treatment of these traditions to date. These essays, written by a wide-ranging group that includes historians, pastors, theologians, canon lawyers, and the wives and children of married Roman Catholic, Eastern Catholic, and Eastern Orthodox priests, offer diverse perspectives from many countries and traditions on the subject, including personal, historical, theological, and canonical accounts. As a collection, these essays push especially against two tendencies in thinking about married priesthood today. Against the idea that a married priesthood would solve every problem in Catholic clerical culture, this collection deromanticizes and demythologizes the notion of married priesthood. At the same time, against distinctively modern theological trends that posit the superiority, apostolicity, and “ontological” necessity of celibate priests, this collection refutes the claim that priestly ordination and celibacy must be so closely linked.

In addressing the topic of married priesthood from both practical and theoretical angles, and by drawing on a variety of perspectives, Married Priests in the Catholic Church will be of interest to a wide audience, including historians, theologians, canon lawyers, and seminary professors and formators, as well as pastors, parish leaders, and laypeople.

Contributors: Adam A. J. DeVille, David G. Hunter, Dellas Oliver Herbel, James S. Dutko, Patrick Viscuso, Alexander M. Laschuk, John Hunwicke, Edwin Barnes, Peter Galadza, David Meinzen, Julian Hayda, Irene Galadza, Nicholas Denysenko, William C. Mills, Andrew Jarmus, Thomas J. Loya, Lawrence Cross, and Basilio Petrà.

Clerical Continence in England and Byzantium

Western apologists for celibacy, desperate to cover over the well-documented holes in their bogus and increasingly desperate apologias for that discipline, like tendentiously to play around with certain bits of canonical legislation to make the claim that continence is required of all clerics, and always has been, and the East gets it wrong, etc. This tedious clap-trap, subject to a royal rubbishing in my forthcoming Married Priests in the Catholic Church, by top-drawer historians without axes to grind, is given further scrutiny in this new book: Clerical Continence in Twelfth-Century England and Byzantium: Property, Family, and Purity Maroula Perisanidi (Routledge, 2020), 204pp. 

About this book the publisher tells us this:

Why did the medieval West condemn clerical marriage as an abomination while the Byzantine Church affirmed its sanctifying nature? This book brings together ecclesiastical, legal, social, and cultural history in order to examine how Byzantine and Western medieval ecclesiastics made sense of their different rules of clerical continence. Western ecclesiastics condemned clerical marriage for three key reasons: married clerics could alienate ecclesiastical property for the sake of their families; they could secure careers in the Church for their sons, restricting ecclesiastical positions and lands to specific families; and they could pollute the sacred by officiating after having had sex with their wives. A comparative study shows that these offending risk factors were absent in twelfth-century Byzantium: clerics below the episcopate did not have enough access to ecclesiastical resources to put the Church at financial risk; clerical dynasties were understood within a wider frame of valued friendship networks; and sex within clerical marriage was never called impure in canon law, as there was little drive to use pollution discourses to separate clergy and laity. These facts are symptomatic of a much wider difference between West and East, impinging on ideas about social order, moral authority, and reform.

Marriage and Sex in Early Christianity

I confess to growing weariness with the endless focus on sexual issues today and the endless policing of and editorializing about the same. But I have none of those fears in approaching a new book by David Hunter, whom I know personally to be a first-rate scholar of antique Christianity, treating issues with the serene and objective regard that characterizes historical scholarship at its best.

He is the editor of the newly released collection, Marriage and Sexuality in Early Christianity (Fortress Press, 2018), 272pp.

About this collection the publisher tells us this:

Marriage and Sexuality in Early Christianity is part of Ad Fontes: Early Christian Sources, a series designed to present ancient Christian texts essential to an understanding of Christian theology, ecclesiology, and practice. The books in the series make the wealth of early Christian thought available to new generations of students of theology and provide a valuable resource for the church. Developed in light of recent patristic scholarship, the volumes provide a representative sampling of theological contributions from both East and West. The series provides volumes that are relevant for a variety of courses: from introduction to theology to classes on doctrine and the development of Christian thought. The goal of each volume is not to be exhaustive but rather to be representative enough to denote for a nonspecialist audience the multivalent character of early Christian thought, allowing readers to see how and why early Christian doctrine and practice developed the way it did.

Between Christ and Caliph

As I have often noted on here over the years, the legal status of minority Christians under Islam is both governed by certain well-known codes in most places, but also subject to a great deal of local interpretation, application, and general variation, leading some Ottomanists to say that this entire legal history is one of endless "local exceptions."

A new book examines this complicated status by focusing on the particular and often difficult question of marriage, especially for Syriac Christians: Lev. E. Weitz, Between Christ and Caliph: Law, Marriage, and Christian Community in Early Islam (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018) Lev E. Weitz 328 pages

About this book the publisher tells us:

In the conventional historical narrative, the medieval Middle East was composed of autonomous religious traditions, each with distinct doctrines, rituals, and institutions. Outside the world of theology, however, and beyond the walls of the mosque or the church, the multireligious social order of the medieval Islamic empire was complex and dynamic. Peoples of different faiths—Sunnis, Shiites, Christians, Jews, and others—interacted with each other in city streets, marketplaces, and even shared households, all under the rule of the Islamic caliphate. Laypeople of different confessions marked their religious belonging through fluctuating, sometimes overlapping, social norms and practices.

In Between Christ and Caliph, Lev E. Weitz examines the multiconfessional society of early Islam through the lens of shifting marital practices of Syriac Christian communities. In response to the growth of Islamic law and governance in the seventh through tenth centuries, Syriac Christian bishops created new laws to regulate marriage, inheritance, and family life. The bishops banned polygamy, required that Christian marriages be blessed by priests, and restricted marriage between cousins, seeking ultimately to distinguish Christian social patterns from those of Muslims and Jews. Through meticulous research into rarely consulted Syriac and Arabic sources, Weitz traces the ways in which Syriac Christians strove to identify themselves as a community apart while still maintaining a place in the Islamic social order. By binding household life to religious identity, Syriac Christians developed the social distinctions between religious communities that came to define the medieval Islamic Middle East. Ultimately, Between Christ and Caliph argues that interreligious negotiations such as these lie at the heart of the history of the medieval Islamic empire.

Eastern Orthodox Divorce and Remarriage

It was a good four years ago now, perhaps longer, that I was first asked by a Catholic publisher for my thoughts on the debate over marriage, divorce, and re-marriage that was then heating up in the Catholic Church. Asked to recommend reliable authors who treated these topics in an Orthodox context, I came up with a short list of names of those who had treated certain aspects in the past, but was aware of just how much work yet needed to be done, and how easily it could be done badly.

What was then lacking, and has since been remedied, is a wide-ranging, historically comprehensive, and scholarly judicious study of these endlessly messy and complicated matters. Such a study has now emerged in very impressive form, and based on my read of it, it promises to be an enormously helpful book, not least for its clarity, careful sifting of sources, and vast bibliography (running more than 60 pages!), inter alia. In the coming weeks I hope to run an interview with Kevin Schembri, author of Oikonomia, Divorce, and Remarriage in the Eastern Orthodox Tradition (Valore Italiano SRL, 2017), 336pp.

About this book and its author the publisher tells us the following:

Over the last fifty years, the Eastern Orthodox position on oikonomia, divorce and remarriage was the subject of numerous studies. This volume builds on this research and attempts to offer a comprehensive systematic presentation of these topics. By doing so, it adds to the already rich tradition of the Eastern Orthodox Churches, and presents the Western Churches with a valuable resource in their pursuit of ecumenical dialogue with the Orthodox East, in their dealing with the ever-growing reality of mixed marriages, and in their ministry to the divorced and remarried members of their faithful.

Kevin Schembri is a lecturer in canon law at the University of Malta. He holds a licentiate in sacred theology from the same university and a doctorate in canon law from the Pontifical Gregorian University. He is a Catholic priest and serves as promoter of justice and defender of the bond for the Archdiocese of Malta.

The Popes and Monarchical Marriages

The current debate in the Catholic Church about marriage, made much murkier by that needlessly sprawling and carelessly prolix mess of a document known as Amoris Laetetia (which proves, yet again, that committees should not write documents, and that the writing of short documents and books requires far greater self-discipline than longer ones), could well benefit from a hefty dose of history such as that supplied in David d'Avray's book, first published in 2015, and released earlier this year in paperback: Papacy, Monarchy and Marriage 860-1600 (Cambridge UP, 2017), 370pp.

About this study the publisher tells us:

This analysis of royal marriage cases across seven centuries explains how and how far popes controlled royal entry into and exits from their marriages. In the period between c.860 and 1600, the personal lives of kings became the business of the papacy. d'Avray explores the rationale for papal involvement in royal marriages and uses them to analyse the structure of church-state relations. The marital problems of the Carolingian Lothar II, of English kings - John, Henry III, and Henry VIII - and other monarchs, especially Spanish and French, up to Henri IV of France and La Reine Margot, have their place in this exploration of how canon law came to constrain pragmatic political manoeuvring within a system increasingly rationalised from the mid-thirteenth century on. Using documents presented in the author's Dissolving Royal Marriages, the argument brings out hidden connections between legal formality, annulments, and dispensations, at the highest social level.

The Adventure of Marriage

I have previously noted the fascinating figure of Julia Kristeva, the French philosopher and psychoanalyst of Bulgarian Orthodox background. I have also mentioned my longstanding reading of biographies, autobiographies, diaries, and memoirs. So this forthcoming book looks like it will satisfy on both fronts, and thus I look forward to the December release of Kristeva's latest book, co-authored with her husband: Marriage as a Fine Art.

The publisher gives us excerpts from the co-authors, and then the blurb:

"We found so much to say, to share, to learn.... For it wasn't just the Marquis de Sade profile and the sporty thighs-and-calves that seduced me. It was even more, perhaps, or certainly just as much, the speed at which you used to read, and still do."—Julia Kristeva

"We're married, Julia and I, that's a fact, but we each have our own personalities, our own name, activities, and freedom. Love is the full recognition of the other in their otherness. If this other is very close to you, as in this case, it seems to me that what's at stake is harmony within difference. The difference between men and women is irreducible; there's no possibility of fusion."—Philippe Sollers

Marriage as a Fine Art is an enchanting series of exchanges in which Julia Kristeva and Philippe Sollers, married for fifty years, speak candidly about their love. Though they live separately, Kristeva and Sollers are fully committed to each other. Their bond is intellectual and psychological, passionate and mundane. They share everything when together, and lose themselves in their interests when apart. Their marriage is art, rich with history and meaning, idiosyncratic, and dynamic in its expression.

Yet it is also as common as they come. Kristeva and Sollers have lived through the same challenges, peaks, and lulls as all married couples do. With humor and honesty, they elaborate on these moments, turning marriage's familiar aspects into exceptional examples of relating, struggling, transcending, and being. Marriage as a Fine Art is a rare chance to know these intellectuals—and marriage—more intimately.

Marriage: Law and Sacrament

Given the on-going turmoil in the Catholic Church over the disciplines of marriage, divorce, re-marriage, and annulments, as well as the potential for turmoil at the upcoming 'great and holy synod' of Orthodoxy, whose agenda includes the topic of marriage, this forthcoming study may be of wide interest: Philip Reynolds, How Marriage Became One of the Sacraments: The Sacramental Theology of Marriage from its Medieval Origins to the Council of Trent (Cambridge UP, 2016), 1077pp.

About this hefty tome the publisher tells us:

Among the contributions of the medieval church to western culture was the idea that marriage was one of the seven sacraments, which defined the role of married folk in the church. Although it had ancient roots, this new way of regarding marriage raised many problems, to which scholastic theologians applied all their ingenuity. By the late Middle Ages, the doctrine was fully established in Christian thought and practice but not yet as dogma. In the sixteenth century, with the entire Catholic teaching on marriage and celibacy and its associated law and jurisdiction under attack by the Protestant reformers, the Council of Trent defined the doctrine as a dogma of faith for the first time but made major changes to it. Rather than focusing on a particular aspect of intellectual and institutional developments, this book examines them in depth and in detail from their ancient precedents to the Council of Trent.

We are also given the table of contents:

 1. Marriage as a sacrament
Part I. Augustine:
2. Marriage in Augustine's writings
3. Bonum prolis, bonum fidei: the utility of marriage
4. Bonum sacramenti: the sanctity and insolubility of marriage
Part II. Getting Married: Consent, Betrothal, and Consummation:
5. Betrothal and consent
6. Consummation
7. From competing theories to common doctrine in the twelfth century
Part III. The Twelfth Century: Origins and Early Development of the Sacramental Theology of Marriage:
8. Introduction to the sentential literature on marriage
9. The theology of marriage in the Sententiae
10. Hugh of Saint-Victor
11. The early doctrine of marriage as one of the sacraments
Part IV. The Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries: Development of the Classical Doctrine:
12. Marriage as union
13. Scholastic sexual ethics
14. Marriage as a sacrament
15. The question of grace
16. Human contract and divine sacrament
Part V. The Council of Trent:
17. On the eve of the General Council
18. The Sacrament of marriage at Bologna and Trent
19. Clandestine marriage: Bologna, 1547
20. Clandestine marriage: Trent, 1563.

Paul Evdokimov on Women

Paul Evdokimov remains one of the most interesting figures to come out of postwar Orthodoxy in France--a rich time with many rich thinkers, as I noted before. His book on marriage, The Sacrament of Love, remains to my mind the most theologically satisfying of any work in contemporary theology. But his theological anthropology, as those who have read Woman and the Salvation of the World know, remains problematic. According to at least three scholars I know who have studied and written about Evdokimov, he did not want this last book of his published, fearing it was unfinished and still needing work; but it was published posthumously anyway. 

We have, then, for some time needed a critical appreciation and evaluation of Evdokimov on these questions, and now it seems we have it in a new book from a Romanian scholar: Simona Sabou, Trading Silence for Words of Praise: The Status of Woman in Eastern Orthodoxy as Reflected in the Works of Paul Evdokimov (Lambert Academic, 2012), 224pp.

About this book the publisher tells us:

This work offers an analysis of Russian theologian Paul Evdokimov's view in regard to the position of woman in Orthodox theology. He starts from the doctrine of imago Dei, which requires a discussion of Evdokimov's view of God, emphasizing the importance given to personhood within Orthodox theology, and arguing that the concept of the monarchy of the Father on the one hand undermines our understanding of personhood itself, and on the other hand leaves room for hierarchical and subordinationist structures. On marriage, he distinguishes between monasticism and marriage, and while he presupposes monasticism to be a threat to the status of marriage and that a low status of marriage, in turn, is a threat to the status of woman, he fails to address either of these. Ultimately, it is argued that Evdokimov's particular attempts to both praise woman and deny any inferiority when compared with man are undermined by his wider Orthodox tradition, where personhood is not fully established, where monasticism has a higher status than marriage, where woman is to be mother without any parallel requirement for man, and where woman is not allowed an equal ministerial status with man.

Celibate Marriages?

Nearly a decade ago now, in a long and very rich article we published in Logos: A Journal of Eastern Christian Studies, Brian Butcher looked at the diverse and sometimes rather odd portraits of married saints as they emerge in the hymnody of the Byzantine tradition. That article was the basis for a book Brian published in 2009: Married Saints in the Orthodox Tradition: The Representation of Conjugality in the Sanctoral Hymnography of the Byzantine Rite.

At the very end of 2011, a new book was published that goes over some similar territory: Anne Alwis, Celibate Marriages in Late Antique and Byzantine Hagiography: The Lives of Saints Julian and Basilissa, Andronikos and Athanasia, and Galaktion and Episteme (Continuum, 2011), 352pp.

About this book, the publisher tells us:

This book explores the puzzling phenomenon of celibate marriage as depicted in the lives of three couples who achieved sainthood. Marriage without intercourse appears to have no purpose, especially in Christian antiquity, yet these three tales were copied for centuries. What messages were they promoting? What did it mean to be a virgin husband and a virgin wife? Including full translations, this volume sets each life in its historical context, and by examining their individual and shared themes, the book shows that the tension raised by pitting marriage against celibacy is constantly debated. It also highlights the ingenuity of Byzantine hagiographers as they attempted to reconcile this curious paradox. The book addresses a gap in late Antique and Byzantine hagiographic studies where primary sources and interpretative material are very rarely presented in the same volume. By providing a variety of contexts to the material a much more comprehensive, revealing and holistic picture of celibate marriage emerges. 

Marriage, Canonically & Ecclesiologically Understood

Robert Taft has called canon law "the bad side of the good news." This is perhaps never so true as when dealing with marriage. At Orientale Lumen last month, Met. Kallistos Ware, in speaking about the complexity of the problem of treating the papacy in the first millennium, noted that one could find various Eastern appeals to the pope of Rome during that time period, but they were far from straightforward, and it would be exceedingly dangerous to extrapolate from them--a point I have myself made in print before. Ware noted the example of the Byzantine Emperor Leo VI, to whom the epithet ''the Wise'' is sometimes suffixed. Leo appealed to Rome against the Ecumenical Patriarch when the latter forbade the emperor from attempting to contract a fourth marriage after his first three wives died without giving him a male heir. (Ware's droll comment was to the effect: How correct is it to call ''wise'' a man who marries four times?) The Roman canonical tradition had no objection to fourth marriages and so the pope blessed the emperor to proceed with a fourth marriage. It would be fatuous to draw from this the conclusion that ''the East'' was therefore always willing to submit to ''papal authority'' in the first millennium, whether on canonical questions or any others. 

David Heith-Stade has recently written a book treating of marriage in the Eastern canonical tradition that looks very interesting:

Marriage as the Arena of Salvation: An Ecclesiological Study of the Marital Regulation in the Canons of the Council in Trullo (Orthodox Research Institute Press, 2011), 206pp.

About this book, the publisher tells us:

Despite the importance of canon law in the life of the Eastern Orthodox Churches, there has not been a study of the ecclesiology of the canons regulating marriage. Marriage is an object of right regulated both by civil law and the canon law of the Eastern Orthodox Church. Marriage as an object of right is at the intersection of two legal orders - the ecclesial and the civil. The canonical regulation of marriage as an object of right confronts us with a twofold ecclesiological problem: (a) how does the Church perceive the civil legal order in relation to its own legal order; and, (b) how is the self-understanding of the Church, i.e. its ecclesiology, reflected in its canon law? Thus, the ecclesiological problem examined in this study is the question of how the ecclesial polity (politeuma), as the Eucharistic ekklēsia of the people (laos) of the new covenant, actualizes itself as taxis within a concrete society. The hypothesis is that the aim of the ecclesial polity is covenant holiness, and, furthermore, that the aim of the canonical taxis is to establish and maintain covenant holiness within the concrete socio-historical setting of the ecclesial polity. By actualization, this means the diachronic institutional process whereby the ecclesial polity subsists in a society as an institution determined by its finality and institutional potentiality.

I will have a canonist review this for Logos: A Journal of Eastern Christian Studies in 2012.