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.

Married Catholic Priests

D.P. Sullins has written an important book that deserves careful attention amidst semi-regular papal chatter about possible relaxation of the celibacy requirement for presbyteral ordination in the Latin Church. In Keeping the Vow: the Untold Story of Married Catholic Priests (Oxford UP, 2016), 336pp., Sullins, himself both a married priest and a sociologist teaching at Catholic University of America, has given us a usefully detailed picture of a very select group of men in one country, the USA. Those interested in clerical life, those interested in the marriage-vs-celibacy debate, and those interested in the sociology of the Catholic Church will all find much that is informative in this welcome and tightly written book.

Sullins looks at the advent of married priests in the US from the early 1980s to the present, beginning with the Pastoral Provision, which allowed married Episcopalian clergy entering the Catholic Church the possibility of being ordained as Catholic priests notwithstanding their being married and having families.

As a sociologist, he has studied this group in some detail, and amassed in this book, in a number of tables and figures, the fruits of his research and statistical calculations. Via surveys and interviews, we learn much about the background of these married priests and their wives--education, formation, length of marriage, and location. Strikingly, the largest number of these men is to be found in just one state: Texas.

Sullins has also surveyed these men carefully on a number of controverted doctrinal issues, and all down the line these men are, compared to a comparable group of celibate Latin priests, much more "conservative" or "traditional" when it comes to such things as abortion, contraception, assisted suicide, etc. (Interestingly, however, their wives do not tend to be quite as conservative.)

He has also surveyed bishops to see what they know about these priests, about the Pastoral Provision, and now the Anglican ordinariates, asking them also about their support for married clergy and their views on celibacy.

Sullins has also usefully dispensed with some of the myths that are sometimes circulated to warn people off a married priesthood, especially the myth that it will cost dramatically more. By carefully crunching the numbers, he demonstrates that the average remuneration for a married man would only be slightly more than that of a celibate guy.

Sullins also sheds welcome light on other areas, noting that on average married priests perdure in the priesthood longer than their celibate counterparts, and have much higher levels of job satisfaction. At the same time, however, and most counter-intuitively, they tend to be lonelier than their celibate colleagues precisely because the married men have so few colleagues who can relate to them. Most of these men, entering a diocese, do so among a diocesan presbyterate that has, Sullins shows, its own internal groupings--the relative liberals, the arch-conservatives, those with certain interests or hobbies, etc. Married men find it hard to break into these pre-existing groups, and while their celibate colleagues are as a whole welcoming and friendly, they are also distant. So married clergy find developing friendships a challenge.

Only in a couple of places does he briefly mention married Eastern Catholic priests, a topic he does not seriously treat, and usually stumbles when doing so. Thus, e.g., he says that the Eastern Catholics driven out of the Catholic Church over married priests formed "today's Greek Orthodox Church in the United States" (175). It was actually the OCA that they largely formed, and the Orthodox Church of America has in fact canonized the formerly Catholic married priest, Alexis Toth, who led an exodus of Eastern Catholics into Orthodoxy thanks in part to the stupidity and intransigence of such as John Ireland. My friend D.O. Herbel gives the fullest, fairest account of all this in the first chapter of his splendid and vital study, Turning to Tradition: Converts and the Making of an American Orthodox.

A little earlier he implies (p.151) that the old rule prohibiting Eastern Catholics from ordaining married men in the United States is still in effect, but it is not.

These need not concern us insofoar as I am myself hoping finally to have movement from the publisher on my own book about married Catholic priests, which features a great deal of history and canon law around Eastern Catholics in North America, as well as chapters from married priests today, including several in the Anglican Ordinariates in England and the US.

In addition to not paying much attention to Eastern Catholic priests who are married--which, I must stress, is not a fault at all insofar as this book was clearly written to focus on another group, and so this is decidedly not a criticism, just an observation--there is one group I rather expected would be attended to more than they are: the phenomenon of the several Anglican Ordinariates.  But the book seems largely to have been centred on, and perhaps even written before, the advent of Anglican Ordinariates in the US, Canada, and the United Kingdom. Sullins alludes to them a couple of times, but that is all.

Again, though, what he has given us is a rich, important study that fills a significant gap. Keeping the Vow: The Untold Story of Married Catholic Priests does indeed tell an untold story, and tells it extremely well. We are in Sullins' debt for this fine book.

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. 

Not Clerical Celibacy Again....

There are, it seems, certain debates that are bound to recur like clockwork, and their very recurrence, it seems to me, is a sign of deep and abiding insecurity on the part of those who insist on repeatedly bringing this topic up and repeatedly (but never successfully) trying to prove the superiority and supposed historicity or "apostolicity" of a celibate priesthood. The debate in the Latin Church over priestly celibacy seems to be precisely such a debate.

According to this recent article by the always fascinating, and usually very reliable, Sandro Magister, that debate is again heating up in no small part due to the new book, Preti celibi e preti sposata: Due carisimi della Chiesa cattolica, by Basilio Petrà, whose article on the topic Logos: A Journal of Eastern Christian Studies published in an edited translation in 2009.

There Petrà was the first to show in English in a serious study certain egregious developments being pushed by some in the Latin Church (especially those influenced by Opus Dei) towards a view that "celibacy is based on the very ontological meaning of ordination. Theologically speaking, this means that ordination objectively demands the state of celibacy." As he goes on to say, "in this view, there is no theological reason for the married...priesthood. Only its historical existence is acknowledged because in Latin circles the principles expounded by Christian Cochini [Apostolic Origins of Priestly Celibacy], Alfons Stickler [The Case for Clerical Celibacy: Its Historical Development and Theological Foundations], and Roman Cholij [Clerical Celibacy in East and West] were accepted without leaving any room for the true theological value of a married clergy." (Cholij, I have it on good authority, has since retracted his views.) These books, among others, were very skillfully reviewed and critiqued by the late historian and patrologist J. Kevin Coyle in a long review essay, "Recent Views on the Origins of Clerical Celibacy: a Review of the Literature from 1980-1991," Logos: A Journal of Eastern Christian Studies 34 (1993): 480-531. After a lengthy discussion, Coyle concludes thus:

the apostolic origins of clerical continence/celibacy are therefore far from proven. Indeed, in their attempts Cochini and his supporters may have achieved the opposite objective, by showing that a historical demonstration of celibacy's validity is a fruitless quest.....The arguments for maintaining mandatory clerical celibacy will, then, have to be sought elsewhere than in an "apostolic tradition."

What makes Petrà's article so important, in my estimation, is that he very skillfully--but without polemics or histrionics--goes on to show how this very recent Latin development (about an "ontological" meaning of celibacy) is so riddled with internal contradictions as to collapse in on itself. He takes recent papal and other Roman utterances, as well as documents like the Catechism of the Catholic Church, and shows that this theology of celibacy as an ontological condition of priesthood, if taken seriously and pressed to its logical conclusions, ends up, however inadvertently, making a complete pig's breakfast of contemporary Latin theology of marriage and the family.

I have, I must confess, dined out on this debate on many occasions in the last decade, trying (but not very successfully it appears) to help Roman Catholics to understand the complexities of a married priesthood, that is, trying to dissuade them from the highly misleading idea that a married priesthood will be an easy or simple change to the life of the Latin Church today, or that it will somehow magically solve the so-called vocations crisis, much of which I think is artificial, that is, tendentiously manufactured.

In addition to the above sources, there are other books on the topic by Eastern Christians, including the collection edited by Joseph Allen, Vested in Grace: Marriage and Priesthood in the Christian East. Allen caused a controversy to erupt in the early 1990s when, as a married Orthodox priest, he sought to re-marry after his wife had died--in violation of long-standing canons and customs prescribing celibacy for priests in just that situation; failing celibacy, the canonical requirement has been that such priests return to the lay state and are no longer permitted to function as priests. Allen wanted both to re-marry and to remain a parish priest, and found a way to do so--but not without controversy and costs--as he recounts in Widowed Priest.

More recently, Helen Parish has taken a comprehensive and current look at the history of celibacy in her Clerical Celibacy in the West: c.1100-1700 (Catholic Christendom, 1300-1700) (Ashgate, 2010), 304pp. About this book the publisher tells us:

The debate over clerical celibacy and marriage had its origins in the early Christian centuries, and is still very much alive in the modern church. The content and form of controversy have remained remarkably consistent, but each era has selected and shaped the sources that underpin its narrative, and imbued an ancient issue with an immediacy and relevance. The basic question of whether, and why, continence should be demanded of those who serve at the altar has never gone away, but the implications of that question, and of the answers given, have changed with each generation.

In this reassessment of the history of sacerdotal celibacy, Helen Parish examines the emergence and evolution of the celibate priesthood in the Latin church, and the challenges posed to this model of the ministry in the era of the Protestant Reformation. Celibacy was, and is, intensely personal, but also polemical, institutional, and historical. Clerical celibacy acquired theological, moral, and confessional meanings in the writings of its critics and defenders, and its place in the life of the church continues to be defined in relation to broader debates over Scripture, apostolic tradition, ecclesiastical history, and papal authority. Highlighting continuity and change in attitudes to priestly celibacy, Helen Parish reveals that the implications of celibacy and marriage for the priesthood reach deep into the history, traditions, and understanding of the church.

Contents: Introduction – 'for the sake of the kingdom of heaven'?: shaping the celibacy debate; 'If there is one faith there must be one tradition': clerical celibacy and marriage in the early Church; 'Preserving the ancient rule and apostolic perfection'?: celibacy and marriage in East and West; 'A concubine or an unlawful woman': celibacy, marriage, and the Gregorian reform; 'In marriage they will live more piously and honestly': debating clerical celibacy in the pre-Reformation Church; 'The whole world and the devil will laugh': clerical celibacy and married priests in the age of reformation; 'Contrary to the state of their order and the laudable customs of the church': clerical celibacy in the Catholic Church after the Reformation; Conclusion – 'one of the chief ornaments of the Catholic clergy': celibacy in the modern Church; Bibliography; Index.

I greatly look forward to having both the Parish volume, and also the Petrà book, expertly reviewed in Logos: A Journal of Eastern Christian Studies next year.