If anyone says the married state is to be placed above the state of virginity or of celibacy and that it is not better and more blessed to remain in virginity and celibacy than to be united in matrimony, let him be anathema.
The Council of Trent 1563
The devil never harmed the church as much as when the church herself adopted the vow of celibacy.
Peter Comestor
I believe that mandatory celibacy may have done as much or more evil than any other church policy when one considers all its consequences in terms of the exclusion of women and the negative reading it gives the laity on sexuality.
Anthony Padovano
Celibacy as a church discipline has been getting a hard time lately. In these past two articles I have looked at its early history, how it came into the Church when a huge wave of asceticism moved through the West in the first century before Jesus, and how the prevailing Stoic philosophy carried these anti-body ideas through the Greco-Roman world for the first few centuries of the common era, how the extreme sexual asceticism, basically unknown in Judaism, became dominant in Christianity. Augustine, the towering Church father of the fourth century seemed consumed by his supposed sexual depravity (though not his abandoning of his concubine) and handed on to posterity his sexual pessimism, his linking of sin and sex. It was Augustine who gave the name pudenda to our genitals. The Latin translation means, "to be ashamed."
For Augustine, the Virgin Birth myth proved to be a perfect canister to safeguard Jesus' absolutely pure birth. No human contact. No sexual arousal as Jesus was conceived. Behold the only human not to pass on "the original sin" of Adam. It is impossible to estimate the staggering effect this negative teaching has had on generations of Christians. Lost to history are the writings of Augustine's antagonist Julian, the son of a bishop and married to a bishop's daughter. Julian rejected Augustine's negative view of sexual desire and original sin. For him, sexual desire within marriage furthered the divine plan and was only abused in extramarital affairs. Sadly, Augustine's defective thinking won the day and as Richard Sipe has written, "Sexual pleasure=women=evil." The championing of celibacy can be traced in large part to Augustine. The unbalanced ecclesiastical thinking, this preoccupation with sex throughout the centuries is a negative gift from the man from Hippo, North Africa. It has nothing to do with Jesus.
Augustine's contemporary, St. Jerome (d.420 circa CE), the greatest biblical scholar of antiquity, had a profound effect on the linking of celibacy with priesthood. The towering scholar of priestly celibacy Henry Lea states, "No doctor of the church did more than St. Jerome to impose the rule of celibacy on its members, yet even he admits that at the beginning there was no absolute injunction to that effect." Jerome, like Origen, castrated himself as he went about extolling virginity as superior to marriage. So galling was the fact that the apostles were married that Jerome even changed the translation of wife to "female servant." In a fit of celibate fervour, he maintained that all the great biblical heroes were single. But just as Augustine had as his nemesis the more balanced Julian, so did Jerome. Jovinian (d.406 CE) a monk from Milan had the effrontery to challenge the whole Church including the Pope Servicius on the topic of celibacy. "With more zeal than discretion" (Lea) Jovinian redefined the word prophet with the simple declaration that marriage was as virtuous as virginity. This set the whole clerical establishment against him, and he was vilified and chased from town to town with his many adherents. The "monster who spreads poison" Jovinian was cornered, tortured, and excommunicated. The same dynamic continues today. Now the exile in the Catholic Church is internal as dissenting theologians are kept from challenging non-infallible teachings like celibacy, and only those who swear to never raise this issue and that of female ordination are raised to the bishopric.
Pope Innocent I (401-17), the pontiff of both Augustine and Jerome, had a novel idea which if implemented, would have allowed the Church to come to grips with celibacy. One lapse of chastity and out of the priesthood. Simple as that. Celibacy equals chastity. Instead this was never enforced and never became law, for the simple reason that the long experience of the Church has shown how absolutely unworkable celibacy is. As the recent sex scandals have proven, the hierarchical leaders have tolerated every lapse, no matter how grave, for the simple reason that the Church could not function otherwise.
This is not new. It has been the consistent experience at every level of priesthood --from the papacy to the curia to the parish. There have been massive cover-ups everywhere as the latest scandals in Ireland and Philadelphia have shown. If every jurisdiction had had the power of subpoena, the same results would have been forthcoming. At the highest levels of ecclesial decision-making the obvious truth that biology is difficult to circumvent is acknowledged. Unless celibacy is freely chosen, explored in depth in seminaries instead of evaded, unless it is painstakingly and gradually implemented, serious repercussions necessarily will ensue. The history of this failed imposition is there for all to see. Elizabeth Abbot in her A History of Celibacy states that "in Africa clerical celibacy is practiced mainly in the breach…and in Latin America there is a teeming morass of under-serviced Catholics and surreptitiously uncelibate priests…a majority of Brazilian priests are uncelibate, perhaps 60-70 percent…in the Philippines a small majority of priests live with women."
Popes were sons of priests
Many popes were sons of priests and bishops. For example: Boniface (418-22), Gelasius (492-496), Agapitus (535-536), Silverius (536-7), Theodore (642-649) and we have yet to get to that epoch of dissolution, the Renaissance. Historians estimate the number of married popes at around 40 and four have been canonized as saints. "No historian," Hans Kung writes in The Catholic Church: A Short History, "will ever discover how many children these holy fathers fathered, living in monstrous luxury, unbridled sensuality, and uninhibited vice." The notorious Franciscan Sixtus IV (1471) sired several sons and made his corrupt nephew Pietro Riario a cardinal. Sixtus licensed the brothels of Rome and partly with this money gave the Church the "Sistine" chapel. Sixtus, of course, paled next to the barbarian Rodrigo Borgia -- Alexander VI (1492-1503), "the Tiberius of Christian Rome" as Gibbon called him. He had ten known illegitimate children. At age 58 he took a fifteen-year-old mistress whose brother became the future Paul III. His son, the notorious Cesare Borgia became a cardinal at eighteen.
But we are slightly ahead of ourselves. As the Roman Empire crumbled and the Dark Ages ensued, monasticism grew confident that the ascetic celibate life was superior to marriage. Beginning in the Middle East, notably Egypt and Syria, celibate monks formed communities in staggering numbers. Female celibates as well organized. Even here in an age of sexual pessimism, nature reared her insistent head. Convents became dumping grounds for unhappy daughters and as Henry Lea states, "The blindly bigoted and turbulently ambitious found a place among those whose only aim was retirement and peace." Out of necessity monastic rules became tightened and it allowed the Church to consolidate both her power and her property. And as for celibacy Lea dryly observes, "As to the morals of monastic life it may be sufficient to refer to the regulation of St. Theodore Studita, in the ninth century, prohibiting the entrance of even female animals." The omnipresence of "vagrants of the worst description" created sexual havoc and inevitably produced the genius who strove to mitigate the enfolding disaster, St. Benedict of Nursia (circa 500 CE) the founder of the Benedictine order and the Monte Cassino abbey.
Things never changed for the better. Ecclesial giants like St. Boniface (726 CE) seemed powerless to enforce the codes of celibacy and mitigate the promiscuity in the abbeys. "The clergy were still stubborn...some defended themselves as being legitimately entitled to have a concubine." Boniface, the right hand of Pope Zachary, feared for his life as he attempted to discipline his unruly clergy. By the time of Charlemagne (800), "unchastity remained a corroding ulcer," according to Lea. The failure was never ending. Edicts prohibiting cohabitation of women and clergy were constant and absolutely ineffectual. Convents, as the Council of Aix-la-Chapelle (836 CE) states "were rather brothels than houses of God." Infanticide of unwanted children became common. Part of the monastic discipline was the letting of blood in the hope of alleviating the effects of prolonged continence. And Sigmund Freud was still one thousand years away on a distant horizon.
The eleventh and twelfth centuries were the absolute zenith of papal power. At the Second Lateran council of 1139 all priestly marriages were declared invalid and priests' wives and children became the Church's property. Mass protests erupted to no avail. This was a massive change not understood by most people who think that clerical celibacy dates from the twelfth century. As we see from above, celibacy and priesthood co-existed from the fourth century on. No more. A priest was so set apart from lay people that marriage was inconceivable. Gregory the Great in 602 declared that a priest's marriage was valid, but he now had to choose. Ordination simply invalidated marriage. Things only got worse and without the discipline of marriage, concubinage and promiscuity became rampant. Hear the frustration in the voice of one of the church's great saints, Bernard of Clairvaux (1135): "Take from the church an honourable marriage and an immaculate marriage bed, and do you not fill it with concubinage, incest, homosexuality and every kind of uncleanness?" From Norman times (eleventh century) at least until the sixteenth century the cullagium, a sex tax was collected, if one wished to keep his concubine.
Hans Kung writes, "A church of celibate men established the prohibition of marriage. In the Eastern churches the clergy other than bishops remained married and were therefore more integrated into the structure of society. By contrast, the celibate clergy of the West were totally set apart from the Christian people above all by their unmarried state."
St. Ulric (d.1093 CE) a Cluniac monk whose feast day is July 14 spoke common sense to the issue. He simply argued for married priests on scriptural grounds and his witty comment survives to this day: "Some prelates are pressing the breasts of Scripture to make them yield blood not milk."
Council of Trent
It has often been said about the Council of Trent that it unnecessarily highlighted everything that the Reformers rejected --and so when it was convened that which in a large part provoked the Reformation, namely celibacy, became the rigorous standard of the Catholic renewal. In classical arrogance which yielded not one whit to these upstart heretics, Rome demanded instant obedience and refused to budge on celibacy. Charles Lea dryly comments, "The regulations which concerned the morals of the clergy were sufficient for their purpose if only they could be enforced yet as they were but the hundredth repetition of an endeavour to conquer human nature, which had always previously failed, even those who enacted them could have felt little faith in their efficacy." And fail they did as the next five centuries proved. Human nature does not change --and as history shows, the Church did not change.
The corrupt papacy, saved once by the return to poverty movement of Francis and his passion for the Jesus of the stable, once again accentuated not the evangelical values of the reign of God, but the massive apparatus of a powerful system. The local clergy who had so shamelessly abused their status as mediators of grace in the confessional and at the altar, once again were set above the laity, bathed as they were in an aura of sanctity.
Celibacy is about control and property. At a basic level a single man without a family and a partner is easier to control. The growing power of the bishops with families caused huge problems as valuable property, huge landed estates was handed down to family and other relatives. Boniface VIII (d 1303) is said to have given away one quarter of Church revenues to his family! A married priesthood simply had divided loyalties.
Unencumbered and isolated he became a pawn in an ecclesiastical game, a loyal soldier in a clerical institution, expected to give absolute obedience to his Episcopal overseer. Celibacy assured this loyalty --no more families to support, no more property to hand on. What Trent demanded once again was the single state (coelebs, Latin for alone). It could never guarantee chastity. You could break your vow hundreds of times and you would be welcomed back. Commit matrimony once and you were gone. Raise a family in a responsible way, cherish one woman and harness all your sexual energy into your work made more sense to Luther and the reformers than to keep imposing celibacy and denying everybody's natural right to wed. Such was the advice of the great priest Erasmus of Roterdam in 1525. "I would like to see permission given to priests and monks to marry, especially when there is such a horde of priests among whom chastity is rare. How much better to make concubines into wives and openly acknowledge the partners now held in infamy! How much better to have children to love and rear religiously, as legitimate offspring of whom there is no need to be ashamed and who in turn will honour their sires." The admirable Dutchman was despised by the hierarchy, and his book burned the same year.
As we have noticed in the recent sex scandals pathetic men used the power and prestige of the priesthood to destroy young lives. They gave up marriage but not chastity. A recent new book, The Bingo Report has linked sexual abuse to mandatory celibacy and researcher Dean R. Hoge makes the point that "the celibacy requirement is the single most important deterrent to new vocations to the priesthood." The powerful spirit force of Vatican ll with its universal call to holiness emptied seminaries and caused a massive exodus from priestly ranks. When the penny dropped that the laity had as much a claim on sanctity and holiness, the celibate life lost much of its allure. The "white martyrdom" which drained so much energy from celibates suddenly lost its rationale. The cultic purity of the priest which at the same time degraded sex has collapsed in our time. Celibacy and ministry turned out to be two different vocations. Similarly, the embarrassing arguments for an all-male priesthood are in fact the last gasp of a warped misogynist history. Scripture scholars have utterly demolished the apostolic origins of celibacy and priesthood, and cultural historians have ably unmasked the obvious conditioning of a patriarchal time.
Conclusion
Church leadership would have us believe that celibacy has a long and noble tradition within the Church. It doesn't. In these few articles, I have merely scratched the surface of the terrible price we have paid for the imposition. In no way should this be seen as an attack on the marvelous ascetical discipline which few have mastered and most non voluntarily. Today, 40 years after Vatican II, living as we do in a world which accepts women as equals, in a church which affirms the gifts of the baptized but which still discriminates on the basis of gender, at a time when after the greatest scandal since the Reformation has humiliated the Church, a scandal which clearly points to the unsuccessful integration of sexuality, we still adamantly refuse to revisit this discipline. That we do not have a priest for every second parish in the Catholic world appears not to bother some hierarchs. That the Roman Catholic Church appears willing to give up the laity's right to the Eucharist rather than dismantle the celibate male-only priesthood is sad beyond words. The greatest Catholic theologian of the twentieth century, Karl Rahner gave that gentle Pope Paul Vl advice which the Church needs to hear. "If in practice you cannot obtain a sufficient number of priests in a given cultural setting without relinquishing celibacy, then the church must suspend the law of celibacy."
Not a few in and out of the Church link power and celibacy. Theologically the Catholic Church does not belong to the Pope or the bishops or for that matter, the laity. It belongs to Christ and this ultimately must demand a better way for non-celibate lay people to participate at every level of the church. The clericalized power of control presently lived out in the Church is not compatible with the vision of Jesus. The untenable continuation of priestly power accessible to celibates who then attempt to control the sexual lives of all the faithful can no longer be the modus vivendi of a healthy church. Lay people who comprise 99 percent of the Church are now much too educated, enlightened and democratic to allow this to continue. Endowed every bit as much with the gifts of the Holy Spirit, lay people are demanding the end of an autocratic structure and the end of the feudal clerical stranglehold on decision making. This is a natural evolution which can result in healthier modes of priesthood.
It has often been said that power is the aphrodisiac of the celibate. We have read enough of past history and seen enough of the present to see the harm done by celibacy: From the pathetic careerism of the upwardly mobile who do not understand that the gospel is about downward mobility, to the repressed sexuality of so many good gay men, to the alcoholism of the lonely celibate, and the frigid asceticism of the poor pastor whose battle with celibacy has cost him his whole affective life. We have tragically observed the wrecked lives of the innocent destroyed, those who became the victims of too many who acted out the twisted power relations with children, adolescents, and women. Lamentably we have watched the sorry codependency of the many who mistook holiness for a safe place in the comfortable arms of a bureaucracy.
Finally, one of the obvious benefits to a relaxation of the celibacy demand in the Church would be a much more wholesome attitude toward sex. The preoccupation of this holy and mysterious life force by a celibate priesthood has badly skewed Catholic morality. The end of celibacy and the deeper appreciation which only comes with experience will grace the Catholic Church with much more authentic wisdom in this realm.
Ted Schmidt is Editor of Catholic New Times.
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