Celibacy

CELIBACY. - I. C. ECCLESIASTICO. - The inspiring principle of ecclesiastical celibacy is the idea of purity and continence. Jesus presents it as the exercise of a higher virtue (Mt. 19:12), and St. Paul takes it as one of the guiding principles that must be kept in mind in the choice of a bishop, priest or deacon. According to the Apostle, the minister of the sanctuary must be

"unius uxoris vir" (Tit. 1:5-6), an expression that must be understood in the sense of a prohibition placed upon those who have entered into marriage two or more times before acceding to the sacred Orders, and not as though it were an obligation imposed by the Apostle to have a wife. This second interpretation would moreover be in opposition to what the same Apostle writes elsewhere (I Cor. 7:7; 32-34), when he formulates the wish to see others as himself (that is, not married: I Cor. 7:7), or when he explains the dispositions favorable to a soul giving itself to the service of the Lord (I Cor. 7:32-34).

The precept is therefore restrictive, not injunctive; it excludes the bigamist from the Orders, it does not impose marriage as a condition for acceding to the priesthood.

Virtually recommended by Scripture, celibacy does not, however, appear there as obligatory, and such freedom of choice was the norm followed in the first centuries of the Church, notwithstanding the high esteem in which continence was held. Indeed, before cenobitism had made of it an institution, the aristocracy of the Catholic clergy had at heart to practice it, as numerous testimonies of Christian writers bear witness, among them Tertullian (De exhort. castit., 13: PL 2, 930), Clement of Alexandria (Stromata, III, 13: PG 8, 1189), Origen (In Lev. hom., 6: PG 12, 473), Eusebius (Demonstr. Evang., I, 9: PG 22, 81), Synesius of Ptolemais (Epist., 105: PG 66, 1485), St. Cyril of Jerusalem (Cateches., 12, 25: PG 33, 757), St. Jerome (Adv. Vigilantium, 2: PL 23, 341), St. Epiphanius (Adv. haeres., 48, 9: 59, 4: PG 41, 869, 1024).

From these and other texts, which show how widespread the practice of continence was among the clergy, one can hardly show the trace of a law on celibacy of apostolic origin, a thesis upheld by Bickel and today commonly abandoned. Other testimonies no less explicit (cf. Clement of Alexandria, Stromata, III, 13: PG 8, 1189; Can. Hipp., 8, 55: ed. Achelis, Leipzig 1889, p. 74) show that the right to live in marriage was recognized for the clergy. It is with the 4th century that the discipline of celibacy tends to take fixed forms in conciliar legislation, but in regulating it the Eastern Church separates from the West.

In the East the Church granted to those who did not feel a vocation to celibacy the use of their conjugal rights. In this sense the Councils of Ancyra (314), Nicaea (325), Gangra (c. 350) pronounced.

The testimony of Socrates shows that a general law on continence did not exist even toward the middle of the 5th century, when only in certain regions, such as Macedonia, Thessaly and Hellas, was it beginning to be introduced (Hist. eccl., V, 22: PG 67, 637).

Custom slowly assumed the force of general law, and the Greek Church in the manner of regulating it drew inspiration from the Apostolic Constitutions (I, 6, 17, Funk, Paderborn 1905, pp. 339-41) and from the Apostolic Canons (cf. can. 6, in Mansi, I, 51), whose prescriptions on the matter were not at all rigid: prohibition of marriage after ordination, but lawfulness of the use of marriage for one who was already married before ordination. Under the influence of the legislation of Justinian (Novella VI, 1) these same measures were somewhat restricted and codified later in the Council in Trullo (692), which is the last word of the East on the matter of ecclesiastical celibacy, still in force today. It is summed up for bishops in the obligation of absolute continence, with separation from the spouse, who is bound to retire into a monastery, for those married before the episcopate. For priests, deacons and subdeacons, interdiction of marriage after ordination; for those already married, instead, preservation of their conjugal rights over the spouse, whom it is not lawful to repudiate, under penalty of deposition (can. 6, 12-13, 48, in Mansi, XI, 944-48, 965).

In the West the first law on the matter is can. 33 of the Council of Elvira (Granada), around 300, which obliged those ordained in sacris to absolute continence under penalty of deposition: "Placuit in totum prohibere episcopis, presbyteris et diaconibus vel omnibus clericis positis in ministerio abstinere se a coniugibus suis et generare filios; quicunque vero fecerit ab honore clericatus exterminetur" (Mansi, II, 11).

In the Roman Council of 386 Pope Siricius promulgated an analogous law (Jaffé-Wattenbach, I, 41), with the intention of making it prevail throughout the Latin Church (Epist. ad Himerium Tarrac.: PL 56, 558-59, 562). Later Innocent I made this decision known to Victricius of Rouen and Exuperius of Toulouse (PL 56, 501, 523-24). Africa, Spain and the Gauls oriented themselves toward the path traced by the popes, as the canons of various Councils bear witness: Carthage (401); Toledo (390, 400); Turin (401).

Subdeacons until the 5th century were not subject to the rule of celibacy; indeed Pope Siricius seems to exempt them (PL 56, 560). But in the times of St. Leo the Great they too were bound to the adopted rule (Ep. ad Anast. Thessal.: PL 44, 672).

Resistances were not lacking, and the most influential doctors of the Church, such as St. Ambrose (De offic., I, 1: PL 16, 97-98), St. Augustine (De coniugis adulterinus, II, 22: PL 40, 486), St. Jerome (Adv. Vigilantium, 2: PL 33, 340), had to join their influence in support of the papal thesis and to counter the errors of Epidius, Jovinian and Vigilantius. Epigraphy too bears witness to individual resistances encountered by celibacy among certain bishops (Leclercq, Célibat, in DACL, II, coll. 2822-27).

The rules given by the Popes and Councils in the West continued to govern the discipline of celibacy until the 12th century, even if, in periods of crisis, its practice was eclipsed, as, for example, in France in the 8th century under Charles Martel, when ecclesiastical benefices were often conferred on the unworthy.

The tireless work of St. Boniface (v.) and later the common life (canonical life promoted by Bishop Chrodegang of Metz; v.), as well as the legislation of Charlemagne, contributed to a restoration of celibacy, unfortunately of no long duration: the decline of the Empire dragged with it the fall of ecclesiastical discipline, and throughout the 10th century until the second half of the 11th, notwithstanding isolated voices of protest (the Council of Trosly of 909, Ratherius of Verona, Egbert of Trier), the evil kept spreading. Not only particular Churches, but Rome itself offered the spectacle of concubinage and marriage, which tended to become the normal state of the clergy. A terrible description of the decadence of the clergy was traced in the Liber Gomorrianus by St. Peter Damian, one of the champions of the rebirth of ecclesiastical celibacy. He energetically seconded the work of the reforming popes of the second half of the 11th century, who, proportioning the remedies to the evil, led the clergy back to the sense of the primitive discipline. Above all the firm stance of St. Gregory VII assured the action of the papacy a lasting success with the struggle against lay investitures, the root of the evil (cf. A. Fliche, La réforme grégorienne, 3 vols., Louvain 1924-37). The Pope, while not yet declaring the marriage of priests null, practically considered it as such. The Lateran Council, convened by Callistus II (1123), took the last step (can. 21), confirmed by Lateran II (1139), can. 7, and later by Alexander III in 1180, which extended the law of the invalidity of marriage also to subdeacons (Decret., capp. 1-2, X, IV, 6). Since then the major Orders have constituted in the Latin Church a diriment impediment to marriage (cf. now cann. 132, 213, 214, 1072).

The attitude of the popes provoked among the enemies of celibacy a series of treatises and libels (1060-80), for which recourse was also had to forgeries. Especially notable is the rescript De continentia, attributed to Bishop St. Ulrich of Augsburg (d. 973) already at the time of the Roman Council of 1079, in reality written around 1060, it seems, by Ulrich, bishop of Imola (Fliche, op. cit., III, pp. 1-48). Attacks against celibacy were not lacking even later. Opposed by Jean de Meung in the Roman de la Rose (1277), it was the object of discussions on the part of ecclesiastics, supporters of marriage, as a remedy for greater evils. Thus Durand the Younger at the Council of Vienne (1313), Card. Zabarella at the Council of Constance (1414), and years later the Emperor Sigismund at that of Basel. For other reasons, however, it was attacked with the advent of the Protestant Reformation: Luther declared null the vow of chastity of religious and priests. In the face of the Protestant schism, some Catholics were of the opinion that, for the return of unity, the Church could derogate from the law on celibacy, and this disposition remained even after the Council of Trent condemned the Lutheran error, defining as invalid the marriage contracted by religious with solemn vows and by clerics in major Orders (sess. XXIV, can. 9). The emperors Ferdinand I and Maximilian II asked the Holy See for a dispensation from the law for the German countries, and Pius IV seriously thought of granting it. But with the death of the Pope and the accession of Pius V the project was definitively abandoned and the Tridentine laws were imposed on the whole Church (cf. G. Constant, La concession à l'Allemagne de la communion sous les deux espèces, Paris 1923, pp. 546-612, 1013-23). In times closer to our own, the attempts in the lay field against celibacy made by the French Revolution are known, then by the "Old Catholics," and in the postwar period by the group of apostate priests who constituted the Czechoslovak National Church (1920). Recently the German neo-modernists in their disciplinary program (Der Katholizismus der Zukunft, published anonymously in Leipzig in 1940) included celibacy as optional. At the same time one must not lose sight of another movement against celibacy: the literary one (cf. P. Franche, Le prêtre dans le roman français, Paris 1902, pp. 80-92).

The conduct of the Church in the face of these episodes has been firm and peremptory. Cf. the encyclicals of Gregory XVI Mirari vos (15 Aug. 1832), of Pius IX Qui pluribus (9 Sept. 1846), of Pius X Pascendi (7 Sept. 1907), of Pius XI Ad catholici sacerdotii (20 Dec. 1935).

By decree of the Sacred Congregation of the Sacraments (27 Dec. 1930) every candidate for the priesthood is bound by oath to attest in writing that he undertakes the obligations of ecclesiastical celibacy with full awareness.

The excellent reasons for the efforts of the Popes so that celibacy might be affirmed are not those poorly glimpsed by Montesquieu, when he asserted that "otherwise their power would never have risen so high and would never have been lasting, if every priest had at heart a family" (Riflessioni e pensieri inediti, Turin 1943), but those pointed out by St. Paul (Hebr. 6, 1). The priest is constituted for men in what relates to God, in order to offer gifts and sacrifices, and only celibacy permits the perfect and total fulfillment of such duties. He who is not married has solicitude for the things of the Lord and seeks to please him; he who has a companion has also solicitude for the things of the world and seeks to please his wife, and so is divided. Moreover, he who must carry on in souls the work of the Redeemer needs freedom from concerns of a familial nature that would absorb a great part of his activity. The individual in the priest must disappear before the material and spiritual needs of the whole human family, otherwise he risks becoming just any professional. The priestly ministry, and in particular the direction of consciences, demands unlimited trust toward the one who exercises it, and this is hardly obtained by the priest who lives in the company of a woman who shares his confidences.

The objections against celibacy do not come so much from the nobility of its program as from the supposed impossibility of its exercise. Chastity, it is said, is impossible and the claim to dominate instinct, pure hypocrisy. This error the Church condemned at the Council of Trent (sess. XXIV, can. 9). The custody of chastity is a matter of Grace, and the Church has never claimed that nature can triumph over its instincts when abandoned to its own forces alone. If, in particular cases, inveterate habits and hereditary defects assign to virtue almost superhuman tasks, these are abnormal beings, for whom the priesthood is not indicated. The thesis, moreover, that would present chastity as harmful to the requirements of hygiene and as a cause of neurasthenia has been clearly excluded by eminent physiologists, who have demonstrated the perfect compatibility of abstinence from sexual satisfactions with physiological and moral laws. Where the case of neurosis occurs, this effect is produced only in types with an abnormal genesiac instinct. Common pamphlet literature likes to insist on the fact: the private life of the priest is not and never has been chaste, and in hidden disorders he seeks what is publicly forbidden to him. But the scandals present and past constitute neither the past nor the present of the Church. The overall perspective is much more luminous, and beyond the zones of shadow she can show her reality formed of saints and heroes.

II. THE CELIBACY OF THE LAITY

What is at issue here is not a celibacy chosen for the sake of a freer licentious life, or out of indolence or fear in the face of the responsibilities that marriage brings with it; nor is it celibacy chosen for a purely human motive (to have more time and greater freedom to devote oneself to study, to scientific discoveries, to social action upon the masses); but rather celibacy freely and directly chosen for "the kingdom of heaven" (Mt. 19:12), that is, for the higher motive of love of God and of the apostolate.

This celibacy has always existed in the Church from the earliest times, because even then the Christian communities spontaneously offered fertile ground for the realization of the evangelical counsel brought by Jesus Christ. Indeed, this public profession of a perfect life generously devoted to the interests of God became so frequent in the various Churches that those who practiced it began to appear in the midst of society as a class apart (v. VERGINITÀ). History, moreover, has demonstrated with ever greater clarity day by day the manifold and effective help that celibate lay people can bring to the Church and to souls through the living example and immediate contact of a life perfectly and entirely consecrated to sanctification, realizing it in cases where the canonical religious life is impossible or poorly suited, intensely re-Christianizing families, the various professions, civil society, exercising the apostolate in manifold ways and performing functions that place, time and circumstances forbid or render impracticable for priests and religious (cf. the constitution Provida Mater Ecclesia, 2 February 1947; AAS, 39 [1947], p. 114 ff.). For this reason, in order to overcome the difficulties and dangers that may be encountered, to second the frequent and repeated desires of the Episcopate and of the laity, and in the realization of this celibacy, the Church has moved to recognize the Secular Institutes of lay people (v.).