Parish Priests and Their People in the Middle Ages in England

by Edward Lewes Cutts

THE CELIBACY OF THE CLERGY.

he enforcement of celibacy upon the clergy was an important feature in the plan of the Hildebrandine reformers of the eleventh century. The idea which inspired the enthusiasm of the foremost Churchmen of the time was, no doubt, a grand one. It was to bring the national churches into practical co-operation by a world-wide ecclesiastical organization, and to place the spiritual authority of the whole Church in the hand of one man, in order to control the world-power of kings and princes, and check the manifold abuses which at that time especially threatened to corrupt and secularize the Church. The clergy were intended in the Hildebrandine scheme to be the Pope’s local agents in the administration of this ecclesiastical monarchy; and in order to detach them from secular and local ties it was proposed to make the secular clergy a kind of Religious Order—an anticipation, in some respects, of the organization of the subsequent Orders of Friars.

We must do the authors of the scheme the justice to remember that they honestly believed that the celibate state—not the mere accident of being unmarried, but the chosen and vowed state—was a higher condition of life; and it was easy to apply St. Paul’s advice to those who could accept it, to the special condition of the clergy:—“The unmarried (priest) careth for the things of the Lord, that (he) may be holy both in body and spirit, but the married (priest) careth for the things of the world.” It was easy to draw a contrast between the parish priest with a wife and family, bound by a thousand ties to the ordinary interests and anxieties of the world, and the celibate priest, who wants nothing beyond the priest’s chamber and his humble fare, and who gives his whole mind and soul to his daily devotions and his spiritual ministrations among his flock; his rusty cassock a uniform as honourable as the soldier’s war-stained coat, his ascetic life ensuring the reverence which even the worldly-minded pay to those who despise worldly things.

To the fulfilment of this idea the great body of the secular clergy in Germany, Italy, and France, as well as England, offered for centuries a stubborn resistance. They stood on the irrefragable ground that the priests and Levites of the Old Dispensation were married men; that our Lord and His apostles gave no such commandment to the Church; that, as a matter of history, some of the apostles were married men; and that for ten centuries bishops and priests of the Church all over the world had married. It was obvious to reply to the supposed advantages of a priesthood disentangled from worldly anxieties, that, on the contrary, it was desirable for the pastors in immediate habitual intercourse with the people to be men who had property and families, because then they could deal with men on the ground of common interests and sympathies; and that to impose compulsory celibacy on the secular clergy was a measure full of the gravest dangers.

The majority of the clergy probably were influenced by the broad common sense which pronounced the ultramontane idea to be unscriptural, transcendental, novel, and, therefore, questionable; and, lastly, a burden which no one had the right to impose upon the unwilling. Some of them tauntingly desired the pope to see if he could get the spirits from above to leave their stations and come and rule the Churches under his Holiness, since men were not good enough for him.

The attempt to introduce celibacy among the secular clergy had been begun in the latter part of the Saxon period. We have seen that kings made laws and bishops made canons against the married clergy. We cannot have better evidence than that of Ælfric’s famous pastoral address, that the Saxon clergy generally had ignored these laws and canons, and that it had not been found practicable to enforce them. Ælfric declares that—

The Four General Councils forbade all marriages to ministers of the altar, and especially to mass-priests [which is a misstatement], and that the canons command that no bishop nor priest shall have in his house any woman except his mother or other person who is above suspicion. “This, to you priests,” he says, “will seem grievous, because ye have your misdeeds in custom” [you are accustomed to married priests], “so that it seems to yourselves that ye have no sin in living in female intercourse as laymen do, and say that Peter the Apostle had a wife and children. So he and others had before their conversion, but then forsook their wives and all earthly things” [which is, to say the least, a doubtful assumption]. “Beloved,” he goes on, “we cannot now forcibly compel you to chastity, but we admonish you nevertheless that ye observe chastity as Christ’s ministers ought in good reputation to the pleasure of God.”

Gregory VII., in the Fourth Lateran Council, in 1074, took a step in advance of previous legislation on the subject. He peremptorily forbade marriage to the clergy, pronounced sentence of excommunication against those who refused to put away their wives, and forbade the laity to be present at mass when they officiated.

In adopting this legislation in England, Lanfranc considerably modified it. In the Synod of Winchester, in 1076, it was decreed that no canon should be married; the married parochial clergy were not required to put away their wives, but those who were not married were forbidden to take any; and bishops were required not to ordain deacons or priests unless they declare that they have not wives. But this legislation seems to have been largely ignored, and the disobedience winked at.