For the next three or four centuries there is little to note but the continual evidence of open or secret resistance to these decrees, and the parallel frequency and stringency of ecclesiastical legislation, which by its very monotony bears witness to its own want of success. At least seven episcopal constitutions of the 8th and 9th centuries forbade the priest to have even his mother or his sister in the house.[6] Nor did the only difficulty lie in such secret breaches of the law; in many districts the priesthood tended to become a mere hereditary caste, to the disadvantage of church and state alike. In northern and southern Italy public clerical marriages were extremely frequent, whether with or without regular forms.[7] The see of Rouen was held for more than a century (942-1054) by three successive bishops who were family men and two of whom were openly married.[8] In England St Swithun (d. 862) was married, though very likely by special papal dispensation; and the married clergy were apparently predominant in Alfred’s time. In spite of Dunstan’s reforms at the end of the 10th century, the Norman Lanfranc found so many wedded priests that he dared not decree their separation; and when his successor St Anselm attempted to go further, this seemed a perilous novelty even to so distinguished an ecclesiastic as Henry of Huntingdon, who wrote: “About Michaelmas of this same year (1102) Archbishop Anselm held a council in London, wherein he forbade wives to the English priesthood, heretofore not forbidden; which seemed to some a matter of great purity, but to others a perilous thing, lest the clergy, in striving after a purity too great for human strength, should fall into horrible impurity, to the extreme dishonour of the Christian name” (lib. vii.; Migne, P.L. cxcv. col. 944). Yet this was at a time when the decisive and continued action of two great popes ought to have left no possible doubt as to the law of the church.
The growing tendency of the clergy to look upon their endowments as hereditary fiefs, their consequent worldliness and (it must be added) their vices, aroused the indignation of two very remarkable men in the latter half of the 11th century. St Pietro Damiani (988-1072) was a scholar, hermit and reformer, who did more perhaps than any one else to combat the open marriages of the clergy. He complained that exhortation was wasted even on the bishops, “because they despair of attaining to the pinnacle of chastity, and have no fear of condemnation in open synod for the vice of lechery.... If this evil were secret [he adds], it might perhaps be borne.”[9] His Liber Gomorrhianus, addressed to and approved by St Leo IX., is sufficient in itself to explain the vehemence of his crusade, though it emphasizes even more strongly the impolicy of proceeding more severely against the open marriages of the clergy than against concubinage and other less public vices.[10] Damiani found a powerful ally in the equally ascetic but far more imperious and statesmanlike Hildebrand, afterwards Pope Gregory VII. Under the influence of these two men, five successive popes between 1045 and 1073 attempted a radical reform; and when, in this latter year, Hildebrand himself became pope, he took measures so stringent that he has sometimes been erroneously represented not merely as the most uncompromising champion, but actually as the author of the strict rule of celibacy for all clerics in sacred orders. His mind, strongly imbued with the theocratic ideal, saw more clearly than any other the enormous increase of influence which would accrue to a strictly celibate body of clergy, separated by their very ordination from the strongest earthly ties; and no statesman has ever pursued with greater energy and resolution a plan once formulated. In order to break down the desperate, and in many places organized, resistance of the clergy, he did not shrink from the perilous course, so contrary to his general policy, of subjecting them to the judgment of the laity. Not only were concubinary priests—a term which was now made to include also those who had openly married—forbidden to serve at the altar and threatened with actual deposition in cases of contumacy, but the laity were warned against attending mass said by “any priest certainly known to keep a concubine or subintroducta.”[11]
But these heroic measures soon caused serious embarrassment. If the laity were to stand aloof from all incontinent priests, while (as the most orthodox churchmen constantly complained) many priests were still incontinent, then this could only result in estranging large bodies of the laity from the sacraments of the church. It became necessary, therefore, to soften a policy which to the lay mind might imply that the virtue of a sacrament was weakened by the vices of its ministers; and, whereas Peter Lombard (d. 1160) concludes that no excommunicated priest can effect transubstantiation, St Thomas Aquinas (d. 1274) agrees with all the later Schoolmen in granting him that power, though to the peril of his own soul.[12] For, by the last quarter of the 13th century, the struggle had entered upon a new phase. The severest measures had been tried, especially against the priests’ unhappy partners. As early as the council of Augsburg (952) these were condemned to be scourged, while Leo II. and Urban II., at the councils of Rome and Amalfi (1051, 1089), adjudged them to actual slavery.[13] Such enactments naturally defeated their own purpose. More was done by the gentler missionary zeal of the Franciscans and Dominicans in the early 13th century; but St Thomas Aquinas had seen half a century of that reform and had recognized its limitations; he therefore attenuated as much as possible the decree of Nicholas II. His contemporary St Bonaventura complained publicly that he himself and his fellow-friars were often compelled to hold their tongues about the evil clergy; partly because, even if one were expelled, another equally worthless would probably take his place, but “perhaps principally lest, if the people altogether lost faith in the clergy, heretics should arise and draw the people to themselves as sheep that have no shepherd, and make heretics of them, boasting that, as it were by our own testimony, the clergy were so vile that none need obey them or care for their teaching.”[14] In other passages of his works St Bonaventura tells us plainly how little had as yet been gained by suppressing clerical marriages; and the evidence of orthodox and distinguished churchmen for the next three centuries is equally decisive. Alvarez Pelayo, a Spanish bishop and papal penitentiary, wrote in 1322 “The clergy sin commonly in these following ways ... fourthly, in that they live very incontinently, and would that they had never promised continence; especially in Spain and southern Italy, in which provinces the sons of the laity are scarcely more numerous than those of the clergy.” Cardinal Pierre d’Ailly pleaded before the council of Constance in 1415 for the reform of “that most scandalous custom, or rather abuse, whereby many [clergy] fear not to keep concubines in public.”[15]
Meanwhile, as has been said above, the custom of open marriage among clergy in holy orders (priests, deacons and subdeacons) was gradually stamped out. A series of synods, from the early 12th century onwards, declared such marriages to be not only unlawful, but null and void in themselves. Yet the custom lingered sporadically in Germany and England until the last few years of the 13th century, though it seems to have died out earlier in France and Italy. There was also a short-lived attempt to declare that even a clerk in lower orders should lose his clerical privileges on his marriage; but Boniface VIII. in 1300 definitely permitted such marriages under the already-quoted conditions of the Apostolic Canons; in these cases, however, a bishop’s licence was required to enable the cleric to officiate in church, and the episcopal registers show that the diocesans frequently insisted on the celibacy of parish-clerks. As the middle ages drew to a close, earnest churchmen were compelled to ask themselves whether it would not be better to let the priests marry than to continue a system under which concubinage was even licensed in some districts.[16] Serious proposals were made to reintroduce clerical marriage at the great reforming councils of Constance (1415) and Basel (1432); but the overwhelming majority of orthodox churchmen were unwilling to abandon a rule for which the saints had fought during so many centuries, and to which many of them probably attributed an apostolic origin.[17] This conservative attitude was inevitably strengthened by the attacks first of Lollard and then, of Lutheran heretics; and Sir Thomas More was driven to declare, in answer to Tyndale, that the marriage of priests, being essentially null and void, “defileth the priest more than double or treble whoredom.” It is well known that this became one of the most violently disputed questions at the Reformation, and that for eight years it was felony in England to defend sacerdotal marriage as permissible by the law of God (Statute of the Six Articles, 31 Hen. VIII. c. 14). The diversity of practice on this point drew one of the sharpest lines between reformers and orthodox, until the disorders introduced by these religious wars tempted the latter to imitate in considerable numbers the licence of their rivals.[18] This moved the emperor Charles V. to obtain from Paul III. dispensations for married priests in his dominions; and his successor Ferdinand, with the equally Catholic sovereigns of France, Bavaria and Poland, pleaded strongly at the council of Trent (1545) for permissive marriage. The council, after some hesitation, took the contrary course, and in the 9th canon of its 24th session it erected sacerdotal celibacy practically, if not formally, into an article of faith. In spite of this, the emperor Joseph II. reopened the question in 1783. In France the revolutionary constitution of 1791 abolished all restrictions on marriage, and during the Terror celibacy often exposed a priest to suspicion as an enemy to the Republic; but the better part of the clergy steadily resisted this innovation, and it is estimated that only about 2% were married. The Old Catholics adopted the principle of sacerdotal marriage in 1875.
The working of the system in modern times is perhaps too controversial a question to be discussed here; but one or two points may be noted on which all fairly well informed writers would probably agree. It can scarcely be denied that the Roman Catholic clergy have always owed much of their influence to their celibacy, and that in many cases this influence has been most justly earned by the celibate’s devotion to an unworldly ideal. Again, the most adverse critics would admit that much was done by the counter-Reformation, and that modern ecclesiastical discipline on this point is considerably superior to that of the middle ages; while, on the other hand, many authorities of undoubted orthodoxy are ready to confess that it is not free from serious risks even in these days of easy publicity and stringent civil discipline.[19] Lastly, statistical research has shown that the children of the married British clergy have been distinguished far beyond their mere numerical proportion.[20]
Authorities.—Henry Charles Lea, History of Sacerdotal Celibacy (3rd ed., 1907, 2 vols), is by far the fullest and best work on this subject, though a good deal of important matter omitted by Dr Lea may be found in Die Einfuhrung der erzwungenen Ehelosigkeit by the brothers Johann Anton and Augustin Theiner, which was put on the Roman Index, though Augustin afterwards became archivist at the Vatican (Altenburg, 1828, 2 vols.). The history of monastic celibacy has not yet been fully treated anywhere; the most important evidence of the episcopal registers is either still in MS. or has been published only in comparatively recent years. The most learned work on clerical celibacy from the strictly conservative point of view is that of Francesco Antonio Zaccaria, Storia Polemica del celibato sacro (Rome, 1774); but many of his most important conclusions are set aside by the abbé E. Vacandard in his contribution to the Dictionnaire de théologie catholique (vol. ii. art. “Célibat ecclésiastique”).
(G. G. Co.)
[1] W. Smith, Dict. of Greek and Roman Antiquities (3rd ed.), vol. ii. p. 44.
[2] “In the 14th century, the city of Ilchi, in Chinese Tartary, possessed 14 monasteries, averaging 3000 devotees in each; while in Tibet, at the present time, there are in the vicinity of Lhassa 12 great monasteries, containing a population of 18,500 lamas. In Ladak the proportion of lamas to the laity is as 1 to 13, in Spiti 1 to 7, and in Burmah 1 to 30” (Lea i. 103).