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  The Church's Short Memory

By Jacqueline Murray
Globe and Mail
May 19, 2009

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20090515.wcopriest19/BNStory/specialComment/home

There was no doubt a collective sigh of relief at the Vatican last week when Rev. Alberto Cutie publicly confirmed his continuing support for clerical celibacy. This affirmation came on the heels of revelations that the popular Miami priest was thinking of leaving the church for a woman he loves after a magazine ran pictures of the couple embracing.

But no matter how earnest Father Cutie's support for celibacy, and how unswerving the Vatican's adherence to this supposedly ancient doctrine, clerical celibacy continues to be a hot-button issue for the Roman Catholic Church.

For many of the general public, fed up with scandal and the predatory sexual activity of men whose libidos seem unnaturally repressed, the solution is to abolish mandatory celibacy and permit priests to marry. For the Vatican, the incontrovertible justification for celibacy is the weight of history: Priests have always been celibate; surely, then, it is divinely ordained. But this view of celibacy is not as straightforward as the Catholic hierarchy would have us believe.

For example, married men ordained to the priesthood in one of the Orthodox churches, or within the Anglican communion, can and do transfer into the Catholic fold, administering the same sacraments as their Catholic counterparts but going home to wives, children and marital beds.

These married priests are not a recent innovation, grudgingly adopted by a church facing a critical shortage of priests. Rather, they are part of a long tradition of married men who formed the backbone of the priesthood for more than 1,200 years. You see, celibacy was only forced upon the priesthood in 1148, after 100 years of discord and resistance.

Celibacy was very much a doctrine contrived by the church hierarchy and imposed onto the majority of priests working in village and town parishes across medieval Europe. For example, in 1074, Pope Gregory VII, as part of a program of innovations known as the Gregorian Reforms, asserted that any man who wished to be ordained to the priesthood was required to pledge celibacy. He said; "priests must first escape from the clutches of their wives" before they could receive ordination.

Priests and their wives and children, however, did not submit passively to this attempt to disrupt their marital and domestic lives. Reacting to Gregory's pronouncement, they, along with significant numbers of the laity, rioted against the church's attempt to expel married men from their parishes.

Resistance to clerical celibacy continued, culminating in 1095 in the astonishing spectacle of Pope Urban II ordering that the wives of priests be seized and sold into slavery, and their children turned out of their homes and abandoned as beggars or worse.

But persecution and dispossession, slavery and degradation, were not enough to put an end to married priests. While the institutional church trumpeted its success at imposing celibacy, in remote villages and bustling cities alike, priests continued to lead a marital existence, albeit with wives now denigrated as concubines and children outcast by the stigma of illegitimacy.

Across Europe, well into the 13th century and beyond, priests continued to reject compulsory celibacy. The issue of celibacy, and priests' own resistance to it, endured up to the Reformation, when new Christian churches addressed the vexing question by abolishing clerical celibacy.

Despite Father Cutie's dutiful lip service to clerical celibacy - made as he contemplates marrying - the issue is one that seriously challenges the Pope and his cardinals insulated in the Vatican. They cannot continue to ignore it, nor can they continue to take refuge behind appeals to ancient authority and the enduring nature of clerical celibacy. History simply does not substantiate their claims.

 
 

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