Question: Should Catholics Permit Marriage For Priests?

Last updated on: May 3, 2018 at 12:05 am by Scot McKnight

Question: Should Catholics Permit Marriage For Priests? 2018-04-28T14:29:53-05:00 Scot McKnight

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The rule has been no celibacy, no priestly ordination. Apart from the historic exceptions — e.g., to name but one, Anglican married priest who converts to Catholicism can become a married Catholic priest — there are no exceptions.

We are back to David Steinmetz, Taking the Long View, and he opens his response to the celibacy of priests by reminding his readers of the ways of Rome, and it’s important to grasp this to see what happens with Christianity’s understanding of sexual relations and how they understood clergy and marriage:

The ancient Romans did not much care with whom they mated—men, women, or children—though some disgruntled critics thought the pedophilia of the dour emperor Tiberius unworthy of his exalted office. Still, an elite Roman male who had sex with a slave girl in the morning, a young male in the afternoon, and his wife at night would not have been thought unusually perverse—not even by his wife.

All of this changed when the Roman Empire was Christianized. Christians banned nonreproducrive sex (whether with a same-sex partner or a child), limited sexual activity to a potentially reproductive relationship between husband and wife, severely restricted the possibility of divorce (usually limited to separation from bed and board), and extolled the virtues of sexual abstinence. The change would have startled Julius Caesar.

The new Christian ideal of marriage embraced at least three elements: an openness in all sexual activity to the procreation, nurture, and education of children; (2) a covenant of mutual fidelity in which husband and wife, “forsaking all others,” pledge to care for each other through thick and thin; and (3) a recognition that the bond between husband and wife is as indissoluble as the bond between Christ and the church.

This Christian culture exported its good to Europe and the West and thus it exported two things: the virtue of marriage and the even higher virtue of celibacy as a sign of spiritual ardor. Commands were for all, counsels for the few, and the counsels including celibacy. Augustine, it will be remembered, found no middle ground between celibacy and sexual license. Women were a threat to the clergy and the clergy a threat to the stability of the home — in some cases and for diverse reasons (p. 107). Concubinage was not always banned even if it carried with it a number of serious problems.

The Reformation saw celibacy and marriage in different terms altogether.

The Protestant Reformation constituted a sustained attack on the celibate ethic and a reemphasis on the dignity of the institution of marriage. Protestants did not deny that some men and women are called to a celibate life, though they regarded all claims to a celibate vocation with considerable suspicion, but they rejected the contention that celibacy should be made a law binding on all clergy. … Celibacy may be a charism; it may never be a law.

Protestants and Anabaptists alike rejected the commands-counsels categories. What was for one was for all.

Together with the rejection of celibacy as a law, the dissolution of the distinction between commands and counsels, and the stress on the functional character of the pastor’s office, Protestants emphasized the interdependence of men and women in a joint task of creating a Christian society. Marriage stood at the center of a God-given order. Matthew Zell, a Protestant preacher at the cathedral in Strasbourg, argued in a famous sermon that, since woman was made from man, her origin proved not that women are subordinate to men but that men can only attain their full perfection in marriage. As Christ loved the church, so men and women are to love one another and to seek their perfection in an interdependent relationship.

The downside of all this was that the new emphasis on the home and family was not an unmixed blessing for women, who over the course of the sixteenth century lost many of the rights and privileges they had enjoyed in the fifteenth: the right to work outside the home, to buy and sell property, to own businesses in their own name, and so on. The dissolution of religious houses for women also reduced women’s opportunities to exercise control over their own societies with minimal interference from men—though the lively debate between Marie Dentiere and Jeanne de Jussy over the positive and negative effects of the cloistered life for women indicates that women were themselves deeply divided over this issue.

Protestants also backed the possibility of real divorce with the right of the “innocent party” to remarry, though divorce was not easy to obtain and very grudgingly granted.

It may be difficult for women who are currently seeking ordination to regard the creation of the pastor’s wife as a step forward in the liberation of women from unjust restrictions, but for the women involved in unofficial clerical “families” the Reformation was a profoundly liberating event.

So now to Americans and the institution of marriage and women in ministry according to Steinmetz.

It is at least arguable that the Protestant churches were not entirely wrongheaded to accept celibacy as a gift and resist it as a law. … The Protestant churches are in error, therefore, when they reject celibacy and make marriage a law for all clergy.

The Protestant emphasis on the interdependence of men and women in marriage and the common calling of men and women to seek the will of God in mutual relationship is an important corrective to theologies that subordinate women to men, on the one hand, or that dispense with the relationship between male and female as trivial, on the other.

The Reformation did not sanction the ordination of women to the public ministry of Word and sacrament. Nevertheless, the fundamental arguments that sanction that act are already articulated in the Reformation era.

That a Christian is a female is no bar to valid ordination in the church. But neither is it the basis on which ordination may be granted. Only those persons—whether male or female—may be ordained for the public ministry of Word and sacrament who have been called to the ministry of God and who have demonstrated to the church that they have, in the happy Wesleyan phrase, ‘gifts, grace and the promise of usefulness.”

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