Posted on 12/11/2015 6:22:34 AM PST by detective
You cannot compare the Church’s policy of compulsory clerical policy to the Boy Scouts. Boy scout members are allowed to have girl friends and they can marry when they are old enough. I belong to an all male organization, the Knights of Columbus, and we’re allowed to have wives and girl friends.
Abstinence and chastity are the preferable state for any individual not married. As the father of a twelve year old daughter, I highly value chastity and abstinence! Trust me on that one. I have never believed that Holy Orders and Holy Matrimony need to be mutually exclusive. The Lord commands us to be fruitful and multiply. The Lord wants us to celebrate life, not celibate life.
The Council of Elvira was quite limited in scope and not embraced by the full Church. Compulsory clerical celibacy was not institutionalized in the Western Church until the First Lateran Council in 1123. Compulsory clerical celibacy was never enthusiastically embraced in the East and to this day Orthodox priests can be married men. There are also Catholic churches in the Middle East and in Eastern Europe which also permit marriage among the clergy. We have a number of married priests in my own archdiocese, mostly converts from other churches, and they do just fine I might add.
No, not really.
Ah HA!!!!
Yes husband of one wife. Polygamy was common in the Middle East back in those days. And still is.
What is it about the Catholic Church’s discipline of celibacy that causes everyone to flip out? Abstinence and chastity are such mind blowers to the modern worlD.
No, they are Human Nature blowers to the world since creation. The sexual urge has been powerful always. As seen in any recorded history, the sexual urge will out. Abstinence and chastity among young hormonal people will not, in general, work.
That is not to say that priests cannot remain chaste. Some can. But all? Probably never happened at any point in human history.
You must be talking about the Mexican imports.
Yeah!!! So why even try? Let's just bang anything that looks attractive at the moment!!! That's the ticket.
The Bad Touch
-Bloodhound Gang
...
(Do it now)
You and me baby ain't nothin' but mammals
So let's do it like they do on the Discovery Channel
(Do it again now)
You and me baby ain't nothin' but mammals
So let's do it like they do on the Discovery Channel
...
(rest of lyrics deleted for reasons that any search engine will make obvious)
No priesthood but elders and deacons with a marital prerequisite.
No kidding.
If I understand you correctly, you're claiming that marriage will solve homosexual inflitration of the clergy.
My point is.........has it solved it anywhere else? (eg. the Boy Scouts)
The answer to the problem of homosexual clergy is to not ordain them in the first place. As the Church has repeatedly advised.
The Council of Elvira was quite limited in scope and not embraced by the full Church. Compulsory clerical celibacy was not institutionalized in the Western Church until the First Lateran Council in 1123.
It was an enactment of obligatory celibacy a millenium before the Middle Ages. This is important because it shows that there are theological reasons for this pratice, totally divorced from any purely pragmatic issues to do with simony. This theology has a basis in both Scripture and in the wrtings of the Church Fathers.
In the East, bishops must be celibate and once a man has been ordained he may not take a wife. This clearly demonstrates that a married clergy is tolerated but is not considered to be the ideal. Which the words of St. Paul affirm.
Come on. The Anglicans and Episcopalians and various mainline Protestant groups where married clergy has been the norm for centuries don’t have any gays in leadership and certainly don’t accept things like ‘gay marriage.’ All the married clergy make it very hard for the gays to infiltrate them and be welcome, for sure. Obviously.
And the liberal homo-acts affirming Catholic contingent is certainly pro-celibacy discipline. They are always hollering about how valuable it is and how it should continue. For sure.
Freegards
At least you admit there is some evidence. God ordained marriage. He did so when the Levites were priests and has made no explicit order to the contrary. God does not change but the laws of man do.
Nothing elevates a theological discussion like statistics and moral relativism. Do you really think that God grades on the curve or favors one denomination over another? If He favored any denomination it would be the Jewish one not Catholic.
Where in the Bible is it written that celibacy is preferable to the married state?
Where in the Bible is it written that celibacy is a requirement for service in the priesthood?
What is wrong with allowing priests (or bishops for that matter) to be married? We have married priests in our archdiocese and they do just fine.
The Lord commands us to be fruitful and multiply. Holy Matrimony is God’s plan. Compulsory clerical celibacy is a Church invention.
Perhaps in South Texas. But I’m talking about the entire South.
Are you really that oblivious?
Would you like a list of all of the gay Protestant clergy in the past 10 years?
You missed my sarcasm, my fault. Sorry.
Freegards
Actually Paul wrote that he preferred it because it created a conflict of duties between family and the type of traveling preaching the Gospel that he did. But he wrote it was not a command but his preference so that clarified that God does not demand it nor prefer it.
Exactly. Paul was single and traveling all over the Roman Empire spreading the Gospel. Obviously being single made it easier for him to travel from one city to the next. Paul never suggests that celibacy should be a requirement for service in the priesthood. Fact is no in the Bible suggests it.
As former Jewish Pharisee, Paul almost certainly was married at one point in his life, virtually a requirement for such a position. In later life Paul was single, probably a widower or divorced.
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