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To: Trapped Behind Enemy Lines
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.

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.

30 posted on 12/11/2015 8:46:21 AM PST by marshmallow
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To: marshmallow

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.


35 posted on 12/11/2015 9:42:13 AM PST by Trapped Behind Enemy Lines
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