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To: gogogodzilla; cyborg; Mr. Jeeves; NYer; eastsider
Didn't the Catholic church once allow priests to marry?

Never that I know of. The Catholic Church in the West did for a while ordain already-married men, but:

1. Even when common, this practice was never considered normative.

2. There's much evidence that after ordination married clergy lived with their spouses as brother and sister, forgoing sexual relations.

3. The "change" that you mention in the early part of the second millennium was merely the legal codification of a near-universal (in the West) discipline of celibacy that had already been recognised as normative for centuries.

53 posted on 05/26/2005 7:11:00 AM PDT by Romulus (Der Inn fließt in den Tiber.)
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To: Romulus
There's much evidence that after ordination married clergy lived with their spouses as brother and sister, forgoing sexual relations.

What evidence of this is there? Just curious...
336 posted on 06/01/2005 9:44:36 AM PDT by Stone Mountain
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