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To: Recovering Ex-hippie; muir_redwoods
and historically accurate. does anyone know why celibacy of priests came about?

No, historically inaccurate. Priests have never at any time in any part of the Church been allowed to marry after ordination.

IN THE PAST, men already married were allowed to be ordained provided that they took up celibacy, and often with the requirement that they seperate from their wives, with her entering a convent.

The celibacy of Priests is a tradition of Apostolic Origin reflecting the Christian teaching that it is good to marry, but even more excellent to remain or become henceforth perpetually chaste (1 Corinthians 7.1, 7-8, 34), and the statement of Jesus Christ to His Apostles that those who gave up having a wife for the sake of the kingdom would receive a 100-fold reward in heaven (St. Matthew 19.10-12, 27-29).

At the dawn of the era of the Church coming out of the catacombs around AD 300, the very first Canon Laws prescribed perpetual celibacy for the Priests of the Church, a ruling that was endlessly repeated over the next 150 years by Popes and Councils.

The change in the Middle Ages was not to introduce celibacy as some new requirement, but to forbid the ordination from then on of any men who was still married, regardless of any pledge of celibacy they wished to make.

13 posted on 03/11/2006 6:19:00 AM PST by Hermann the Cherusker
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To: Hermann the Cherusker

friendly amendment: "provided they took up continence" (sexual abstinence within marriage) rather than "took up celibacy" (a married man cannot be celibate, since celibate = not married, but he can be continent, abstinent).


15 posted on 03/11/2006 6:35:00 AM PST by Dionysiusdecordealcis
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To: Hermann the Cherusker

So my statement that the eastern rite and the converted Lutheran and Episcopal clergy can be married is 100% accurate.


28 posted on 03/11/2006 11:46:58 AM PST by muir_redwoods (Free Sirhan Sirhan, after all, the bastard who killed Mary Jo Kopechne is walking around free)
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