Posted on 03/09/2010 12:13:22 PM PST by the invisib1e hand
Married or single priests from the early stages of Christianity practiced celibacy, according to a Vatican archaeologist.
During the first four centuries, married priests would renounce having intimate relationships with their wives, but they needed their the approval of their spouse.
“there is a good reason for it.”
LOL. I’m given a “sola scriptura”: “There’s nothing in Scripture about X”
and you come back with, “no, but there’s a good reason for X.”
Everyone who practices and advocates things that “aren’t in Scrpture” says he has good reason for it.
That is totally irrelevant here. You just gave away the Sola Scriptura store.
I don’t believe in Sola Scriptura. I assume that there’s a heckuva lot of stuff that’s not in Scripture. I don’t think that God ever intended that everything would be in Scripture. Indeed, John’s Gospel ends by saying that not everything can be “in Scripture” because the books would fill the whole world.
So I don’t have any problem with defending this or that practice as being derived by Holy-Spirit guided teaching office “out of Scripture.”
You and your Protestant buds are the ones who use “it’s not in Scripture” when convenient for attacking this or that Catholic belief you reject
and now you turn around and defend thimbles of grape juice as being done “for a good reason.”
Can you not see that you just knocked your whole “it’s not in Scripture” mantra into a cocked hat?
Don’t answer that. I know you can’t see how ludicrous your reasoning is.
No, because as Campion pointed out, Palladin was just plain wrong. He quoted a proof for Jewish laymen without considering what the rules were for Jewish priests.
Not at all—if the vocation of the priest is to be continuously given to prayer in a way that the layman and laywoman’s vocations are not.
That’s the issue. And the proof that my view is good exegesis is that Paul the Apostle (prot-bishop) himself makes clear that he chose not just continence within marriage but celibacy for the sake of the kingdom. Something about the apostle’s role precludes the “normal” cares and concerns of marriage—that’s what 1 Cor. 7 says.
Remember, bishops (successors to apostles), if not married when ordained, were forbidden to marry—that’s Paul’s point: he’s an apostle, he never married, he is not going to get married because it’s hard to combine with apostleship. (Priests derive from bishops from apostles.) But the married prests/bishops we are talking about here were already married before being chosen to become bishops/priests. They aren’t unmarried like Paul, but being married, they nonetheless follow Paul’s rule as much as they can. They aren’t going to end the marriage but within the marriage, if the wife consents, they live like Paul and the apostles. If the wife refuses consent, then the man simply cannot be ordained. So the wife freely chooses to accept the new situation. It is not forced on her and she can veto his ordination.
Hey I appreciate the 'heads' up on this I will pass this info along.
I wrote “GREGORY SAYS THAT JESUS SAYS THAT SEXUAL SINS ARE NOT POLLUTING IN THEMSELVES. The Pharisees are the ones who say sexual sins are polluting.”
Badly written. Sexual sins qua sins are polluting. Jesus’ and Gregory’s point is that the woman repented of her sin and her sexuality (not her sin) can now be used for good. Sexuality and sexual desire is not evil in itself (as you claimed Gregory taught) but sexual desire can be used wrong as well as rightly. The Pharisees were saying that a woman who had used sexuality wrongly was in herself now a pollutant. Gregory rejects that because Jesus rejects that.
I think RnMomof7 is getting his info here:
Notice how RnMomof7 used the same incorrect spelling of Paris that EIPS used? Yeah, dead give away that yet another anti-Catholic is must rely on anti-Catholic websites to do their propagandizing for them. Whenever I see an anti-Catholic bring up Migne I am suspicious. How many anti-Catholics are well educated enough to actually learn any Latin? Not many.
here’s the original:
>> That’s the issue. And the proof that my view is good exegesis is that Paul the Apostle (prot-bishop) himself makes clear that he chose not just continence within marriage but celibacy for the sake of the kingdom. Something about the apostle’s role precludes the “normal” cares and concerns of marriage—that’s what 1 Cor. 7 says.
Paul was not married. But Peter was ... which seems to undermine the “apostles cannot be married” thesis. Paul may have chosen celibacy for the sake of the kingdom ... but Peter did not, which seems to me to indicate that celibacy is not the only appropriate choice for an apostle.
As to whether previously married bishops should be permitted perpetual chastity within marriage, the previously quoted scripture seems to me to indicate that perpetual chastity in marriage is not permissible — even by mutual consent (thus the “and come togther again” portion of the scripture).
SnakeDoc
You wrote:
“Why do we always forget that Jesus and his disciples were strict Jews who obeyed Levitical laws?”
Not after the fulfillment of the Law by Christ.
That post marks the first time I can recall seeing Ron White quoted in a theology thread.
“I hear they’re runnin’ two-a-day in Ar-i-zona.”
SnakeDoc
There’s also a trustworthy English translation of _Forty Gospel Homilies_ by Gregory the Great in the Cistercian Studies series (Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications), but I was too lazy to get up and walk to the next room to consult it. It was easier to get Migne from our university library’s database and translate the passages roughly myself.
Yeah, Homilarian and the 11 for II are also typos that reappear in RnMomof7’s version.
“Everyone who practices and advocates things that “aren’t in Scrpture” says he has good reason for it.”
You are so right, give booze to recovering alkies, what harm could come of that? I answered your questions specifically and without malice and you hit me with a bunch of sola scriptura stuff? Are you always this much of a dick or is this just how the love of Christ chooses to shine through you?
and I don’t do those things either
Read Margery Kempe.
By the way, look at the websites that happen to have this statement on them:
“590-604-Pope Gregory “the Great” said that all sexual desire is sinful in itself”
Future Church (www.futurechurch.org/fpm/history.htm)
Democratic Underground
Jesus never existed: www.jesusneverexisted.com/dark-age.htm
Yeah, those websites are soooooo diligent in their research of things.
kalee’s right. Margery Kempe and her husband, after many years of marriage and many children did it.
“which seems to undermine the “apostles cannot be married” thesis.”
Puhleeze. Where in the world do you get the idea that I or any Catholic or Orthodox says that apostles were not permitted to be married.
Some early Church bishops were married. No one disputes that, not even those who believe in mandatory priestly (and episcopal) celibacy.
Do you get that?
But being married, they were expected to be continent. And when later a lot of priests ignored their pledge of continence, they were eventually forbidden to be married at all (1000s).
Peter doesn’t help your effort to refute the plain history. He’s the only apostle known to have been married. After him, some bishops were married. But none of the other apostles are known to have been married. Some might have been but you cannot offer positive proof that they were.
And with Peter, the evidence of his having been married is a slender thread, inferred from the brief mention of his mother-in-law.
So, even with Peter, we have no positive evidence that he was “actively married” at the time of or following his vocation to be the leader of the Twelve Apostles. To put it bluntly, “that Peter was actively married when he served as an Apostle”
AIN’T IN SCRIPTURE
That he at some point was married and that he MIGHT have been actively married while serving as an apostle, is possible but has to be “read out of Scripture” (”for good reason,” like the thimbles of grape juice).
These scraps of evidence all make it quite plausible to conclude that the Church preferred unmarried men (like Paul) for her bishops but did not avoid ordaining already married men, if they and their wives pledged continence.
A hint that supports this inference is the “husband of one wife” phrase in Titus or Timothy or whereever. As Peter Brown (the premier scholar of late antiquity in the world, not a Catholic as far as I know) points out, widowed men who chose not to remarry were highly respected in ancient secular Rome and in the Church. Not to remarry showed you could control yourself and you want self-control in all sorts of ways in a leader in a time of danger and persecution. Someone posted an excerpt on this thread about Fr. De Smet and how the Indians admired priests who could choose to live celibately. It was like that in the early Church.
So, although married men were ordained bishops and priests (pledging continence), the preferred pattern was unmarried or widowed but not remarried men, as “Paul” writes to Timothy (or Titus?).
But I never advanced an “apostles cannot be married thesis.” Whatever gave you the impression that I said that?
just in case the same typos are present on the hack anti-catholic website from which you took this, please inform them that “nominal” should be “nominat” and I can’t figure out what “else” is—it’s not Latin, that’s for sure.
Oh, and “damonia” should be daemonia.
Tell them to triple check when the go around transcribing from Latin texts. Or else go to the Chadwyck-Healey digitized Migne’s Patrologia and cut and paste to avoid typos.
>> But I never advanced an “apostles cannot be married thesis.” Whatever gave you the impression that I said that?
The following quote gave that impression ...
— “Something about the apostle’s role precludes the “normal” cares and concerns of marriage”
“Preclude” and “cannot” are synonyms. Peter was married, and thus was not precluded from the normal cares and concerns of marriage by his role as apostle. If you would argue that Peter was, in fact, not married or was chaste during his role as apostle — fine, though I see no justification for that belief aside from conjecture.
I am aware that the Catholic church has required chastity in the past — I am arguing whether that requirement is justifiable. For priest, bishops, etc. that are married before their ordainment, I believe the requirement of chastity is wrong (even by mutual consent). For those that are not married at the time of ordination, I think chastity/ celibacy is laudable and fine-by-me, but I see no justification for making it mandatory.
SnakeDoc
That URL can’t be RnMomof7’s source for “Gregory says all sexual desire is sinful” because our good friend Ian Paisley doesn’t say that there, at least as far as I can see. Ian’s upset that Gregory and the Church Fathers identified Mary of Bethany with the “loose woman” anointing his feet with the woman from whom Jesus cast out seven devils. Fine, one can reject that on exegetical grounds.
But Gregory doesn’t say all sexual desire is sinful. Someone else must have said that and then referred to Paisley’s site for references to the homily? The hack authority who said Gregory said all sexual desire is sinful must have read those snippets from that homily on Paisley’s site and read into it the claim that Gregory was saying all sexual desire is sinful. To read the snippets that way take more than an average dose of incomprehension.
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