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To: sinkspur
"Husar is Uniate. IOW, Eastern Rite.

He would certainly be an interesting choice.

Doesn't the Eastern Rite accept that priests can marry? What about Bishops. For that matter, is Husar married?

98 posted on 04/02/2005 10:34:58 PM PST by cookcounty (So just WHO bought insurance from Michael Schiavo's short-lived insurance company?)
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To: cookcounty

Don't know if the Ukrainian guy is married-but think what he could do for Christmas!

Most of them sound like they would be fine choices, and would represent the truly international nature of the Church.


101 posted on 04/02/2005 10:51:23 PM PST by WestVirginiaRebel (Carnac: A siren, a baby and a liberal. Answer: Name three things that whine.)
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To: cookcounty

Eastern Rite Catholics and Eastern Orthodox permit men already married to be ordained priest, but once ordained, an unmarried man may not marry. Bishops must not have been married, so they frequently come from monastic clergy.

What most people do not realize is that the earliest discipline in the Church was for men still married when ordained to pledge (with their wives' consent) to cease marital relations with their wives. This was already "ancient" practice when the first surviving legislation emerges in the early 300s, so it very probably is apostolic in origin (see the book by Charles Cochini, _The Apostolic Origins of Clerical Celibacy_). In the 200s we know that men who chose not to remarry were preferred as bishops (if widowed at 35 or 40, the choice not to marry indicated maturity and self-control). This choice not to remarry as a widower helps make sense out of St. Paul's injunction in the epistle to Timothy that a bishop must be the husband of one wife. (It makes sense also in light of the "enrolled widows" mentioned in the New Testament: widowed women who chose not to remarry in order to devote themselves to prayer and the Church were then supported by the Church financially; the same principle les behind St. Paul in 1 Corinthians when he points out that the unmarried can devote themselves more fully to apostolic work, using himself as an example--there seems to be a fairly consistent principle at work here in the New Testament.)

That Eastern Orthodox and Eastern Rite Catholics permit ordination of married men represents a moderate change of discipline in the 690s. Even married men who were ordained were required by the legislation at the synod of Trullo in the 690s to abstain from marital relations when the time approached for them to celebrate the Eucharist. This is no longer the case, but it indicates that the ancient discipline of abstinence from sexual relations even for married priests, was in their minds. The bishop of Rome refused to ratify the changes made at Trullo, which is the origin of the divergence in practice between East and West--the East changed, not the West.

The basic text on which the changes at Trullo were predicated, a supposed speech by Paphnutius, a monk-bishop at the Council of Nicea, has been shown to be a pious legend. (See Cochini).

The differences between Greek East and Latin West were thus not as great as people assume them to be--that this issue looms so large today owes much to the campaign against celibacy and rejection of monasticism in the Protestant Reformation.


278 posted on 04/04/2005 6:05:59 AM PDT by Dionysiusdecordealcis
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