The broad outline of the last fifty years of celibacy scholarship shows that something has occurred that not infrequently causes misunderstandings in historical research: a one-sided formulation of the question has produced one-sided answers. Scholars took the present discipline of celibacy in the Roman Catholic Church as their point of departure and searched for a pattern of clerics in the unmarried state in the first centuries. This, however, they did not find -- at any rate, not for all clerics. The question that they should have asked is whether the early Church perhaps knew a different discipline of continence. This was the approach of the older German scholarship in the nineteenth century. But that was though to have been refuted scientifically, and so these contributions were consigned to oblivion. Actually, if this deficit has not become evident already, it ought to when on looks at the Church's legislation. That is to say, according to canon law an exclusively unmarried clergy, as we know it today, existed at all only after the Council of Trent (1521-1545). Even the above-mentioned Second Lateran Council, which is repeatedly cited as the beginning of the history of celibacy, did not intend to exclude married men from holy orders; it merely declared marriages contracted after the reception of orders to be invalid (canon 7). [Emphasis added.]
As I thought, mandatory celibacy has an even shorter history than many here believe.
Don't confuse me with those who would promote celibacy almost to the level of infallible doctrine. I recognize celibacy for what it is: a discipline. Should our Holy Father change or eliminate this discipline in the near term (though I think that highly unlikely), my faith would be unaffected.
It is a discipline with a long pedigree, to apostolic times. That the Church took centuries to develop mandatory celibacy in the Latin rite doesn't detract from the fact that it is a gift highly-prized from the New Testament Church, by St. Paul himself. That the Church met resistance as it moved toward making this discipline mandatory is unsurprising. I would be careful, however, to assert that the fact that many successfully resisted this discipline for so long means that it wasn't the will of the Church to bring it about. Heck, I wouldn't be surprised if historians, 500 years from now, will state, "Well, even as late as the early 21st Century, the Church still hadn't completely enforced mandatory celibacy, because we know that there were many, many priests who nonetheless married."
I haven't asserted that mandatory celibacy is on par with unchanging doctrine, and I haven't asserted that mandatory celibacy will be the right thing for the Church until Jesus comes again.
All I've said is that I believe that now is a time when we really need mandatory celibacy in the Latin rite. Nonetheless, it is only a discipline, and I accept the Church's governance with regard to it.
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