There are many angles from which to analyse clerical celibacy today and the suggestions by some that it’s high time to end the practice. I would like to focus on two: its history and a personal reflection.
The Catholic Church sometimes remembers aspects of its tradition which have fallen into disuse – such as her teachings on the universal call to holiness and religious liberty, recovered and refined at the Second Vatican Council – and so we can ask, did the Church have married priests in the past, and if so, can we therefore restore them today?
There is evidence from the Gospels onwards of married clergy (such as St Peter, who had a mother-in-law). But, perhaps surprisingly, there is no evidence of married clergy making use of their marriage: there is a constant tradition of Latin clergy being celibate from their ordination onwards even if they were married.
To explore this and subsequent points, I follow Cardinal Stickler’s recently re-published classic The Case for Clerical Celibacy.
The first reference to Catholic priests having marital relations after ordination came at the Second Council of Trullo in 692 AD, a local council in Constantinople, never recognised by Rome. This was a highly controversial step: the thirteenth canon of this council deliberately misquoted an earlier council in Carthage to reverse the previous tradition.
From this point onwards, Catholic priests in the East were permitted to live as husbands of their wives; the Latin Church maintained celibacy, which had been the universal custom. In short, the practice of Catholic clergy making use of their marriage was not a tradition dating back to the apostles which was lost at some point in history – it was invented over six centuries after Christ.
What then, can history teach us about clerical celibacy, apart from the fact that it was discarded in the East in 692 AD?
Early texts, such as the third century De singularitate clericorum (“On priests’ living alone”) – attributed falsely to St Cyprian, but a faithful indicator of the Church in that time – describe clerical celibacy not simply as a discipline imposed from without, but as a gift of God received within.
This has been my experience of priestly celibacy: a gift put into my heart by God, not simply a canonical obligation applied externally.
When I first thought of being a priest, celibacy was not very attractive; it seemed a necessary sacrifice in order to get ordained. But the more I read, especially St John Paul II’s Theology of the Body, the more I saw it as a positive grace rather than simply a negation.
Key for me was the concept that marriage does not exist in heaven, as Jesus himself said (Matthew 22:30). So to be celibate on earth is to start living now what we will all, please God, experience in heaven: the greatest love imaginable.
This links beautifully with priesthood: just as Jesus was celibate in order to love each one of us profoundly as his spiritual children, so the priest shares in this fatherly love of Christ for each person entrusted to him.
All of the fatherly instincts of a priest are not denied by his celibacy, but are transformed into a different kind of fatherhood; it is fitting that we called priests “father”.
There is no greater joy as a priest than to see people grow in grace, and to help them do so by offering them the Word of God and the Sacraments. I recently received an uplifting video of my god-daughter taking her first steps and it reminded me that, spiritually-speaking, a priest often sees his “children” take their first steps, especially in the confessional. He also sees their moments of crisis, their times of joy and everything in-between.
This gift of priestly celibacy cannot be manufactured by the priest himself, it can only be received. To welcome this gift of becoming a spiritual father, the priest must first be a spiritual son and brother: a son of God through his prayer, a son of his bishop by his obedience; a brother of his fellow priests through his friendships with them.
Without prayer, though; without loyalty to his bishop and without priestly friendships, celibacy becomes a burden rather than a heart-expanding joy. There have been priests in the past who have accepted celibacy externally but without the inner transformation Christ wanted for them, and this has led to problems of various kinds.
But the answer to these problems is to renew our gratitude for the gift of priestly celibacy by receiving it authentically for what it really is, the privilege of sharing in Jesus’ fatherly love for his children.
One particular saint who can help us do so is the one who, humanly-speaking, formed Jesus’ fatherly virtues: St Joseph. Let’s ask him to form all priests more deeply in the spiritual paternity of Christ.
Fr David Howell is a priest of Southwark currently studying canon law in Rome. His previous studies include Classics at Oxford and a licence in Patristics at the Augustinianum Institute in Rome.
Photo: Seminarians from the Saint Martin community pray before lunch at the Abbey of Evron, France, 22 June 2017. (Photo credit should read DAMIEN MEYER/AFP via Getty Images.)
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