A Brief History of Celibacy in the Roman Catholic Church
Metroland - July 11, 2002
Glenn Weiser
... Jesus designated St. Peter, a married man, to be the first pope. Priests had married in Judaism (the priesthood itself was a hereditary profession), and it would seem that Christ accepted this part of the tradition in his choice of Peter. Although St. Paul believed that spreading the Gospel was easier for a man who didn’t have a family to provide for, he still mandated that bishops, elders and deacons be only “the husband of one wife.” (Even then, polygamy among all ranks of the clergy persisted, and by the third century bishops alone were required to be monogamous.)
The change began with the Council of Elvira in Spain in about 306, which prohibited bishops, deacons and priests from marrying. Shortly thereafter, the early church fathers began to stigmatize sex as sinful in their writings. St. Ambrose (340-397) wrote, “The ministerial office must be kept pure and unspoiled and must not be defiled by coitus,” and the former libertine St. Augustine (354-430) even went so far as to consider an erect penis a sign of man’s insubordination
With the advent of the Dark Ages around 500, the upheavals in society saw a decline in clerical discipline and with it, a return to marriage and even the keeping of concubines by priests. During this time, the wealth of the church was also increasing, a development not lost on Rome. Many priests were leaving church lands to their heirs, and others handed down land of their own through primogeniture. The Holy See saw that a return to the celibacy rule would result in a real-estate bonanza, and in about 1018 Pope Benedict VIII put teeth in the Elvira decree by forbidding descendents of priests to inherit property. Later, in the 11th century, Pope Gregory VII, who had assumed vast power by declaring himself the supreme authority over all souls, went even further by proscribing married priests from saying mass; he also forbid parishioners from attending masses said by them. Scholars believe that the first written law forbidding the clergy to marry was finally handed down at the Second Lateran Council in 1139.
Dissent persisted, though. At two 15th-century church councils, supporters of clerical marriage attempted to reintroduce the practice but were defeated by hard-liners, who tried to rewrite history by asserting that celibacy was apostolic in its origins. The law finally became official doctrine at the Council of Trent in 1563, and Rome’s position on the issue has remained essentially unchanged since then ...
http://www.celticguitarmusic.com/mland~celibacy.htmIt could be that
celticguitarmusic is not a definitive resource on theological history, so I'll add the following remarks:
Power struggles are often conducted dishonestly, with the real object of the power struggle being hidden by the nominal subject of controversy; perhaps a certain amount of strange theology remains as the fossilized record of such power struggles.
We shouldn't listen to her because she's a woman or
We shouldn't listen to him because he's married may sometimes have represented ploys in struggles that were actually about something completely different.
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