Tea at Trianon: A Brief History of Priestly Celibacy

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Tuesday, September 18, 2018

A Brief History of Priestly Celibacy

From Aleteia:

By the 300s, monasticism had become the preferred method of those who pursued Christian perfection. When Christians asked themselves, “How do I become perfect as Christ called us to be?” (Mt 5:48), they found in Him the exemplar of that perfection. Christ was totally obedient to the will of the Father, he was poor in worldly possessions, and he was unmarried. These three qualities together became known as the evangelical counsels of poverty, chastity, and obedience. They are not commandments, for marriage, material wealth, and free choice are themselves good things, and gifts of God. Rather the monk or nun chose to forego these goods in favor of a pursuit of holiness.

For 1,000 years the monks and nuns provided the reforming evangelical energy of the Church. It did not take long for Christians to view them as paragons of holiness and to pattern wider Christian practices after theirs. As early as the first decade of the 300s, bishops of the Western Latin Church began to codify the practice already well established in many areas and prescribed celibacy for their non-monastic priests. It must be emphasized that all vows in Christianity, whether those of marriage or the religious life, are voluntary. No one is to be forced into a vow, therefore every vow of celibacy is — of its very nature — free.

It took many centuries for the practice of clerical celibacy to prevail in some corners of the Western Church. In the 11th century, there was a serious crisis that mirrors our present one. Rampant corruption manifested itself in widespread clerical immorality and homosexual practices. Pope Gregory VII and his collaborators, coming from a monastic tradition, purified the Church thoroughly, stringently enforcing the apostolic practice of clerical celibacy and creating the morally purified Church of the high medieval period. (Read more.)