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 CELIBACY

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CELIBACY

quently been set aside. His determined attitude brought forth a whole literature of protests (see the Libelli de Lite, 3 vols., in Mon. Germ. Hist.), amongst others the letter "De Continentia" which Dr. H. C. Lea (Celibacy, 1907, I, 171) is not ashamed even now to attribute to St. Ulric of Augsburg, though every modern scholar admits it to be a forgery, fabricated more than a hundred years after St. Ulrie's death. The point is of importance because the evidence seems to show that in this long struggle the whole of the more high-principled and more learned section of the clergy was enlisted in the cause of celibacy. The in- cidents of the long final campaign, which began indeed even before the time of Pope St. Leo IX and lasted down to the First Council of Lateran in 1123, are too complicated to be detailed here. We may note, how- ever, that the attack was conducted along two dis- tinct lines of action. In the first place, disabilities of all kinds were enacted and as far as possible en- forced against the wives and children of ecclesiastics. Their offspring were declared to be of servile condi- tion, debarred from sacred orders, and, in particular, incapable of succeeding to their fathers' benefices. The earliest decree in which the children were declared to be slaves, the property of the Church, and never to be enfranchised, seems to have been a canon of the Synod of Pavia in 1018. Similar penalties were pro- mulgated later on against the wives and concubines (see the Synod of Melfi, 1189, can. xii), who by the very fact of their unlawful connexion with a subdea- con or clerk of higher rank became liable to be seized as slaves by the over-lord. Hefele (Coneilienge- schichte, V, 195) sees in this the first trace of the principle that the marriages of clerics are ipso jacto invalid.

As regards the offenders themselves, the strongest step seems to have been that taken by Nicholas II in 1059, and more vigorously by Gregory VII in 1075, who interdicted such priests from saying Mass and from all ecclesiastical functions, while the people were forbid- den to hear the Masses which they celebrated or to admit their ministrations so long as they remained contumacious. In the controversies of tliis time the Masses said by these incontinent priests were some- times described as "idolatrous"; but this word must not be pressed, as if it meant to insinuate that such priests were incapable of consecrating validly. The term was only loosely used, just as it was also some- times applied at the same period to any sort of homage rendered to an antipope. Moreover the wording of a letter of F/rban II (Ep. cclxxiii) enforc- ing the decree makes an exception for cases of urgent necessity, as, for example, when Communion has to be given to the dying. Clearly, therefore, the validity of the sacraments when consecrated or administered by a married priest was not in question. Finally, in 1 123, at the First Lateran Council, an enactment was passed (confirmed more explicitly in the Second Lat- eran Council, can. vii) which, while not in itself very plainly worded, was held to pronounce the marriages contracted by subdeacons or ecclesiastics of any of the higher orders to be invalid (contracta quoque matrimonia ab hujusmodi pcrsonis disjungi . . . judi- camus — can. xxi). This may be said to mark the victory of the cause of celibacy. Henceforth all con- jugal relations on the part of the clergy in sacred orders were reduced in the eyes of the canon law to mere concubinage. Neither can it be pretended that this legislation, backed, as it were, by the firm and clear pronouncements of the Fourth Council of Lat- eran in 1215, and later by those of the Council of lout, remained any longer a dead letter. Laxity among the clergy at certain periods and in certain localities must undoubtedly be admitted, but the principles of the canon law remained unshaken, and despite all assertions to the contrary made by un- scrupulous assailants of the Roman system the call

to a life of self-denying continence has, as a rule, been respected by the clergy of Western Christendom.

In England. — A few words may here be added in particular about the history of clerical celibacy upon English soil. Very extreme views have been put for- ward by various Anglican writers. Passing over Dr. Lea as quite untrustworthy, the following statement of a more sober writer, the Bishop of Salisbury (John Wordsworth), may be taken as a specimen. After declaring that during the Anglo-Saxon period the English clergy were undisguisedly married, he adds: "It would be easy to multiply evidence for the con- tinuance of a practically married clergy in this coun- try up to the time of the Reformation. Sometimes I believe that they were privately but still legally mar- ried so that their wives and children might have the benefit of their property after their death. For all marriages properly performed in England were valid according to the civil law, unless they were voided by action in the Bishop's Court, down to the passing of Lord Lyndhurst's Act in 1835, however much they might be contrary to law" (Ministry of Grace, p. 236). It can only be said that this is a quite gratuitous assertion, unsupported by any evidence yet produced, and founded in the main upon that strange miscon- ception, so well exposed in Professor Maitland's " Roman Canon Law in the Church of England ", that ecclesiastical law in England differed from, and was independent of, the jus commune (i. e. the canon law) of the Catholic Church. Objectors may safely be challenged to produce a single case during the four- teenth and fifteenth centuries in which a clerk in sacred orders went through the marriage ceremony with any woman, or in which his wife or the children born after his ordination claimed to inherit his prop- erty upon his death. On the other hand, the denun- ciations of all such unions as mere concubinage are in- numerable, and the evidence for any great prevalence of these irregular connexions, despite the rhetorical ex- aggerations of such writers as Gower or Langland, is relatively slight. Unfortunately, nearly all the best- known popular histories (Trevelyan's "Age of Wicliffe" might be cited as a specimen) are written with a strong anti-Roman or anti-sacerdotal bias, particularly disas- trous in matters in which there can be no question of compa rati ve statistics, but only of general impressions.

With regard to the Saxon and Angevin period again, careful study of the evidence has convinced the present writer that a very exaggerated estimate has been formed of the prevalence of marriage or concubinage among the secular clergy. Two points deserve especially to be remembered. First, that the Anglo-Saxon word preost does not necessarily mean a priest but simply a cleric. The ordinary word for priest in the sense of sacerdos, was maesse-preost. This is continually ignored, but the evidence for it is quite unmistakable and is fully admitted in Bosworth- Toller's "Dictionary" and in the important mono- graph. "The Influence of Christianity upon the Vo- cabulary of Old English" (1902) by the American scholar Dr. H. MacGillivray. To take one illustra- tion, Abbot jElfric writes: "Gemaenes hades prcos- tum is alyfed . . . thaet hi syferlice sincipes brucon " — i. e. "To clerics [preostum] of the common order [i. e. to clerks in minor orders] it is permitted that they enjoy marriage soberly"; and then he continues: "but in sooth to the others that minister at God's altar, that is to say to mass-priests and deacons (mmsseprcostum and diaconum), all conjugal relations are forbidden" (yElfric, Homilies, ed, Thorpe, II. 94). Similarly, where Bede speaks of St. Wilfrid receh ing the tonsure, the Anglo-Saxon translation, as in many similar cases, renders it, "he waes to preost gesceo- ren", i. e. he was shorn into a cleric (preost), Wil- frid's ordination as priest did not take place until several years later. Now the importance of this will be appreciated when we find a well-known historian