Clerical Celibacy in the West: c. 1100–1700 by Helen Parish (review)

The topic of Helen Parish’s authoritative and immensely readable Clerical Celibacy is rooted in millennia of Christian doctrine, discipline, and practice, and remains as timely and contentious as ever. Pope Francis called it “a rule of life that I appreciate very much, and … a gift for the church” but added that “since it is not a dogma, the door is always open.”

In her introduction, Parish underscores the vastness and complexity of her subject. Celibacy and marriage are intensely personal and private matters, but in the context of the Christian priesthood, very public, and at times polemical statements. The commitment to a life of celibacy demanded of the Catholic clergy reaches to the heart of the individual, but also to the heart of the history of the Church that he serves, and clerical celibacy continues to be defined in relation to scripture, apostolic tradition, ecclesiastical history, and papal authority (p. 13).

Despite her subtitle (c. 1100–1700), Parish begins by examining the attitudes and experiments of the early Church, which set the tone for centuries of discussion and debate. St. Paul was a towering influence in the debate, and Parish describes how his “infamous statement in defence of chastity” (p. 24) in his First Epistle to the Corinthians, and his moderate though ambivalent observations about marriage fueled the debate about clerical celibacy. So did St. Jerome’s diatribes against any suggestion that virginity and chastity were not the highest form of Christian expression. In his denunciation of the monk Jovinian, who defended the worth of married clergy, Jerome insisted that clerics either remain unmarried or, if married, then abstain from sex—the only way, he believed, they could achieve the holiness that was an essential priestly quality.

The sexually experienced St. Augustine, on the other hand, who believed that “all sexual activity [w]as accompanied by ritual pollution” (p. 39), tempered his recommendations about clerical celibacy for the very practical reason that it was difficult to find enough priests. His solution was to accept married men, secure in the knowledge that ordination would bestow on them the grace to live chaste lives. Even as the theological foundation for clerical celibacy developed and matured, the reality of the early Church was that many of its clergymen were married. In this context, the chapter on the history of clerical marriage in the Eastern churches adds a fascinating dimension to the issue, and Parish concludes:

The married ministry of the Eastern church might appear be stand in stark contrast to perpetual continence of Latin priests, but the law which committed them to temporary continence was constructed on the same foundations as the celibacy obligation which bound the clergy of the Roman church.

(p. 86)

The locus of chapter 3, “‘A concubine or an unlawful woman’: Celibacy, Marriage, and the Gregorian Reform,” is “a central place in the history and historical narrative of clerical celibacy,” when many priests were married “and leading a life almost indistinguishable at first glance from that of their parishioners” (p. 89). But when church holdings fell into private hands, these priests were blamed for the common practice of assigning church properties to their children and even founding dynasties. The ensuing churchly campaign against clerical wives and children did not, Parish notes, “manifest the rhetoric of purity and sacerdotalism that was to characterise later attempts to regulate clerical conduct” (p. 96) and relied instead on harsh punishments: removing clergy from office; instructing (often reluctant) parishioners to decline sacraments from noncompliant priests; threatening excommunication; even forcibly separating ordained husband from wife and children.

Interwoven into Parish’s descriptions of centuries of such real-life complexities and dynamics are stories of how Gregorian reformers effected drastic changes in canon law and how the Church’s devotional focus on the Eucharist and Christ’s presence led to the new vision of priests who were chaste and unstained as they handled...