Expert: Fr. Timothy Johnson - 3/24/2010

Question
Were priest ever married before the church implemented the rule of celibacy?  Were  priest married at one time back around 640 A.D. To my understanding when a parish was built, it was built on the priest and wife land. Now, when the priest died, the land went back to the wife and family. Unfortunately, the parish dissolved. I had watched a documentary about the beginning of the Catholic Church and I want to know if this is true.

Answer
Hi, Lydia:
Thanks for the question.
I can't say that this is particularly my area of greatest expertise, however I have gleaned some insights into these sort of "celibacy matters" in Church history over the years.  I would suspect that the particular locality in a particular time in history that the documentary focused on probably had a practice something like you describe... I would personally, however, be a little skepticle to believe that it was a universal practice.  I got the impression when such "researchers" focus on somehting like this, they are trying to emphasize some sort of idea that clerical celibacy became instituted and enforced in the Catholic Church for merely economic and altruistic, wordly reasons: namely, so that property would not go back to a family, but rather could stay in the institutional Church.
At the same time, one cannot deny that there is historical evidence that there were married Priests in the Catholic Church in certain localities, etc.  However, there is also a factor that most "historical experts" seem to gloss over or ignore, and that would be the practice of Apostolic continence among the married clergy, which meant that they lived as "brother and sister" in the Lord, and had come to a point in their intimatacy relationship beyond sexual intercourse.  The Eastern Orthodox Churches that have the practice of married clergy have mitigated the practice of the Apostolic Continence over the centuries to a form of "Levitical Continence" that involves periods of abstinence on certain holy days, and at the time the Priest must minister at the Altar liturgically.  This limited sort of abstinence is different from the complete and total abstinence of Apostolic Continence one discovers in the earliest centuries of the Church.
A closer and unbiased look at history will actually show that modern ideas that wish to look toward, countenance, and entertain the idea of "married clergy" are not looking at the whole actual picture of the situation of the Catholic Church of Apostolic times, and the earliest centuries after that time.  A lot of this secularized ahistorical outlook is rooted in false ideas about human sexuality, intimacy, and marriage... sexual fulfillment acted out for each person is presented and treated as a fundamental right in any form without regard for moral ordering toward mutual conjugal support, intimacy, and unity with a fundamental stability for the WHOLE OF LIFE, with the purpose of forming a family by openness to the procreation of children, etc.  Then there are the false theories that celibacy causes pedophilia and such things; and yet, can't one see that this is just as crazy as saying that marriage is the cause of adultery, sexual impurity, divorce, and sexual dysfunction that is manifested even among those who ostensibly are married?
+ God bless you; and thank you for your question.  Keep studying, and stay rooted in the True Faith of Jesus Christ, taught by His One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church - the Faith delivered once and for all to the Apostles...

Fr. Timothy Johnson