Expert: Fr. Michael - 3/5/2005

Question
Hello Fr. Moderator!

Some time ago i asked the priest if this would be better, according to him, to abolish celibacy.
He said that it's better to live in chastity.
So i started to wonder, if priests and nuns live in chastity because they've got no husbands and wives,they don't make love, what about those who do these things. Do the others live in "dirt" because they get married make love and have children? Are these people any worse because they don't live in chastity but as i called it in "dirt".
God blessed them; and God said to them, "Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth, and subdue it; and rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and over every living thing that moves on the earth."
Thank You!


Answer
       In the NEW Covenant, celibacy is a more honorable state than marriage.  This is clear from both Sacred Scripture and Sacred Tradition.

       Clerical celibacy has a biblical basis in the evangelical counsel of Our Lord as relayed in St. Matthew's Gospel (19:12), also taken up by St. Paul in his First Epistle to the Corinthians (7:8-9, 25-26, and especially
32-35), and confirmed by St. John in the Apocalypse (14:4-5).  It is clear that once the Apostles received the call, they did not lead a married life.

       The tradition of clerical celibacy was solemnly proclaimed by the Council of Nicaea, the First Ecumenical Council, in 325.  Canon No. 3, unanimously approved by the Fathers, admitted of no exceptions whatsoever.  The Council considered that the prohibition imposed thereby on
all bishops, priests, and deacons against having a wife absolute.  All subsequent councils that have addressed the subject have renewed this interdiction.

       Not only would it be a violation of Sacred Tradition to blot out a custom decreed for 2,000 years to be absolutely obligatory, but also one must recognize that clerical celibacy is to be seen not merely as of
ecclesiastical institution, but part of what is more broadly known in Catholic moral theology as "divine positive law," initiated by Christ and His Apostles.  That is, it is not merely disciplinary in nature.

       The Council of Carthage in 390 stated that celibacy of is Apostolic origin.

       St. Epiphanius of Salamis (ca. 315-403):  "It is the Apostles themselves who decreed this law."

       St. Jerome (ca. 342-420):  "Priests and deacons must be either virgins or widowers before being ordained, or at least observe perpetual continence after their ordination....  If married men find this difficult to endure, they should not turn against me, but rather against
Holy Writ and the entire ecclesiastical order."

       Pope St. Innocent I (401-417):  "This is not a matter of imposing upon the clergy new and arbitrary obligations, but rather of reminding them of those which the tradition of the Apostles and the Fathers has
transmitted to us."

       St. Peter Damian (1007-1072) wrote:  "No one can be ignorant of the fact that all the Fathers of the Catholic Church unanimously imposed the inviolable rule of continence on clerics in major orders."

       There is a reason for this Tradition.  The cleric in major orders, by virtue of his ordination, contracts a marriage with the Church, and he cannot be a bigamist.  St. Jerome in his treatise "Adversus Jovinianum," bases clerical celibacy on the virginity of Christ.

       The universal law of clerical celibacy confirmed by the Council of Nicaea applied, and still applies, to the Eastern Church as well as the Western.  It is noteworthy that at that Council, the Easterns (Greeks) made up the overwhelming majority.  Previously, the Council of Neo-
Caesarea (314) had reminded all Eastern clerics in major orders of the inviolability of this law under pain of deposition.

       The Eastern Church began at a late date to violate its own law of celibacy.  The Quinisext Council of 692, which St. Bede the Venerable (673-735) called "a reprobate synod," breached the Apostolic Tradition concerning the celibacy of clerics by declaring that "all clerics except
bishops may continue in wedlock."  The popes refused to endorse the conclusions of the Council in the mater of celibacy, and the Eastern Church planted the seeds of its schism.

       The German scholar, Stefan Heid, in his book, Celibacy in the Early Church, demonstrates that continence-celibacy after ordination to the priesthood was the absolute norm from the start -- even for the separated married ordinand -- a triumph of grace over nature, so to speak.  The Eastern practice we now see was a mitigation of the rule, not, as the Modernists like to claim, the original practice from which the Roman Catholic Church diverged.