Clerical celibacy

A set of related satirical poems, probably written in the early thirteenth century, described an imaginary church council of English priests reacting to the news that they must henceforth be celibate. In this fictional universe the council erupted in outrage as priest after priest stood to denounce the new papal policy. Not surprisingly, the protests of many focused on sex, with one speaker, for instance, indignantly protesting that virile English clerics should be able to sleep with women, not livestock. However, other protests were focused on family. Some speakers appealed to the desire for children, and others noted their attachment to their consorts, such as one who exclaimed: “This is a useless measure, frivolous and vain; he who does not love his companion is not sane!” The poems were created for comical effect, but a little over a century earlier English priests had in fact faced, for the first time, a nationwide, systematic attempt to enforce clerical celibacy. Undoubtedly a major part of the ensuing uproar was about sex, but in reality as in fiction it was also about family.

Rules demanding celibacy first appeared at church councils in the late Roman period but were only sporadically enforced in Western Europe through the early Middle Ages and never had more than a limited impact in what would become the Eastern Orthodox Church. In Anglo-Saxon England moralists sometimes preached against clerical marriage and both king and church occasionally issued prohibitions against it, but to little apparent effect. Indeed, one scribe erased a ban on clerical marriage from a manuscript and wrote instead, “it is right that a cleric (or priest) love a decent woman and bed her.” In the eleventh century, however, a reinvigorated papacy began a sustained drive to enforce clerical celibacy throughout Catholic Europe for clerics of the ranks of priest, deacon, or subdeacon. This effort provoked great controversy, but papal policy prevailed, and over the next couple of centuries increasingly made clerical celibacy the norm.

In England, it was Anselm, the second archbishop of Canterbury appointed after the Norman Conquest, who made the first attempt to systematically impose clerical celibacy in 1102. Anselm’s efforts created a huge challenge to the status quo, for many, perhaps most English priests were married in 1102 and the priesthood was often a hereditary profession. Indeed, Anselm and Pope Paschal II agreed not to attempt in the short term to enforce one part of the program of celibacy, the disbarment of sons of priests from the priesthood, because that would have decimated the ranks of the English clergy. Anselm, moreover, found himself trying to figure out how to allow priests to take care of their former wives, and priests who obediently separated from their wives were apparently sometimes threatened by their angry in-laws. Not surprisingly, Anselm’s efforts were deeply unpopular and faced widespread opposition.

Priests then and in subsequent generations (for Anselm’s efforts had only limited success in the short run) were often deeply attached to their families. A miracle story recorded after Thomas Becket’s death in 1170 describes a grieving priest getting confirmation from the recent martyr that his concubine, who had done good works before her death, had gone to heaven. Other miracle stories show priests and their companions lamenting the illness, misfortune, or death of a child and seeking miraculous aid. It took a long time to fully convince everyone that priestly families were ipso facto immoral. Even late in the twelfth century, the monastic writer John of Ford, in a saint’s life of the hermit Wulfric of Haselbury, could depict the family of a parish priest, Brictric, as perfectly pious, with Brictric’s wife making ecclesiastical vestments and his son and eventual successor as priest, Osbern, serving at mass as a minor cleric. John also depicted a former concubine of another priest as a saintly woman noted for her piety. Proponents of clerical celibacy had a difficult challenge not only in enforcing the rules but in convincing people that they ought to be enforced in the first place.

Inevitably, priests’ families suffered heavily from the drive for celibacy. The sons of priests lost the chance to routinely follow in their father’s professional footsteps, as most medieval men did. After priestly marriage was legally eliminated, sons and daughters both were automatically illegitimate, bringing severe legal disadvantages. However, it was the female companions of priests who suffered most. Partly this was because one of the key motives behind clerical celibacy was the belief that sexual contact with women polluted priests who then physically touched God by touching the sacrament as they performed the Eucharist. Moralists constantly preached that this was irreligious, even blasphemous, and disgusting. However, the female partners of priests also suffered because preachers constantly denigrated them as whores and used misogynistic stereotypes to try to convince priests that they should avoid taking partners. Thus preachers repeatedly attacked priests for wasting money on adorning their “whores” or for arising from having sex with their “whores” to go perform the Eucharist. It is hard to know the precise position of priests’ wives in the eleventh century but it is quite likely that most were perfectly respectable. Nonetheless, the attacks of reformers had a powerful impact. In 1137 King Stephen decided to do his part to encourage clerical celibacy, and raise money in the process, by rounding up clerical concubines and holding them in the Tower of London for ransom. Some of these were probably partners of canons of St Paul’s cathedral, who were rich and powerful men, but even so, while in the tower they were subject to physical mockery and abuse. Increasingly, it was impossible to be both the partner of a priest and a respectable member of society.

Many of the proponents of clerical celibacy were fiercely idealistic in their efforts to prevent what they saw as widespread pollution of the Eucharist, to remove the costs of families from the financial burdens of churches, to make the priesthood more distinctive from the laity, and simply to enforce church law. As the historian Christopher Brooke suggested nearly six decades ago, however, and as subsequent research has clearly demonstrated, one result of their efforts was a social revolution that resulted in broken homes and personal tragedies.

Headline image: 12th Century painters, from the Web Gallery of Art. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.