As I understand it, Anglican priests can marry, as can other members of the Anglican clergy (I believe). Since the Anglican Church formed when King Henry VIII split with the Roman Catholic Church in order to get a divorce I assume that was when this particular change in church policy put in place.
Why were Anglican priests allowed to marry when they hadn’t been allowed to marry prior to the split? Were Catholic priests allowed to marry in the 1500’s?
Not in the Latin church (from which Anglicanism broke), no.
But in fact your assumption (the Anglican church allows clergy to marry because Henry VIII wanted a divorce) is wrong. Henry was violently opposed to clerical marriage. His own Archbishop of Canterbury, was married, but this had to be kept secret from Henry. His wife and children had to live discreetly, mostly separately from him, and his marriage was not publicly acknowledged until after Henry died.
The ban on clerical marriage in the Church of England was not dropped until the reign of Edward VI, when Edward and his principal advisers moved the English church in a distinctively Protestant direction. Henry had himself appointed head of the English church but, apart from the dissolution of the monasteries, the church under Henry continued to be largely Catholic in doctrine and practice. His successors then used their position to cause the church to oscillate first towards Protestantism (Edward VI) and then towards Catholicism (Mary) before it arrived at the the via media of Anglicanism under Elizabeth I.
Also, many Anglicans would dispute the statement that the Anglican Church was formed by Henry VIII. Rather, it was re-formed, with considerable continuity in clergy and doctrine. The main sticking point was the authority of the pope over the existing church in England, not the creation of a new church.
Yup. What Henry and his successors did was to reform the English church (meaning, the English branch of the Catholic church). The eventual outcome was a schism, with an English Catholic church and an English Anglican church, both of which can reasonably and meaningfully see themselves as emerging from and having a continuity of identity with the English church that Henry set about reforming.
Even Elizabeth, a Protestant herself, disapproved of married clergy, and her first Archbishop of Canterbury’s wife in particular. On visiting them at the Archbishop’s London palace, she’s supposed to have asked his wife how to address her, “For Madam I may not call you, mistress I should be ashamed to call you”.
And indeed the Anglicans still identify themselves as a Catholic Church in the Thirty-Nine Articles (Catholic as being Universal and descending from the Apostles). They’re simply not a Roman Catholic church.
Exactly…lots of gilt, not much guilt!
and also in the three creeds: Apostles’, Nicene and Athanasian.
The other day it was asked here why the catholics left Elizabeth I in, if Mary had reverted the country to being catholic ? Today we have it that Henry VIII was final and no further changes occurred.
Its inbetween !. The catholics were neither stripped totally by Henry VIII, They were not totally put back in place fully by Mary, Elizabeth made a deal with the Pope himself .
Decades later, Elizabeth then finds she is safe and secure as monarch and offends the pope by crushing the Mary Queen of Scots revolt and then executing MQS. So the pope excommunicates her. However, Rome and the HRE ally with England against Spain, as Spain had attempted to turn HRE into a “spanish empire”.
Therefore, CoE had no need to follow papist rules for the while … Now have a look at the CoE… Monarch as HEAD. So if the HEAD is HIGHER than a priest, then they should be more godlike than priests… so the CoE thing was clearly to be consistent, the monarch wanted to have children, and so they had to say that priests could marry too!
Anyway, what happened to the priests marrying rule with James I and Charles I ?
The requirement for clerical celibacy was abolished in the Church of England in 1549 under Edward VI, and was never reinstated, either under Mary or under Elizabeth, though neither in fact approved of clerical marriage. It had nothing to do with the monarch wanting to have children, or with political machinations during the reign of Elizabeth.
The Roman part in the name of the RCC refers to the kind of rite, not to Papal authority.
Am I right, that obligatory clerical celibacy was / is a (very) relatively new thing in the Latin / Roman Catholic Church – became the rule somewhere around the 11th / 12 century? And that it was more than anything else, an “anti-graft” measure: hitherto, to an extent often seen as excessive and scandalous, the clergy had tended to – in this-worldly things – favour and prefer their own offspring?
I think you’re right about its 11th century adoption. Whether the reasoning behind it was as you say, or all tied up with the notion of monastic discipline and so on, I don’t know. I do remember being given a number of early mediaeval reports of Bishop’s Visitations in school as part of our Latin course, and they were full of juicy details of priests’ misbehaviour in the days before celibacy became the rule.
And its relatively recent introduction gave Luther (and I think some wouldbe reformers before him) the opportunity to portray the rule as yet another deformation from “pure” Christianity (not forgetting St Paul’s “it is better to marry than burn”).
The Anglican priesthood continued marrying and having rather large amounts of children, whilst the papist priesthood — who were technically banned as nonconformists, but rarely persecuted too badly except when they were trying to blow people up — did not.
All the other prottie sects allowed married ministers.
Ah, well: “Christians, and Godly people, are not perfect, only forgiven,” etc. And the Old Testament especially, is full of accounts of characters not obeying the rule of “sex with your lawfully wedded spouse only”…
It didn’t become a general rule until the 11th century, but it’s much older than that. Celibacy has always been a feature of monastic life - monks live in community, not in matrimony - and monasticism as a model of priesthood was in high regard from the fourth century onwards. So priests were discouraged from marrying, there were various local and provincial rules forbidding or restricting marriage, married priests were unlikely to advance to bishoprics, etc. Plus, it was always the rule (n the Greek church as well as in the Latin) that a man could not marry after being ordained - to be a married priest you had to marry first, and then become ordained. All of these factors combined to produce a Latin clerical class which was largely celibate, but in which there was a place for married priests. It didn’t become entirely celibate until the eleventh century.
One of the concerns expressed at the time the general rule was introduced was that priests with children would use their position to favour their children - not by alienating church assets to their children, which most priests weren’t in a position to do, but by securing church appointments and church careers for their children. But, taking the long view, this was a comparatively minor factor in the move to celibacy. After all, the various Protestant churches have all survived the corrupting possiblities of allowing priests to have children, as have the Orthodox and Greek Catholic churches, as did the Latin church for the first thousand years or so. It had more to do with a high regard for the monastic model of priestly life, I suspect.
Thanks – wasn’t aware that the trend started so early; but I am pretty highly ignorant about the approx. first millennium of Christianity.
I’d been aware of this thing in the Eastern Orthodox church: the ordinary parish clergy may marry, in fact it’s almost expected – but the church’s “upper ranks” must be monastic vowed-to-celibacy types. I’d read of – with “you have to marry before ordination” – on the Eastern Orthodox scene, rather urgent dating-and-pairing-off scrambles on the part of clerical students shortly to be ordained: in which circumstances, strong healthy girls particularly sought: with “no marriage after ordination” – if a priest’s wife dies before him, he may not remarry.
I’ve heard and read it suggested, that the imposition of celibacy did not help all that much, re the favouring of children: celibate priests have tended often to similarly pull strings and facilitate ways-through, for the offspring of their married lay-person siblings – I gather that “nepotism” is derived from the Greek nepos = nephew – originally alluding particularly, to priests using their office to benefit their nephews. It would seem overall, that despite high ideals on the part of those at the top making the rules: one way or another, “human nature will out”. From the point of view of the earnestly pious – likely the least-bad procedure is, after all, to have the clergy be under exactly the same rules re marrying-or-not, as the laity: let those who would choose to be celibate in whatever shape or form, voluntarily go ahead.
Except when it’s the Bishop of Rome asserting dominance over other churches. Then it’s more than just a particular rite.
Thanks everyone. Ignorance Fought.
Yes. In fact, Henry still considered himself a faithful Catholic, to the point where he (and subsequent British monarchs, up to and including the current monarch) retained the title “Defender of the Faith,” granted to him by Pope Leo X (in gratitude for a book Henry wrote defending Catholic doctrine against the new ideas of the Reformation)