page_title: Clerical marriage
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: Clerical marriage / History
context_page_description: Clerical marriage is a term used to describe the practice of allowing Christian clergy to marry. This practice is distinct from allowing married persons to become clergy. Clerical marriage is admitted among Protestants, including both Anglicans and Lutherans.
  Many Eastern Churches, while allowing married men to be ordained, do not allow clerical marriage after ordination: their parish priests are often married, but must marry before being ordained to the priesthood. The Catholic Church also forbids clerical marriage, but generally follows a practice of clerical celibacy, requiring candidates for ordination to be unmarried or widowed. However, this public policy in the Catholic Church has not always been enforced in private.
context_section_description: There is no dispute that at least some of the apostles were married or had been married: a mother-in-law of Peter is mentioned in the account in Matthew 8:14, Mark 1:29-34, Luke 4:38-41 of the beginning of Jesus' ministry. 1 Timothy 3:2 says: "an overseer (Greek ἐπίσκοπος) must be ... the husband of one wife". This has been interpreted in various ways, including that the overseer was not allowed to remarry even if his wife died.
  Evidence for the view that continence was expected of clergy in the early Church is given by the Protestant historian Philip Schaff, who points out that all marriages contracted by clerics in Holy Orders were declared null and void in 530 by Emperor Justinian I, who also declared the children of such marriages illegitimate.
  Schaff also quotes the account that "In the Fifth and Sixth Centuries the law of the celibate was observed by all the Churches of the West, thanks to the Councils and to the Popes. In the Seventh and down to the end of the Tenth Century, as a matter of fact the law of celibacy was little observed in a great part of the Western Church, but as a matter of law the Roman Pontiffs and the Councils were constant in their proclamation of its obligation." This report is confirmed by others too. "Despite six hundred years of decrees, canons, and increasingly harsh penalties, the Latin clergy still did, more or less illegally, what their Greek counterparts were encouraged to do by law—they lived with their wives and raised families. In practice, ordination was not an impediment to marriage; therefore some priests did marry even after ordination."  "The tenth century is claimed to be the high point of clerical marriage in the Latin communion. Most rural priests were married and many urban clergy and bishops had wives and children." Then at the Second Lateran Council of 1139 the Roman Church declared that Holy Orders were not merely a prohibitive but a diriment canonical impediment to marriage, therefore making a marriage by priests invalid and not merely forbidden.
  The great East–West Schism between the Church of Rome and the four Apostolic sees of the Orthodox Communion (Constantinople, Alexandria Egypt, Antioch Syria, and Jerusalem) took place in the year 1054. As stated above, the majority of Roman Church Priests at that time were married. Therefore, when some churches that followed western rites and traditions were brought back into communion with the Orthodox Churches beginning in the 20th century, their right to have married clergy, provided they were married before ordination, was restored.
  The practice of clerical marriage was initiated in the West by the followers of Martin Luther, who himself, a former priest and monk, married Katharina von Bora, a former nun, in 1525. It has not been introduced in the East. In the Church of England, however, the Catholic tradition of clerical celibacy continued after the Break with Rome. Under King Henry VIII, the 6 Articles prohibited the marriage of clergy and this continued until the passage under Edward VI of the Clergy Marriage Act 1548, opening the way for Anglican priests to marry.
caption: Marriage reform: cleric Martin Luther married Katharina von Bora in 1525
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