Folia Canonica 4. (2001)
STUDIES - Pablo Gefaell: Clerical Celibacy
CLERICAL CELIBACY 85 priesthood and celibacy”.26 And a heirloom vestige of this original harmony can also be found in the requisite of temporary continence required by can. 13 of Trullo. In the early Church there was a situation regarding married priests that needed a drastic clarification, both in East and in West: it was not completely fitting with the sacredness of marriage to require perpetual continence of them, so in the West the trend was to ordain only celibate candidates, while in the East (at least in the bizantine tradition) they decided to allow the use of matrimony (with temporal restrictions, as we have seen) but not the marriage of clerics. A more extreme decision was taken by the Assirian Church of the East when — acting consciously against the discipline that they previously followed27 - they allowed marriage even after ordination: this would seem an extreme but logical consequence of the permission of using matrimony. Canon Law is not something positivistic, and the Laws of the Church need to be based in a theological reason. One cannot say “the matrimonial impediment of Holy Orders exists because of historical circumstances”. Nay, that is not the way of justifying such a serious law. If clerics are not able to marry it is not only “because it is like this, since the beginning, in East and in West”. That is true, but something must be behind that discipline. And this “something” is the intrinsic relation between priesthood and celibacy. The classical objections to the thesis of the apostolic origin of the celibacy, are, above all: a) the marriage of some apostles, bishops and presbyters, in the primitive Church; b) some representative patristic and disciplinary texts: Ancyra can. 10, Nicea I can. 3, Gangra can. 4, Canons of the Apostles can. 6; c) the episode of Paphnutius. 26 Cholij, Clerical Celibacy (nt. 14), 68. 27 The Council of the Persian Church of the year 410 issued a canon which reaffirmed the discipline of celibacy-continence: “On the subject of subintroductae we will do all that is indicated by the Council [of Nicea]: from now on every bishop, priest, deacon, subdeacon or cleric who lives with women, and not alone in chastity and in holiness, as befitting a minister of the Church (i. e. men [dwelling] separately with other men), will be excluded from ministering in the Church”, J.B. Chabot, Synodicon Orientale, ou recueil des Synodes Nestoriens (Notices et extraits des manuscripts de la Bibliothèque nationale et autres bibliothèques 37), Paris 1930 [translation is mine]. But, after the Persian Church had rejected the Ecumenical Council of Chalcedon (451), patriarch Barsauna, desiring to legitimize his marriage, convoked in 484 a Synod which gave license to every cleric to marry. Even if this Synod was annulled a year later, the discipline was ratified by can. 3 of a Synod held in 486 under Mar Acacius, and also by another Synod held under Mar Babai in 497; Cf. Cochini, Origines apostoliques (nt 14), 312-313; Cholij, Clerical Celibacy (nt. 14), 41; N. Tajadod, Les Porteurs de lumière. Péripéties de l’Église chrétienne de Perse, lUe-VIIe siècle, Paris 1993; J. P. VALOGNES, Vie et mort des Chrétiens d’Orient. Des origines à nos jours, Paris 1994, 411; A. Vine, The Nestorian Churches. A Concise History of Nestorian Christianity in Asia from the Persian Schim to the Modern Assirians, London 1937.
