A Married Parish Priesthood With Celibate Bishops

The discipline that lets an Eastern parish priest marry and keeps its bishops celibate was not always settled practice; it was fixed by canon in a single council. The Quinisext Council, held at Constantinople in 692 and known in the East as the Council in Trullo, gathered to complete the disciplinary work the fifth and sixth ecumenical councils had left undone. Its sixth canon confirmed that a man already married when he was ordained deacon, priest or subdeacon could remain married and continue living with his wife; what it forbade was marrying after ordination, and a widowed priest remarrying. The same council, in canons twelve and forty eight, restated an older rule from the age of Justinian that a bishop must be unmarried and, in practice, drawn from the monasteries. The West took a different road. Mandatory celibacy for the whole priesthood, not only the episcopate, hardened into universal law only later, at the Second Lateran Council of 1139, well after Trullo had already settled the Eastern discipline in the opposite direction. Rome and Constantinople were formally still one church when the two paths diverged, so the split in practice predates the schism between them and was never itself the cause of it.

The discipline of a married parish clergy did not stay behind when some Eastern churches entered communion with Rome. The Eastern Catholic churches, in union with the pope while keeping their own liturgy, canon law and married priesthood, are the clearest proof that the practice was never itself the issue dividing East from West. For a large part of the twentieth century, though, that unity broke down on one narrow point. In 1929 the Vatican's decree Cum Data Fuerit barred Ruthenian Greek Catholic priests from exercising ministry as married men in North America, at the urging of Latin bishops who judged a married clergy a source of confusion among their own faithful. The order applied only outside the old country and it cost the church dearly: by some estimates as many as two hundred thousand Ruthenian faithful in the United States left for Orthodoxy rather than accept it, taking parishes and property with them into schism. The restriction stood, on and off, for decades before Rome finally lifted it, restoring to Eastern Catholic bishops around the world the standing authority to ordain married men that their discipline had always claimed. Celibate bishops drawn from the monastic ranks remain the rule on both sides of the communion; it is only the parish priesthood the two churches were ever divided on.