Good post. I was under the impression these myths were true until Catholicguy told me about one of the books in a previous thread.While I admire Fr. Fessio's advocacy of obligatory priestly celibacy, IMO, he overplays his hand. Take the following, for example:
The truth is that the Church's obligation of celibacy goes back to the apostles in an *unbroken* line.I have one of the books listed in Fr. Fessio's "message" with me right now -- Celibacy in the Early Church, by Stefan Heid (the original German edition was published in 1997) -- and everything in my post #23 above is based on that book. Here's an extended excerpt from Chapter 1:
The broad outline of the last fifty years of celibacy scholarship shows that something has occurred that not infrequently causes misunderstandings in historical research: a one-sided formulation of the question has produced one-sided answers. Scholars took the present discipline of celibacy in the Roman Catholic Church as their point of departure and searched for a pattern of clerics in the unmarried state in the first centuries. This, however, they did not find -- at any rate, not for all clerics. The question that they should have asked is whether the early Church perhaps knew a different discipline of continence. This was the approach of the older German scholarship in the nineteenth century. But that was though to have been refuted scientifically, and so these contributions were consigned to oblivion.The word "exclusively" emphasized above is significant. Heid is not saying that the Church did not practice clerical celibacy prior to Trent, but that the exlusively celibate diocesan priesthood has only been around for about 450 years, or about one-quarter of the Church's history. (Indeed, as I'm sure you're aware, there are presently former Anglican priests who are now married Catholic priests in the Roman rite, as well as Eastern-rite married Catholic priests who are in communion with Rome). Accordingly, one should exercise restraint in trying to read the tridentine model of clerical celibacy back to the apostolic age.Actually, if this deficit has not become evident already, it ought to when on looks at the Church's legislation. That is to say, according to canon law an exclusively unmarried clergy, as we know it today, existed at all only after the Council of Trent (1521-1545). Even the above-mentioned Second Lateran Council, which is repeatedly cited as the beginning of the history of celibacy, did not intend to exclude married men from holy orders; it merely declared marriages contracted after the reception of orders to be invalide (canon 7). [Emphasis added.]