Sex and the Clergy
Poets and preachers continued to insist on the well-established literary comÂmonplace that few clerics actually remained celibate, although for centuries they had been legally bound to the discipline.
The Dominican preacher, John Bromyard, roundly declared that the unchastity of priests was a scandal and a cause of ruin, while John Gower described as typical the lecherous priest who prowled through his parish like a wolf around a sheepfold, searching out attracÂtive young women whom he might seduce:So the lecherous parson,
With his lustful gaze,
Teaches simple Iayfolk
Foul abandons ways.[1994]
These complaints were not simply the vaporings of superheated rhetoric. The documentary evidence of visitations, petitions to the pope, and court records bears out the impression that clerical incontinence was an open scandal in many parts of Western Christendom.[1995] Poets and preachers may have exagÂgerated the seriousness of the problem for rhetorical effect, but reforming poÂlemicists did not have to search diligently to discover ample evidence that the Catholic clergy often felt that although celibacy might require them not to marry, it did not oblige them to renounce sex. The English reformer, Robert Barnes (1495-1540) reported that a London notary told him of having written a thousand dispensations during his career to allow the sons of priests to be orÂdained and estimated that less than a third of the English clergy observed the celibacy rule.[1996]
Official opposition to clerical marriage and concubinage remained essentially unchanged through the pre-Reformation period. The Council of Basel in 1435 reiterated the longstanding Condemnnation of clerical concubinage in ringing terms. Clerics who retained their concubines and refused to renounce them within two months of the publication of the Council’s decree were to be deÂprived of their benefices, suspended from clerical status, and to lose any titles, dignities, or offices they might hold.
Local synods were directed to adopt this decree and to enforce its provisions. A good many of them did the one and atÂtempted the other. At Reims, Camin, Avignon, Seville, Florence, Tournai, and Augsburg, bishops and their clergy re-enacted the Basel decree and added fines and other punishments of their own to those decreed by the general council.[1997] It might not be accurate to say that all this effort had no effect, but its results were certainly modest. The energies of local reformers, at any rate, seem to have been directed primarily at avoiding scandal and only secondarily at conÂtrolling clerical carnality. By the end of the fifteenth century many Churchmen had concluded that further attempts to enforce celibacy were futile: the best they could do was to confine the clergy’s sexual activities within tolerable limits.[1998]Rulers, too, were concerned about the enforcement of clerical celibacy. NicÂolaus Boerius (1469-1539) declared that temporal authorities had the right to penalize clerics who lived in open and notorious concubinage, and at least a few towns enacted statutes for this purpose. How effectively they were enforced, however, remains questionable. No evidence suggests that secular courts had greater success in this matter than did their ecclesiastical counterparts.[1999]
Sixteenth-century reformers would see the failure to enforce celibacy as proof of the policy’s theological unsoundness and would argue that God had sanctioned marriage precisely to provide a remedy for sexual temptations and an outlet for sexual passions, from neither of which the clergy were immune. Every major figure of the Reformation rejected celibacy as a mistaken and ill- conceived policy.[2000]
Those criticisms were nothing new: arguments that celibacy ought to be abolished had been advanced in every generation since the policy was adopted by earlier Church reformers in the eleventh century. The criticisms continued unabated through the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.
The agenda of the Council of Constance contained a proposal that clerical marriage be permitted, and in 1440, at the Council of Basel, the Polish physician and humanist, Jan de Ludzisko, argued that clerical celibacy should be abandoned in theory because it had long since been disregarded in practice, a position supported by Johann Scheie, Bishop of Liibeck.[2001] Their arguments may have owed some of their substance to the Lamentacio humane nature adversus Nicenam COnstitueionem of Guillaume Saignet (ca. 1364 ~ 1369-1444), who argued that clerical celibacy was unnatural and called for its rejection.A generation earlier, however, St. Birgitta of Sweden (1303-73) had been shocked to encounter an archbishop who declared that if he were pope he would allow all clerics, including priests, to marry and who claimed that this would be more acceptable to God than having clerics who lived sexually dissolute lives, as most of them currently did. Birgitta was indignant and dismayed:
Know this [she replied to the archbishop], that if any pope were to give priests permission to contract carnal marriage, God would conÂdemn him with a spiritual penalty similar to that meted out to men who have committed heinous offenses, for by secular law they should pluck out his eyes, cut off his tongue and lips, his nose and ears, chop off his hands and feet, and let all the blood drain out of his body so that he becomes cold. And then his exsanguinated corpse should be thrown to the dogs and other wild beasts that they may devour it. This is the sort of thing that will happen—spiritually, of course—to that pope who grants such a license to priests for conÂtracting marriage against the foreordained will of God.[2002]
Multiple Marriages
Fourteenth- and fifteenth-century writers continued to advocate the time- honored cures that had proved so ineffective in the past. But none of the conÂventional remedies worked.[2003] Nor was a cleric who felt inclined to take a conÂcubine likely to be dissuaded when he learned that if he murdered his mistress’s husband he would automatically forfeit his clerical privileges.[2004] “One should not force a cleric to swear that he will not go back to his concubine,” concluded Giovanni Nevizzani, “for because of human frailty he will not keep his word.
”[2005] Authorities may not have been altogether keen to see clerical celibacy actually enforced, for they might well have feared that, as an anonymous critic threatÂened, effective enforcement would simply result in an exodus of priests from their ministry.[2006]By the fifteenth century, Church authorities had largely abandoned atÂtempts to penalize women who became sexually involved with clerics. LegislaÂtion about clerical sexuality during this period was silent on the subject and Giovanni Bossi considered earlier penal provisions aimed at punishing conÂcubines to be a dead letter in his day.[2007]