Sex and the Clergy in Gratian’s Decretum

Since the Church required clerics in major orders to observe celibacy, twelfth­century writers warned repeatedly that they must be wary of dealing with women and ought to shun their company so far as possible.

With this sentiment Gratian was in complete agreement and his Decretum reiterated numerous warnings that clerics must refrain from forming relation­ships of any kind with women, lest they expose themselves to sexual temptation and, even worse, succumb to it.¹³¹ Not only should they avoid female company, including that of their own relatives, but they must decline even to talk about them, much less discuss their physical attributes and attractions.¹³²

Gratian applauded the Church reform movement’s views on celibacy: he col­lected in the Decretum a battery of authoritative prohibitions of clerical mar­riage and concubinage, including the celibacy decree of the Second Lateran Council (1139), and warned that clerics in holy orders who kept wives or con­cubines were subject to dismissal from their posts and degradation from clerical rank.¹³³ He likewise repeated the warning of the Roman Synod of 1063 that had forbidden the laity to attend Mass or other services conducted by married or Concubinary priests, together with Gregory VII s condemnation of bishops who failed to enforce the celibacy rule.¹³¹ Gratian included in his work a virtual handbook of decrees and decisions supporting the reformers’ views on the celi­bacy issue, including the penalty of enslavement for the wives, mistresses, and children of clerics in sacred orders.¹³⁵

'^2sD.

¹²⁹D. 30 c. 6.

¹³⁰St. BernardofClairvaux, Sermones in Cantica canticorum 65.2.4, ed. JeanLeclercq et al., vols. 1-2 in Bernard’s Opera (Bome: Editiones Cistercienses, 1957- ; in progress) 2:175; translation from Caroline Walker Bynum, Jesus as Mother: Studies in the Spiritu­ality of the High Middle Ages (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1982), p. 145. The passage is reminiscent of St. Jerome, Epist. 22.14, in CSEL 54:162.

¹³¹D. 32 C. 16, 18; D. 34 C. 1; D. 81 C. 20-21.

¹³²D. 32 c. 17 (palea); Joris Backeljauw, “De uxoris statu sociali in iure canonico medii aevi,” Divus Thomas 89 (1968) 272.

¹³³D. 27 c. 8; D. 28 c. 2 and c. 9; D. 32 c. 10, 11, 16; D. 33 pr. and c. 1; D. 82 c. 2.

¹³⁴D. 32 c. 6, c. 10; D. 83 c. 1.

¹³⁵D. 81 c. 30; C. 15 q. 8 c. 3. At D. 56 d.p.c. 13 Gratian remarked that the law treated the children of priests more harshly than it did adulterers.

Gratian also stressed the point that the clergy were forbidden to have casual sexual affairs.^[1016] Although fornication may have been a common consequence of enforced celibacy, Gratian clearly believed that even a single instance of sexual transgression by clerics demanded severe punishment.^[1017] Violation of the obli­gation to celibacy was more serious for a cleric than adultery was for a layman, he thought, and required correspondingly more severe punishment.^[1018] True, the penalties prescribed by Gratian’s authorities for clerics guilty of fornication or adultery were less severe than those visited on married or Coneubinary priests, but the differences were slight. The cleric convicted of a transient sex­ual offense lost his ecclesiastical office and could expect confinement in a mon­astery for the remainder of his life.^[1019] The offender did not, however, suffer degradation from holy orders, which was prescribed for those involved in long­term relationships.

Gratian saw no bar, however, to the ordination of men who had been married or who had kept a concubine prior to assuming holy orders, provided that be­fore they were ordained their wives or concubines had died or agreed to a sepa­ration.^[1021] Gratians work included an important exception to the rule that previ­ously married men could be ordained: a man who had married twice, or who had married a widow or a divorcee, or whose wife had committed adultery was deemed guilty of constructive bigamy and hence was barred from ordination.^[1022] Digamy, or ecclesiastical bigamy, as Gratian called it, consisted in having had sex with more than one woman or in having relations with a woman who had slept with another man. It made no difference whether the relationship oc­curred in a solemnized and valid marriage or not, nor did it matter which party had participated in the affair. The physical act of intercourse with a woman who had known another man or with more than one woman was a bar to clerical orders, as Gratian read the law.

Constructive bigamy was not a crime or an offense; but it gave rise to an irregularity, much like the irregularity incurred, for example, in having been born to an unwed mother. The affected person might not even know the cause of his irregularity. Gratian did not explicitly link the ban on the ordination of men tainted by constructive bigamy to notions of ritual purity, but this idea probably underlay the sources that he cited. Gratian’s commentators would soon

Procedure and Evidence

point out the difficulty in accounting otherwise for this policy.^[1023] In any event, Gratian left open the possibility that candidates for ordination who had incurred the irregularity of constructive bigamy might receive papal dispensation from the strict application of the law, particularly if a shortage of clergymen seemed to require such a concession.^[1024]