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The East broke the Apostolic Norm at Trullo, which is well documented.
“In 1969 Christian Cocchini, S.J. completed his doctoral thesis at the Institut Catholique, on the history of clerical celibacy. The president of the examiners who approved his dissertation was Cardinal Danielou. Cocchini’s mastery of the sources from the New Testament to the seventh century is unequalled. This is what he found:
“From the beginnings of the Church, and throughout the Greco-Latin world, a single rule prevailed: Priests were celibate; or else, if they had married before ordination, they and their wives promised to live together thereafter without the use of the marriage. This rule was an Apostolic norm; it was proclaimed and practiced by the Apostles; and that norm in turn was founded upon the example of our Lord Himself.”
No reputable refutation of the Apostolic Norm of priestly celibacy can be substantiated after the illustrious scholarly works cited and quoted, including the following detail from Mother Angelica’s Eternal Word Television Network by the scholarly Fr John Echert of EWTN, Nov 10, 2003:
“Fr Cochini examines the question of when the tradition of priestly celibacy began in the Latin Church, and he is able to trace it back to its origins with the apostles. He examines evidence about the marital status of every known bishop, priest or deacon of the period and gives an exhaustive list of married clerics from apostolic times until the end of the seventh century, a list that includes not only the Western Church, but the East and also the Nestorian, Novatian and Pelagian Church. Then Cochini examines the relevant Church documents for the same period, including council and synod documents, papal letters, ecclesial and even secular legislation as it relates to the problem. He also provides a survey of scholarly literature on the topic. This is the definitive scholarly statement on the discipline of priestly celibacy in the Church East and West.”
Since definitive means “of recognized authority or excellence”, so be it.
For the record, Father Echert is a priest of the Archdiocese of St. Paul-Minneapolis, ordained in 1987. He is a member of the faculty of The Saint Paul Seminary in Minnesota and teaches Sacred Scripture. He is also an adjunct faculty member of the University of St. Thomas. Father Echert has the Licentiate in Sacred Scripture (S.S.L.) degree from the Pontifical Biblical Institute, Rome with additional graduate studies at the Ecole Biblique, Jerusalem.
What Cochini shows through patristic sources and conciliar documentation is that from the beginning of the Church, although married men could be priests, they were required to vow to celibacy before ordination, meaning they intended to live a life of continence. He provides extensive documentation, a bibliography and an index. “This work is of the first importance. It is the result of serious and extensive research. There is nothing even remotely comparable to this work in this whole century.” – Henri Cardinal de Lubac.
Fr Anthony Zimmerman refers to *Apostolic Origins of Priestly Celibacy *“which argues cogently from the sources that the tradition of clerical celibacy began with the apostles. If that is true, then opponents of obligatory celibacy oppose not the pope, but the twelve apostles. The book, written by Christian Cochini, S.J. (translated from French, Ignatius Press, 1990), merited this remarkable encomium from the late Henri Cardinal de Lubac: ‘This work is of the first importance. It is the result of serious and extensive research. There is nothing even remotely comparable to this work in this whole 20th century.’ And Curator of the Vatican Library, Fr. Alfons M. Stickler (later Cardinal) wrote: ‘This authoritative work is fully in accordance with the tradition of the Society of Jesus in the area of high-level scientific apostolate’ (Foreword to Cochini’s book)."
So the celibacy required for priests is from the time of the apostles, the Apostolic Norm, and obligatory, as confirmed by all scholarship, and by the Fathers and Popes.
Fr. George William Rutler, in an article entitled *A Consistent theology of clerical celibacy *(Homiletic & Pastoral Review, Feb. 1989), notes that “Virginity and celibacy were not synonymous in the original ecclesiastical institution of celibacy. Those clerics whose marriages were recognized by the Church, and they were many, were expected to abstain from conjugal union after ordination. The new archeology shows that this was the case for all the Eastern Churches in the earliest centuries, and in a mitigated form later. In the Latin Church this was the clear rule throughout the first millenium, culminating in the laws of the Gregorian reform, especially as found in the First Lateran Council of 1123, and the Second Lateran Council of 1139…The discipline of the Second Lateran Council explicitly forbidding marriage after ordination was not an innovation in the observance of continence. Its prohibition of clerical marriage was only a regulation ensuring that the apostolic norm of abstinence would be better observed.”
[My emphases].
Thus, the Church had celibate clergy only, from the beginning.