Greatest Mass Divorce

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It’s been said that the greatest mass divorce in history was when the Catholic Church declared that priests must be celibate, and they actually permitted that all of their priests be divorced! Is this true? If so, how can Christ’s Church do such a thing?
 
Yes the Church declared that priests had to be celibate. Celibate can mean no sex, by the way, not always no marriage, technically you can be married and celibate as Joseph and Mary were.

As far as I know, no divorces were given or required for those priests who were married at the time the decree came out. What evidence (primary documents - divorce decrees or the like) does your anonymous source have that divorces were given? Possibly they were required to live apart from their wives or something, which is entirely different to a divorce.

And who the heck is this anonymous source of yours? I’ve never heard the like said before, so it’s not (apparently) a widely-held opinion.

The church has always been very accommodating with all such changes, as when the new form of the Mass came out in the 1970s - plenty of priests who were attached to the old form were given permission to keep saying it and didn’t have to switch to the new form, St Padre Pio being one of those. Such is the typical attitude in any case of a major change, and such would’ve been the attitude with married priests as well.
 
“It’s been said”…by whom? Not only have I never heard anything like that, but it sounds like a made-up story to me. What someone imagines must have happened when some change took place in the Church doesn’t need to have actually happened. There is no need to prove it never happened. The burden of proof is on the person with the activated imagination.
 
EasterJoy said:
"It’s been said"…by whom? Not only have I never heard anything like that, but it sounds like a made-up story to me. What someone imagines must have happened when some change took place in the Church doesn’t need to have actually happened. There is no need to prove it never happened.** The burden of proof is on the person with the activated imagination.**
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waiting…
 
The source is a Jack Chick comic book called “Smokescreens”.
 
You can be married as a priest however must be married before you becoem a priest I kn ow a number of them that are married and even have childrren and it is Roman Catholic priests.
 
JustaServant said:
The source is a Jack Chick comic book called “Smokescreens”.
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Nah. It was some website. I wouldn’t even dare look in a Chick comic lol. He thinks the Vatican has a computer full of Protestant names for further persecution! :eek:
 
TristanCross said:
Nah. It was some website. I wouldn’t even dare look in a Chick comic lol. He thinks the Vatican has a computer full of Protestant names for further persecution! :eek:
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May I ask why you continue to make baseless accusations against the Catholic Church and then just shrug them off when you are shown to be in complete error? Does this help your spiritual growth?
 
TristanCross said:
Nah. It was some website. I wouldn’t even dare look in a Chick comic lol. He thinks the Vatican has a computer full of Protestant names for further persecution! :eek:
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Which website? Why on earth would you even contemplate believing what some anonymous, uncredentialled website has to say about anything, let alone Catholicism?
 
Technically speaking, it was a mass annulment, as the marriages were declared to be null from the start. The wives/concubines and the children of the priests were put into slavery as a result.
 
Just_Lurking said:
Technically speaking, it was a mass annulment, as the marriages were declared to be null from the start. The wives/concubines and the children of the priests were put into slavery as a result.
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And your source for this information? The marriages could only possibly be invalid and capable of annulment if they were entered into AFTER the Papal decree that priests needed to be celibate.

And there’s no such thing as a ‘technical’ annulment. A marriage is either invalid (and thus capable of annulment) from its origin or it isn’t. It can’t retroactively invalidated if it was valid at the time it was entered into, not by Papal decree or in any other way.

What DID happen is that there were some priests who refused to accept the papal decree on celibacy, and thus AFTER it was promulgated some went ahead and married, in direct contravention of Church law. That’s the possible explanation.

And in such a case the Pope was well within his rights to annul those marriages - they were indeed invalid from their origin.

You wouldn’t call someone caught doing a speed of 80 mph in a 50 zone guilty on a mere technicality, even if a day or a week before that road had had a speed limit of 80. Changes in the law don’t deserve the derogatory label ‘technicalities’.
 
Catholic Encyclopedia (see here):

The incidents of the long final campaign, which began indeed even before the time of Pope St. Leo IX and lasted down to the First Council of Lateran in 1123, are too complicated to be detailed here. We may note, however that the attack was conducted along two distinct lines ofaction. In the first place, disabilities of all kinds were enacted and as far as possible enforced against the wives and children of ecclesiastics. Their offspring were declared to be of servile condition, debarred from sacred orders, and, in particular, incapable of succeeding to their fathers’ benefices. The earliest decree in which the children were declared to be slaves, the property of the Church, and never to be enfranchised, seems to have been a canon of the Synod of Pavia in 1018. Similar penalties were promulgated later on against the wives and concubines (see the Synod of Melfi, 1189, can. xii), who by the very fact of their unlawful connection with a subdeacon or clerk of higher rank became liable to be seized as slaves by the over-lord. Hefele (Concilienge-schichte, V, 195) sees in this first trace of the principle that the marriages of the clerics are ipso facto invalid.
 
Just_Lurking said:
Catholic Encyclopedia (see here):

The incidents of the long final campaign, which began indeed even before the time of Pope St. Leo IX and lasted down to the First Council of Lateran in 1123, are too complicated to be detailed here. We may note, however that the attack was conducted along two distinct lines ofaction. In the first place, disabilities of all kinds were enacted and as far as possible enforced against the wives and children of ecclesiastics. Their offspring were declared to be of servile condition, debarred from sacred orders, and, in particular, incapable of succeeding to their fathers’ benefices. The earliest decree in which the children were declared to be slaves, the property of the Church, and never to be enfranchised, seems to have been a canon of the Synod of Pavia in 1018. Similar penalties were promulgated later on against the wives and concubines (see the Synod of Melfi, 1189, can. xii), who by the very fact of their unlawful connection with a subdeacon or clerk of higher rank became liable to be seized as slaves by the over-lord. Hefele (Concilienge-schichte, V, 195) sees in this first trace of the principle that the marriages of the clerics are ipso facto invalid.
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The slavery issue I accept as wrong, I don’t have to defend it, of course, any more than Americans have to defend the fact that George Washington and Thomas Jefferson were both slave-owners. And it has no bearing on the isue of the legal status of the marriages.

As has been pointed out, it was a LONG campaign - waged over many decades if not centuries according to your article.

So the priests who entered into marriages at that late stage were well aware that it had been illegal for priests to marry for some time beforehand. They just didn’t accept that law and broke it. They could have been under no illusion that their marriages were valid in any sense 🤷
 
Ah,thank you. (Editing now). “Liable to the over-lord” is NOT the same as being ‘sold’ into slavery. The Church was not making a profit here. A reading of the encyclopedia on slavery itself makes clear that the status of those who became ecclesiastical slaves was ‘better’ than those slaves who were not ecclesiastical. It also makes clear that at the times this occurred there was a transitioning from slavery (antique/classical) to serfdom; it also notes that considering the laws of the time, it would be necessary to ‘disinherit’ these children from taking over, in the case of males, the father’s ‘priesthood’, his land, etc.
 
LilyM said:
And your source for this information?
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See my previous post quoting the Catholic Encyclopedia.
LilyM said:
The marriages could only possibly be invalid and capable of annulment if they were entered into AFTER the Papal decree that priests needed to be celibate.
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I’m afraid you are anachonistically projecting your modern sensibilities onto the actual history of the time. Remember that at that time, the Catholic Church still hadn’t decided whether it was the vows or the consummation that effected a marriage.
LilyM said:
And there’s no such thing as a ‘technical’ annulment.
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I’m commenting on the thread title, saying that it was not a “great mass divorce” but a “great mass annulment”. So, technically speaking, the thread title is inaccurate.
LilyM said:
A marriage is either invalid (and thus capable of annulment) from its origin or it isn’t. It can’t retroactively invalidated if it was valid at the time it was entered into, not by Papal decree or in any other way.
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This was not true historically, nor is it true today. In 2006, the CDF retroactively changed/imposed conditions on “defecting from the Catholic Church by a formal act” that resulted in previously valid marriages suddenly becoming invalid, and vice versa.
LilyM said:
What DID happen is that there were a lot of priests who refused to accept the papal decree on celibacy, and thus AFTER it was promulgated many still married.
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You are projecting your modern sensibilities again. As the Catholic Encyclopedia article makes clear, the idea that the “marriages of the clerics are ipso facto invalid” was born from the actions enslaving the cleric’s wives and children, not the other way around.
 
The other thing to note is that even if Catholic priests and bishops etc. made poor ‘state’ decisions (or at least viewed as such hundreds of years later), it still doesn’t invalidate Catholic teaching.

Nobody could be ‘anything’ if the prerequisite was that said ‘something’ had to be ‘above reproach’ with never an instance of a person belonging to the ‘something’ doing wrong.

Bakers in history have sold bad bread. Ditto with everyone from a blacksmith to a computer salesman.

Protestant pastors have engaged in adultery. Rabbis have molested children. Ditto teachers. Lawyers have accepted bribes.

Etc. etc. Heck, at the very beginning of our Christian faith, one of the Twelve Apostles sold Jesus for 30 pieces of silver (shoot, now nobody could be an apostle, one of them ‘went bad’.)

Much as I like math–and history–I also like to point out that just as we can’t put 21st century ‘points of view’ onto 11th century people, the converse is true as well. Those 11th century people couldn’t jump forward a millennium and see a ‘different solution’ or see the problem for the one they had, then.
 
<>

How many blacksmiths or computer salesmen do you know who have sold bad bread?
 
LOL, you caught me, Cluny! Definitely time to get to bed, had to work this a.m. at 7 and I’m obviously too tired to post. Allow me to (I hope) clarify and then say goodnight, LOL. I hate Saturday rotations. . .

Bakers throughout history have had members who sold bad bread. Blacksmiths have sold bad horseshoes or harness. Computer salesmen have sold ‘lemons’ in the computer lines. But we don’t dismiss the idea of having bakers, or blacksmiths (when needed, and even now we do have a couple working in places like Plimouth Plantation, Cooperstown Museum, and Colonial Williamsburg), and certainly we’ll probably have computer salesmen with us for many years.

There is no profession that is not ‘tainted’ at some point by being filled by a rogue, cheat, scoundrel, scally-wag, whatever your description of choice. So yes, we had some priests in history who engaged in immoral and even illegal activities. . .by our standards. By the standards of the 11th century, however, the ‘concubines’ (who could, if given secular penalties, been subject to even ‘stricter’ penalties than the Church laid down) and the children (themselves innocent but again, according to the knowledge of the time, still liable to a judgment, again of the times, and as reasonable and fair to all parties as could be for the times) were treated as best those involved knew how.
 
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