OVERVIEW
Within the Roman Catholic Church, there has been a long tradition of a celibate clergy. The pros and cons of the practice have been debated for nearly two millennia. This tradition posits a theology that a married person has a conflict of interest between religious commitments and familial responsibilities.
With this tradition still in place in Catholicism, are the reasons for celibacy
empirically verifiable? Two questions that this paper addresses are: are celibate clergy
more religious than the married clergy? Are celibate clergy more involved in the lives or
their parishioners than are the married clergy? The hypotheses of this paper are: celibate
clergy are not more religious than the married clergy and the former do not spend more
time with their parishioners than the latter. First of all, a short historical survey on
Roman Catholic celibacy will be outlined to develop the reasons for celibacy and to
create constructs to be used in an empirical analysis. Secondly, the hypotheses will be
tested using a national sample of Canadian evangelical clergy and a Canadian provincial
sample of Roman Catholic priests.
A SHORT HISTORY OF THE TRADITION OF CLERICAL CELIBACY
IN THE ROMAN CATHOLIC CHURCH
This literature review will endeavour to capture why the Roman Catholic Church has chosen to include in its polity the practice of a celibate clergy. In order to develop constructs that can be operationalized, only the central reasons for a celibate clergy will be developed.
Three works will be used as primary sources: Lea (1957 [1884]), Brown (1988), and Sipe (1990). This will be updated with recent Vatican announcements on reasons for a celibate clergy.
Three images emerge out of the apostolic time. Both Lea (1957) and Sipe (1990) argue that the apostolic church did not advocate celibacy at all for the leaders and the decision to embrace it was given to the leaders themselves. Brown (1988) adds that the early celibates were more likely to be men and women who were originally married, had raised their children, and, if then they became widowed, choose celibacy.
It was common that married leaders co-existed with celibates. Sipe (1990) refers to Schillebeeckx (1968) as noting that there is no indication of any rejection of women or sexuality in connection with the ministry.
The Patristic period witnesses a change. Ignatius (b. 100 AD), Justin Martyr (b. 150 AD), Athennagorus (b. 180 AD) and Origin (b. 185 AD) all advocated celibacy for ecclesial leaders. Towards the close of the Patristic period (c. 500 AD), Gregory the Great (b. 540 AD), Jerome (b.340 AD), and Augustine (b. 344 AD) all considered sexual activity even in marriage to be tainted and even sinful. The central reason for celibacy during this period, then, was ritual purity: the priest, performing sacred rites, must not be tainted by sexuality that was suspect.
Brown (1988 and 1992) states that the rise of ascetic celibacy was not only a major factor in the social construction of a new morality of marriage but also of the salience of a celibate priesthood. In the middle of the 4th century, many men left the luxuries of the city to become "men of the desert" (Brown, 1992:287). The primary motive seems to be "singleness of heart" so that the monk, in leaving the city as a symbol of this world's civilization and entering the desert, a symbol of the antithesis of the city, he could recapture the lost "glory of Adam" in paradise and be like the angels in heaven.
However, Brown (1988), adds that even though there was an invisible link between the men of the desert and the married Christians in the cities and that married couples were counselled to refrain from sexual intercourse during special times of the week and liturgical year, there was no requirement that priests be celibate. During the Council of Nicea(1) (325 AD), a Pophanatrus, who was himself celibate, spoke out to the effect that sexual abstinence should not be imposed on them.
Two reasons for a celibate clergy stand out from the monastic paradigm. One is singleness of heart. If one is to devote completely to God, one needs to renounce all worldly pleasure including the joy of sex. Also, because sexuality is suspect, it would not be appropriate for the clergy to engage in sexual activity for the reason of ritual purity.
Sipe (1990) adds interesting evidence for the persistence of a married clergy. He enumerates six popes (from 400-1000 AD) who were sons of popes and nine who were sons of either bishops or priests. Lea (1957) also indicates that there was a wide variation throughout the Christian West of the practice of the sacerdotal celibacy as well as a married priesthood. Brown's (1988) evidence also points to this variation.
The controversy continued into the Medieval period culminating in a decree of the Second Lateran Council of 1139 AD that declared all marriages of priests null and void and that existing marriages of men must be severed before a man could be ordained to the priesthood (Sipe, 1990). In response to the Reformation, according to Lynch (1972), the Council of Trent did uphold the Lateran decision but still with some dissenting voices.
The Second Vatican Council (1961-1965) reaffirms the Roman Catholic position on the importance of celibacy. It affirmed that priests who are celibate have an "undivided heart", able to give themselves more, minister more, and do all to a " greater extent." In a similar way, a Synod of Bishops that meet in Rome in 1971, noted that celibacy results in: (1) undivided devotion to Christ; (2) dedication to the apostolic task (ministry); and, (3), a sign of the world to come where there will be no marriage (Coriden, 1972).
Finally, the official catechism of the Roman Catholic (Catechism of the Catholic Church, Libereria Editrice Vaticana, 1994) takes the position that the clergy are celibate for the "sake of the kingdom", as a sign of singleness of heart that enables them to give themselves better to God and others, and as a symbol of eternal life.
For the purposes of this paper, this review of the research literature and an
historical view of the issue results in the following conclusion and proposition: the two
millennia of Christian history reveals that from the early beginning of the religion, the
central reasons for a celibate clergy are:
These reasons as constructs will be operationalized for testing. However, because ritual purity is not a part of the current theology on catholic celibacy, it will not be included. In addition, there is no measurement of celibacy being an eschatological sign and will not be included in the analysis. "Single hearted devotion to Christ" and "giving one entirely to God" will be operationalized using various measures of religiosity. Finally, the ability to give oneself more to parishioners if one is celibate will also be operationalized and tested.
METHODS
Data
In Canada, there is a para-ecclesial organization called EFC or the Evangelical Fellowship of Canada which promotes a unity among evangelical denominations and acts as a common voice for conservative Christianity. This was the sponsoring agency that funded the research from which some of the data for the present study were collected. The focus was on evangelical ministers and their spouses and not all Christian ministers in Canada. Thus, one cannot generalize to the total ministerial community in Canada in extrapolating from these data.
Each of the member denominations of EFC were contacted about their active participation in a nation wide study of clergy and their spouses. In a similar way, two Roman Catholic dioceses in Western Canada were approached to participate in the study. A clergy sample was drawn from a list of priests who were in the two dioceses and those involved in the Catholic Charismatic Renewal across Canada. To each denominational head (including the diocesan hierarchy) were sent copies of the proposed instrument. Twenty-two denominations agreed to participate. The total national population, as defined by the mailing lists provided, was 4,953. For the Roman Catholic clergy, the number was 396.
For the evangelical clergy, a random sample of households (which included both ministers and their spouses) was drawn for the ten denominations which had more than 170 clergy on their mailing lists. For the 11 denominations, however, the entire mailing list was the sample. In the case of the Catholic clergy, the sample frame was also the sample. The final sample included 10 evangelical denominations greater than 170 clergy, 11 small ones with less than 170 clergy and the one Roman Catholic sample consisted of two Catholic dioceses and priests involved in the Catholic Charismatic Movement. The total sample included 3,214 households from twenty-two denominations. The packets were mailed in the spring of 1993 and a total of 1374 were received by the time of the deadline of September 01, 1993. For the evangelicals, the response rate was 41.3% while for the priests, the rate was 34%(2). The final number used in the analysis was 1294 for the evangelical clergy and 80 for the priests.
One could be concerned about such a low response rate. Of interest is to present some demographic data to show if the two groups are comparable. Gender does not contribute to variation because 100% of the priests are men while among the ministers, 97% are male and only 3% are female. There is quite a variation in age: the mean age of the ministers is 44 (range from 20-93) and that of the priests, 60 (range 28-83).
In regards to education, 41% of the priests and 34% of the ministers have at least a college education. The average income for ministers is $27,000 @ year while priests take home about $16,000. It should be recognized, though, that priests typically have their dwelling expenses (rent and utilities) and car allowances added to their basic income. In sum, I believe that one can modestly assume that the groups are comparable.
After the survey packets were mailed, three follow-up postcards were mailed, to every household in the sample, each at 2-3 week intervals. The initial coding of the data, including the entry of hand-written comments (coming to a total of 500 typewritten pages), was completed by mid-August of 1993. By the beginning of 1994, all of the data had been checked for errors and entered into the computer.
The Constructs and their Measurements
From the work of Glock and Stark (1965), the experiential and dimensions were
used to measure devotion to Christ. Meditative prayer was used to indicate the
experiential dimension and frequency of and the amount of time for personal prayer, the
ritualistic dimension. The construct "the ability to give oneself more completely to
parishioners" was called "parochial commitment" that is linked to the consequential
dimension of Glock and Stark and will measured by the number of hours ministers or
priests devote to their ministry.
Descriptive Statistics
To prepare the data for analysis, several initial statistical techniques were utilized. Factor analysis and a reliability test was performed on items that measured the experiential dimension of religion that is termed meditative prayer and is operationalized as MEDITATION. This scale, which ranged from 27 to 60, consists of thirteen items (thanking, talking to, loving, taking time with, worshipping, feeling close to and listening to God; reflecting on the Bible, acting on what I believe God is saying, achieving insights in prayer, sensing a divine presence and experiencing peace). The Cronbach alpha on these items was .88.
For the ritualistic dimension, two measures of prayer were used: frequency of and the amount of time of prayer. The question on frequency asked the respondent how often do you have private prayer? Possible responses included several times a month (1) to several times a day (4) that resulted in a range from 1 to 4.. The amount of time in prayer was measured actual minutes spent a day that ranged from 1 to 96.
The last variable to be used in the analysis was parochial commitment (termed PASTORAL COMMITMENT). Its measurement was the number the hours per week (range from 2 to 96) that the ministers or priests devoted to their ministries.
Analytical Statistics
Again, the hypotheses to be tested are that celibate clergy are not more religious than the married clergy and celibate clerics do not spend any more significant time with their parishioners than do married clergy. To test these hypotheses, the statistical technique to be used is the T-Test for independent groups(3)
.
Table 1 presents the results of this analysis. A T-Test was performed on each of the scales and variables of interest.
These results reveal that the null hypothesis is substantially confirmed. Of the four measures, there is no significant difference between MEDITATION and PASTORAL COMMITMENT. However, there are significant differences between both the frequency of prayer and the amount of time spent in prayer.
What may this mean? It is definitely true that priests spend more time in prayer on the two measures of frequency and the actual minutes spent in prayer.
However, it is important to ask the question what happens within that prayer time that makes an effect in the lives of the clergy that is measured by MEDITATION. Time does not seem to be the telling factor but the contents of prayer do. In both groups, there are no significant differences on this measure of experiential religiosity. This scale seems to measure the effects of prayer that could be more a more telling measure of the construct, devotion to Christ. Also, two other measures of "devotion to Christ" were used to test for differences that are not reported in the table because they seem to lack the face validity that the MEDITATION scale has. They were designed to reveal if the clergy asked God to guide their decisions and if they believed that God answered their prayers. Married clergy were significantly more likely to respond positively to both.
Further, the scale MEDITATION is based on one developed by Poloma and Gallup (1991) and used in an American national study in 1988. They categorized prayer into four dimensions: ritual, conversational, petitionary and meditative. Of all these dimensions the dimension of meditative prayer was the strongest predictor of a variety of correlates: religious experiences, participation in political activities, and willingness to forgive others who have harmed you. I would contend that the scale on meditative prayer is a better measure of one's devotion to Christ than the frequency of and the time that ministers and priest spend in prayer.
This test also confirms the hypothesis that celibate clergy do not spend more time in their ministry than do the married clergy. This is in spite of the fact that the evangelical ministers all have marital and familial commitments.
CONCLUSIONS
The results of this study are substantially consistent with the hypothesis that there are no significant differences in dimensions of religiosity and parochial commitments between celibate priests and married clergy. The exceptions to this are that priests spend longer periods of time in prayer than do evangelicals. However, this does not make a difference on an important dimension of experiential religiosity namely meditation.
The implications of this study is that there is some empirical basis to argue for a
change in the present law of clerical celibacy. In regards to one's devotional life and
time for ministry, celibacy does not appear to matter.
NOTES
1. This council and the third and forth councils of Carthage (397 and 398 AD) did not
advocate celibacy (Lea, 1957).
2. 2. The final N was 80. This figure represents a response rate of 34% from priests of one diocese and those in the renewal movement (total 235). In the beginning of the survey, the authorities of one diocese requested that the priests were not to fill out the instrument. Thus, 161 respondents were, in effect, lost.
3. This tests the difference between two means (one for the married clergy and one for the celibates) on a given variable. An assumption is that the variances of the two groups are assumed to be equal. However, even though the variances are not equal, this T-Test is fairly robust so that if even if the deviations from this assumption is present, the test is still useful (Harnett, 1982).
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| TABLE 1: T-TEST
OF MEANS OF MINISTERS AND PRIESTS | |||
| VARIABLES | MINISTERS | PRIESTS | T-TEST |
| MEDITATION | 50.59 | 50.48 | 0.906 |
| FREQUENCY OF
PRAYER |
2.88 | 3.35 | .000*** |
| AMOUNT OF
TIME SPENT IN PRAYER |
19.33 | 33.40 | .000*** |
| PAROCHIAL
COMMITMENT |
51.16 | 56.01 | 0.105 |