CELIBACY IN THE ROMAN PRIESTHOOD.
TN the Times of Wednesday there appeared an in- teresting, though, as we shall try to show, an impractical, letter from a French priest on the subject of clerical celibacy. A part of his argument may be very soon dismissed. His idea that the law of clerical celibacy is "the chief obstacle to the return of the Anglican Church to Catholic unity" is purely visionary. In the first place, there are other obstacles far more effectual ; in the second place, we do not believe that, if it were the chief obstacle, it would long be suffered to remain so. A. Church which allows her clergy to marry in the East would not forbid them to marry in the West if she saw good reason for ceasing to do so. The " deadlock " which the French priest speaks of exists only in his imagination. "The pastors in both Russia and England," he tells us, "decline to come over unaccompanied. They wish to become Catholics, to become priests, to exercise their ministry, and to retain their wives." We should rather say that the great majority of pastors, both in Russia and England, have no intention of coming over either accompanied or unaccompanied. They believe that they are Catholics and priests already, and they mean to go on exercising their ministry where they are. The interest of the letter, therefore, turns not on the particular object for which the writer urges the abolition of clerical celibacy, but on the evidence it affords of a wish among a section of the Roman Catholic clergy that it should be abolished, and on the questions which the existence of such a wish may one day raise. In what follows we propose to look at the subject simply from the point of view in which it might present itself to a Pope who was seriously reviewing the arguments for and against the change.
The French priest is very anxious for the repeal of the law, and looks to the influence of the American Episcopate to bring it about. "In a matter of this sort," he says, "Cardinal Gibbons and Archbishop Ireland ale worth all the Old World Bishops put together." Why Cardinal Gibbons and Archbishop Ireland should wish to make the change he does not expressly state. "The law," he says, "has served its purpose, and been of great use. It is now anachronistic. It has outlived its utility, and in these days men like to be free in their domestic arrange- ments." Were they thus free, "it would enhance the prestige of the Church, regain much of her lost ground, and be the means of salvation for innumerable souls." These recommendations are of a kind with which reformers are but too lavish. There is no mention, it will be seen, of the objections to the proposal, and only the most general descriptions of the advantages to be derived from it. In the event of the authorities of the Roman Church taking the matter in hand, they would probably proceed on quite an opposite method. They would begin by con- sidering the reasons against disturbing the existing system, and only if these proved open to an answer would they go on to inquire into the specific benefits to be looked for from the change. No religious reform has ever been recommended that was not warranted by its authors to save souls, and increase the prestige of the Church. The French priest speaks of the existing French Bishops as certain opponents of the repeal of the law. They are "pious men, of regular life, who are devoted to the old state of things. From them nothing is to be hoped." It would be more to the purpose, we suspect, to inquire what is to be hoped from the French laity. Frenchmen are not specially priest-ridden, but they often show a curious dis- like to the idea of a priest who has taken a wife. Perhaps their observation of lay life has convinced them that marriage is rather the removal of a danger-signal than the provision of a guarantee. A French husband knows that if his wife is devout she will see a good deal of her director. He is not greatly disturbed at this because he knows that the whole training and education of the clergy is arranged with a view to reducing any danger from this quarter as much as possible, and the whole weight of official and class opinion is exerted in the same direction. But supposing that the clergy were allowed to marry, the need for this stringent preparation would be at an end. It is designed to arm the priest against the special dangers of an enforced celibacy. Make celibacy voluntary, instead of compulsory, and in all probability the whole seminary system would by degrees give place to a system more like that which obtains in the Anglican Church. Candidates for orders would begin their special training at twenty-two or twenty-three instead of at fourteen or fifteen. Whether the substitution would make clerical scandals fewer seems to us exceedingly doubtful. At least, we do not know that they are fewer in England, where the clergy of the Established Church are as a rule married, than in France, where the clergy of the Established Church are celibates. And we do know that, in the opinion of men of large experience and competent judgment, there are more scandals among those of the Anglican clergy who are married, than among those of them who are unmarried. We greatly doubt, therefore, whether the effect of relaxing the obligation of celibacy in the Roman Church would be at all what the French priest imagines,— whether, in fact, the change would not be highly unpopular with the laity and tend to the lessening of the Church's prestige rather than to its increase, to the alienation of souls rather than to their gathering in.
There are two other difficulties in the way of which the French priest takes no notice, but to which the Ecclesi- astical authorities would be likely to attach a good deal of weight. The first is the position of the clergy under the two systems. In all parts of Europe, except Austria, the Roman Catholic clergy are largely of peasant extraction. They owe such social importance as they possess entirely to the fact that they are priests. Even as it is, this does not always insure them much consideration. The notices of the cures which we meet with in French novels—notices which are the more likely to be accurate as they are for the most part quite inci- dental—usually represent the country priest as an em- barrassed dependant of the great house of the village, tolerated as a sort of necessary incumbrance because the family must hear Mass and go to the Sacraments. If this is true now—and, make as many deductions as we will, it is at least very commonly true—how much lower the cure's position would be if he were not only a peasant priest, but the husband of a peasant wife and the father of peasant children. The French priest admits that "the law of clerical celibacy has served its purpose and been of great use." But why was it of use ? In part at least because it prevented the mediEeval clergy from sinking altogether beneath the level of the gentry, and left each one of them free, if he chose and had the chance, to make a position for himself in virtue of his education and ability. No doubt the forms of insult to which the clergy would have been exposed in the Middle Ages if they had given such hostages to fate as wives and children neces- sarily constitute are different from those to which they would be exposed now. But the distinction, as we strongly suspect, would be found to be one of form only.
Again, there is the financial question to be considered. Friendly as are the dispositions of the French priest towards the Anglican Church, he does not seem to have studied its recent experience. If he had, he would know that the reason why clerical poverty is such a serious question among us is that the Anglican clergy are eminently a married clergy. But for that clerical poverty would hardly exist, or, if it did, would exist in a far less acute form. Now there is hardly a benefice in the country that does not yield an income which to a country cure in France or Italy would appear opulence. Badly off as many of the Anglican clergy are, they have seldom to put up with an official stipend of £24 a year and such chance fees as come into them from weddings or funerals. The efforts now being made to raise the income of every English benefice to a minimum of .2200 would seem to a Frenchman or an Italian altogether absurd. Give every cure, he would say, 5,000 fr. a year ?—what useless extrava- gance! But if the clergy in France or Italy were married, their wants—after making every allowance for differences of nationality and habit—would not be very far removed from the wants of their Anglican brethren, and to satisfy these the State must enormously increase its payments— which may be put aside as out of the question—or an enormous sustentation fund. must be raised by private hbemlity,—which is, if possible, more out of the question still. Just when English Churchmen are racking their brains to discover how to maintain that married clergy which English opinion and feeling demand, French and Italian Churchmen are to be asked voluntarily to take up a similar burden, with no similar demand from opinion or feeling abroad. One more consideration must be mentioned. It has been the policy of the Roman Church for more than half a century to increase by every means in her power her authority over her clergy. She has aimed at making them, in the strictest sense of the term a service ; with the traditions, the devotion, and the esprit de corps which properly belong to a service. That she has so markedly succeeded in this enterprise is due in a great measure to the segregation of her clergy from their kind, and, at all events among the more ambitious of them, to the limita- tion of their hopes, their fears, and their prospects to the sphere of their profession. We may call it a degrading servitude, if we will, but at any rate it is a willing and a devoted servitude. What would be the chance of this state of things remaining undisturbed if the Roman clergy were allowed to marry, and to surround themselves with the cares and interests of a wife and children ? Possibly the Roman authorities do not read Mr. Rudyard Kipling, but we have little doubt that they would examine any suggestion for the abolition of clerical celibacy quite in the spirit of the refrain in one of his poems:— " Down to Gehenna, or up to the Throne, He travels the fastest who travels alone."
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