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Review Summary: meticulous, passionate scholarship on the most divisive issue in church history |
Date: 2008-02-17 |
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Details: This is a book of gloriously passionate and meticulous scholarship. Why, Ranke-Heinemann asks, did the church turn from forbidding priests the right to divorce their wives at the Council of Nicea (in 325), to requiring all priests to dump their families in 1074? Why did this demand arise in the Latin Church, and not in the Eastern Orthodox Church, the Coptic Church, or in Judaism?
Sometime around the year 1000, the Latin Church hierarchy shifted from trying to end sex in clerical families, to a goal of ending the families period. The question of how to do this was both practical and moral. Because speaking directly on the issue of divorce, Jesus said that if a man and woman really loved each other unconditionally, they would never find reason to end their relationship. Taking these words legalistically, the Western Church had long taught that the only moral justification for divorce was adultery. And if that was their doctrine, how could the clergy justify divorcing their mainly loyal wives en masse?
When Christianity became Rome's official religion, most clergymen still believed that having wives was a good thing, and marriage helped prepare a man for religious leadership. As the Jews expected their rabbis to be married, so most Christians expected the same of their priests. If a priest was not married, most adults in the community would assume there was something wrong with him. A bachelor priest seemed immature. Marriage was a school of life, and if a man had not learned its lessons, how could he teach those who had?
Ranke-Heinemann traces the movement for enforced celibacy through an ecclesiastical struggle lasting over 700 years. Her presentation of the arguments pro and con is so revealing, that these chapters alone are well worth the price of the book. Then she documents the measures taken to enforce the great divorce - and they were horrific, including punishments of whipping, prison, banishment, or sale on the slave markets for the offending priest's wives. With their backs to the wall, many priests grew violent to defend their families. In the Paris Synod of 1074, Abbot Galter of Saint Martin demanded that the flock must follow its shepherd in celibacy. A mob of outraged priests and bishops beat him, spit on him, and threw him into the street. In the same year Archbishop John of Rouen threatened protesting priests with excommunication, and had to flee for his life under a hail of stones. In furious debate, the celibate party denounced its opponents as fornicators trying to prostitute the church. Married priests hurled accusations that their foes were sodomites, whose obvious preference for homosexuality rendered them hostile to married families. For decades church synods regularly broke into riotous fistfights, with monks and priests actually smashing each other's faces in the church aisles. In 1233, protesters murdered papal legate Conrad of Marburg, who was touring Germany partly to enforce chastity. (p. 109)
Beyond this, Ranke-Heinemann surveys the impact of this policy on the church over centuries to come, showing what it took for the parish clergy to live without wives, or what it took to train future priests, if no priest could train his son. And last she shows the history of resistance across Europe, in which love between priests and churchwomen survived despite all attempts at "sundering the commerce between the clergy and women through an eternal anathema".
Finally, this book of protest becomes a testament to the power of love, which proved stronger than all efforts to control it.
--author of "Different Visions of Love" |
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Review Summary: Very informative and essential scholarship |
Date: 2002-12-25 |
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Details: I read this book in mid 2001. For anyone who wants to know from where the Catholic Church derives its intense sexual pessimism and its antagonistic attitude towards heterosexual love within marriage, then this is the book for you. Many of the sexual taboos the Church is fixated upon have no Scriptural basis, and as the book incisively points out, no rational basis either. And the Church's extreme negative hatred of married sexual pleasure has been very costly to it over the centuries - even contributing to the Schism of 1054 and later the Protestant Reformation. One of the conclusions that I was compelled to draw based on the overwhelming evidence of centuries of papal and clerical animosity towards heterosexual love (especially within marriage!) is that such an intense hatred of married heterosexuality is itself an immoral perversion in the same class as the sexual perversions the Church routinely condemns. One suspects, after reading this book, that the celibate clergy talked down marriage, in part, to bolster their prestige both within the Church and society at large. Another conclusion that became clear was that the Catholic Church hurts its credibility immensely in the modern world by its obstinate clinging to a discredited, pessimistic view of human sexuality. The faithful often times do not listen to the Church on current major issues - issues that the Church is correct on - because the institutional Church has trivialized and abused its moral authority on so many minor or non-issues. The author points out that this sexual pessimism was not dominant in the very early Church of the first three and a half centuries, but became dominant later. And, most surprising, is that this destructive sexual pessimism has pagan roots! We can hope that, in time, the Catholic Church will return to the more positive and constructive thinking of New Testament times. |
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Review Summary: Incredibly Insightful Read |
Date: 2002-12-03 |
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Details: This book is incredibly well referenced and insightful. I was amazed by the amount of reference materials that were also included throughout the book. I was also amazed by the information set forth in the book. If you have ever wondered where some of the practices and ideas in the Catholic church originated, this is a very helpful book. It's not just limited to a female audience either - it's also quite helpful in understanding some of the requirements placed on men by the Church. I gave it four stars instead of five because it can be a very difficult read -- not a great book to read after a long day at the office! |
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Review Summary: ONE OF THE MOST IMPORTANT BOOK OF ALL TIMES |
Date: 2001-09-01 |
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Details: This books simply unmask the horror,perversion and insanity of Catholic Church.It is important people live the pleasure and freedom as a sin,because companies need them for work.It is important to maintain and consolidate socio-economic domination-see Marx and Freud-and the SEXUAL dimension of the man and of the women is FUNDAMENTAL for this.Church and rich and powerful makes an invisible alliance.
Do you want to understand Columbine massacre,american psycophats and so on...? Start on this book,on Freud and on Marx. |
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Review Summary: Things That Need to be Said |
Date: 2000-03-18 |
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Details: This book was a revelation for me. It opened up avenues for research and exploration that I was not yet ready to open on my own. Did you ever have an intuition that everything was not as simple and rosey as some would have you believe? Did you ever think that there was more to the story than was being revealed? If so, then this book is an excellent resource for you for topics such as misogyny, celibacy, sexuality, family planning and morality. I am a Roman Catholic and a religious educator, but far from finding the book to be shocking or full of "dirty words," I found it to be an insightful challenge to the church to return again to the central teaching of Jesus and to turn away from its obsession with genitalia and what people do with them. There is more to faith than that. And only by embracing the truth of our past can we grow beyond it. |
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out of 8 Reviews
