Ah! 9 March — so, obviously, it’ll be the 949th anniversary of Pope Gregory VII declaring that married priests should be excommunicated, after which everything went swimmingly for the Catholic Church.
To be fair, this wasn’t particularly new. Priest castes in plenty of religions before this one had been celibate, to make sure those performing rites were ‘pure’, and since the early days of the church, the life of Jesus had been the example to follow.
This is why there was a 20-year crusade against the Cathars, or Albigensians, in the 13th century, because these heretics’ belief that Jesus and Mary Magdalene had got it on and started a bloodline made the more established church very cross indeed
To be fair to the Catholics of the 13th century, there isn’t what you’d call masses of evidence for this (which is no reason why a 20th-century novelist who can’t string a sentence together shouldn’t make a shitload of cash from it)…
…and whether it justifies the massacre of 7,000 people in one day (Béziers, 22 July 1209) is debatable. Then again, so’s the death toll. Crusade commander, Arnaud Amalric, supposedly said “Caedite eos. Novit enim Dominus qui sunt eius” (‘Kill them all. God will know his own.’)
…but whether this happened, and 7–10,000 people were done in, or ‘only’ the estimated 700 heretics in town, who can say? All the sources are several hundred years old, and not noted for their impartiality
Anyway, early church fathers Ambrose and the splendidly named Augustine of Hippo declared sex sinful, which has been nothing but a boon to psychological health in the centuries since. (St Paul was content with stipulating only that clergy should take *no more than one wife*)
A synod at Pavia in 1022 said priests’ children should be sold into slavery, and the 1049 synod thought wives of Roman priests should become slaves of the Lateran Palace
A mere 56 years later, Pope Urban considered the idea of punishment for the men involved, saying priests who married should go to prison, while the wives and children should be sold as slaves. Guess who was going to get the proceeds?
A full ban on priests marrying came in with the Lateran Council of 1139, and was reaffirmed by the Council of Trent in 1539, in case anyone had forgotten. Still, at least it was all settled then, and nothing bad ever came of it.
