Need help citing a reference (Catholic Church related)

[rojoloco]

Need some references for citations for a book I'm writing. John MacArthur delivered a sermon on the Catholic priesthood. On the subject of marriage, he said priests were once able to marry (true fact) but a council decided to void out all clerical marriages causing the wives to be cut off with no support. He said many of them starved and were even forced to become street walkers to survive. He doesn't cite any sources in the transcription. After some digging, I found out it was the First Lateran Council of 1123 that did this. However, I am having some difficulty finding proof of the claims of what happened to the wives. All I can find is where it says they were void, had to live as far away from their wives as possible, and all the children were declared illegitimate.

Anybody have any sources to help in my research?

 

[Knee V]

I don't know, dude. A lot of people say a lot of things about Catholics that tend to be unfounded. I'm not saying that there is no truth to that; I really don't know. But I tend to ignore people when they say things like that as it is very popular to make up things about Catholics and market them as factual.

 

[ViaCrucis]

I don't know, dude. A lot of people say a lot of things about Catholics that tend to be unfounded. I'm not saying that there is no truth to that; I really don't know. But I tend to ignore people when they say things like that as it is very popular to make up things about Catholics and market them as factual.

I don't know if MacArthur is necessarily the most reliable source for this sort of thing either. Though that may just be personal bias on my part.

-CryptoLutheran

 

[rojoloco]

I don't know if MacArthur is necessarily the most reliable source for this sort of thing either. Though that may just be personal bias on my part.

-CryptoLutheran

To be honest, I haven't really ever found a claim of MacArthur's that was meant to deliberately lead people into a fallacy. He is pretty on point with almost everything I have ever heard him say. That's why I am searching so hard for a reference. I feel that, if he said it, there must be some truth to it that I just can't seem to pinpoint.

That being said, I do understand how easy it is to throw out false claims that you believe to be true. People do it all the time regarding Calvinism. They think they have stated a historical fact when it is actually nothing more than fabricated history of an anti-Calvinist.

 

[Knee V]

To be honest, I haven't really ever found a claim of MacArthur's that was meant to deliberately lead people into a fallacy. He is pretty on point with almost everything I have ever heard him say. That's why I am searching so hard for a reference. I feel that, if he said it, there must be some truth to it that I just can't seem to pinpoint.

That being said, I do understand how easy it is to throw out false claims that you believe to be true. People do it all the time regarding Calvinism. They think they have stated a historical fact when it is actually nothing more than fabricated history of an anti-Calvinist.

I truly doubt that MacArthur would ever deliberately do something like that. My only point is that is popular to beat up on Catholics without ever doing serious homework.

I'm reminded of a story that I once experienced at a church of a certain denomination some years ago. The pastor received an email about a new Halo game (Halo 2 or 3, I think). The game was condemned because it was "not for the homophobic". Obviously, anyone who has ever played any one of the Halo games knows that there is no homosexual activity in that game. But that didn't matter; the email said so, and he trusted the person that he got it from. So he read that part of the email and said, "And what is homophobic? I'm homophobic, that's what!" He then continued his rant against the game, and called out one of the teenagers that he figured would have played it. The kid had no idea what the email was referring to, but the pastor didn't care.

What I think is the obvious case is that the original review said that the game is "not for the hemophobic", and then got jumbled up somewhere down the chain of communication. That pastor, I'm sure, wasn't deliberately trying to mislead anyone. But because he trusted his friend who sent him the email, he was satisfied with the facts and didn't bother to do any further homework about it.

Such is very often the case with things pertaining to the Catholic church.

 

[Knee V]

Internet History Sourcebooks Project

Here are the canons of the second Lateran Council. As far as this source alone is considered, it makes no mention of what would happen to a defrocked priest's wife. In fact, each canon that mentions the marriage of someone ordained does so in the context of them marrying after being ordained. One of the canons forbids the son of a priest from serving at the alter, and that he must first be ordained himself; being the son of a priest doesn't automatically qualify someone for that role.

This probably isn't quite what you were looking for, but that's what I was able to find so far.

 

[Radagast]

Peter Damian and others of the time declared wives of clergy to be prostitutes, but that merely indicates a very low opinion of them.

According to the Catholic Encyclopedia, what happened officially was that (at least in some places) the wives and children of clergy became slaves (property of the Church, never to be enfranchised, and liable to be seized as slaves by the over-lord).

 

[Root of Jesse]

To be honest, I haven't really ever found a claim of MacArthur's that was meant to deliberately lead people into a fallacy. He is pretty on point with almost everything I have ever heard him say. That's why I am searching so hard for a reference. I feel that, if he said it, there must be some truth to it that I just can't seem to pinpoint.

That being said, I do understand how easy it is to throw out false claims that you believe to be true. People do it all the time regarding Calvinism. They think they have stated a historical fact when it is actually nothing more than fabricated history of an anti-Calvinist.

I just read this and found it fraught with errors. I don't think they're deliberate, per se, but they do not use the words Catholics use the same way Catholics use them, so the concepts are wrong. To sum up the Council of Trent in four or five sentences is suspicious-you can't.

That he cites the canons without the supporting documents is also telling.

I understand that he disagrees with it-he's a Protestant, and the Council of Trent was meant to combat Protestantism the way other councils were used to combat other heresies.

But there's a lot of anti-Catholicism in what I have read of him.

 

[Root of Jesse]

Peter Damian and others of the time declared wives of clergy to be prostitutes, but that merely indicates a very low opinion of them.

According to the Catholic Encyclopedia, what happened officially was that (at least in some places) the wives and children of clergy became slaves (property of the Church, never to be enfranchised, and liable to be seized as slaves by the over-lord).

Did you miss this on purpose?: "The earliest decree in which the children were declared to be slaves, the property of the Church, and never to be enfranchised[meaning 'heirs'], 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. "

Pavia and Melfi are small Italian cities. So this was not a decree of the Church. Also, what they're trying to prevent by this is that heirs of the priest would not be able to inherit anything from the Church. Also seems they were talking about lower clergy-deacons and subdeacons, not necessarily priests.

 

[Radagast]

Pavia and Melfi are small Italian cities. So this was not a decree of the Church.

The reference to Melfi is to the general council of 1089, chaired by Pope Urban II ("1189" is a misprint). Numerous history books tell the story of this enslavement of priests' wives in more detail.

 

[jlmagee]

Need some references for citations for a book I'm writing. John MacArthur delivered a sermon on the Catholic priesthood. On the subject of marriage, he said priests were once able to marry (true fact) but a council decided to void out all clerical marriages causing the wives to be cut off with no support. He said many of them starved and were even forced to become street walkers to survive. He doesn't cite any sources in the transcription. After some digging, I found out it was the First Lateran Council of 1123 that did this. However, I am having some difficulty finding proof of the claims of what happened to the wives. All I can find is where it says they were void, had to live as far away from their wives as possible, and all the children were declared illegitimate.

Anybody have any sources to help in my research?

This website makes similar claims:

A Brief History of Celibacy - FutureChurch

It has sources listed at the bottom of the page. I am not endorsing the material or anything.

 

[Root of Jesse]

The reference to Melfi is to the general council of 1089, chaired by Pope Urban II ("1189" is a misprint). Numerous history books tell the story of this enslavement of priests' wives in more detail.

A synod does not carry the weight of the entire Church, it's a local meeting. I'm not talking about the incorrect date. I'm talking about the content of the quote. Could you comment on the substance, that this was not institutional slavery, but an attempt to keep benefices from being inherited by wives and children of clergy?

By the way, I'm not saying slavery was not something Catholics engaged in, they most certainly did. That's been renounced, and was never a magisterial teaching.

 

[ebia]

I don't know if MacArthur is necessarily the most reliable source for this sort of thing either.

He doesn't have a good track-record.