Clerical marriage
practice of allowing Christian clergy to marry
Clerical marriage is the practice of allowing Christian clergy (those who have already been ordained) to marry. This practice is distinct from allowing married persons to become clergy. Clerical marriage is admitted among Protestants, including both Lutherans and Anglicans.
Many Eastern Churches (Assyrian Church of the East, Eastern Orthodox, Oriental Orthodox, or Eastern Catholic), while allowing married men to be ordained, do not allow clerical marriage after ordination. Eastern Lutheran clergy are permitted to marry after being ordained, and married Eastern Lutherans are eligible to become clergy. Within the lands of the Eastern Christendom, priests' children often became priests and marry within their social group, establishing a tightly knit hereditary caste among some Eastern Christian communities.
The Latin Catholic Church as a rule requires clerical celibacy for the priesthood since the Gregorian Reform in the late 11th century under the influence of Bernard of Clairvaux, but Eastern Catholic Churches do not require clerical celibacy for the priesthood and the Latin Catholic Church occasionally relaxes the discipline in special cases, such as the conversion of a married Anglican priest who wishes to be ordained a Catholic priest. (Celibacy is, however, a requirement to become a bishop.)
History
There is no dispute among theologians that at least some of the apostles were married or had been married: a mother-in-law of Peter is mentioned in the account in Matthew 8:14, Mark 1:29–34, Luke 4:38–41 of the beginning of Jesus' ministry. 1 Timothy 3:2 says: "an overseer (Greek ἐπίσκοπος) must be ... the husband of one wife".
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This entry incorporates text from “Clerical marriage” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.