Monday, March 16, 2020

Hildebrand & Boniface Vs. God on Celibate Clergy

...GOD...
A bishop then must be blameless, the husband of one wife.... 1 Timothy 3:2
vs.
Hildebrand / Boniface

"Another purpose to which Hildebrand was devoted, and which was essential to his grand scheme of the supremacy of the papacy, ----was the absolute and universal celibacy of the clergy.


----Monkery was, of course, always opposed to the marriage relation.
----All of the clergy who were monks, were therefore celibate.
----And all the popes who were also monks had steadily warred against marriage; and the popes who were not monks rigidly maintained what those had done who were monks.

In 748 Boniface, the monk, who was the papal missionary to Germany, after a long war against the married clergy in France, in which he was firmly supported by Charles Martel and his son
Carloman, was obliged to confess that the married clergy, though driven out from all Church connection, were "much more numerous than those who as yet had been forced to compliance with the rules. Driven from the churches, but supported by the sympathizing people, they performed their ministry among the fields and in the cabins of the peasants, who concealed them from the ecclesiastical authorities.
This is not the description of mere sensual worldlings, and it is probable that by this time persecution had ranged the evildisposed on the winning side. Those who thus exercised their ministry in secret and in wretchedness, retaining the veneration of the people, were therefore men who believed themselves honorably and legitimately married, and who were incapable of sacrificing wife and children for worldly advantage or in blind obedience to a rule which to them was novel, unnatural, and indefensible." — Lea."
A.T.Jones