Between 1049 and c.1122 the church endeavored to disengage itself from worldly control and involvement. By attacking the vices of simony (buying church offices) and clerical marriage (sometimes called nicolaitism), and finally by declaring that lay people were simply incapable of appointing bishops, abbots, popes, etc., the members of the clerical hierarchy asserted their independence from the secular realm, and indeed, they began to declare their superiority over all lay men and women. Clerical marriage was an issue in all of this not only because it was felt that the clergy should practice celibacy, but also because family and lineage entanglements could compromise the interests of the church (and dissipate its landed wealth). Propagandists for the reform of the clergy supported their arguments for clerical celibacy by denigrating both marriage and women. The result was a great revival of old misogynist themes. The following passages are from Anne Llewellyn Barstow, Married Priests and the Reforming Papacy: the Eleventh-Century Debates (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 1982), 60-61, 68-71, and 121.
1. Pope Gregory VII (1073-1085)
Gregory was one of the most vigorous of the eleventh-century reforming
popes (indeed, he lent his name to the movement, which became known as
the Gregorian Reform). Here are some passages from his writings about
clerical marriage:
a. ... I command you to apply yourself with more energy to preaching and enforcing the celibacy of the clergy ... so that the service of a pure and unspotted family may be offered to the bride of Christ who knows no spot or wrinkle
b. We urge you to call a council of your fellow bishops ... Expound at length ... how great is the virtue of chastity, ... how fitting for the chamberlains of the virgin bridegroom and the virgin bride. Then declare firmly that it shall no longer be permitted to carry on the functions ... which they have usurped to their own destruction.
c. [to the Bishop of Paris] ... that [all your bishops] are strictly to forbid all priests who refuse to give up the crime of fornication to perform the office of the holy altar ... And if you find the bishops lax ... do you prohibit all people from receiving their offices ...
d. [about one married bishop he stated] ... in the very bishopric he had so destructively obtained, [he] was not ashamed to enter openly into marriage and to take a harlot rather than a wife, by whom he then also begot children, so that he who had already prostituted his soul [to simony] might likewise dedicate his body in shame to the devil by his lewd and foul lust ...
2. Peter Damian
Peter Damian was one of the most important theorists of the Gregorian
reform and one of its most strident rhetoricians. Here he writes
about married priests and then about the wives themselves:
I have wanted to place locks on their sacred thighs. I have attempted to place the restraints of continence upon the genitals of the priesthood, upon those who have the high honor of touching the body and blood of Christ ... We extort from them, however, a bare promise to observe the ruling, it being postponed with trembling backslidings. (They do this not secretly but publicly, everyone knowing the names of their concubines, even of their fathers-in-law!) Finally, when all doubt is removed, the bellies are swelling, the children running around.
I speak to you, O charmers of the clergy, appetizing flesh of the Devil, that castaway from paradise, you, poison of the minds, deaths of the souls, venom of wine and of eating, companions of the very stuff of sin, the cause of our ruin. You, I say, I exhort you women of the ancient enemy, you bitches, sows, screech-owls, night-owls, she-wolves, blood-suckers, [who] cry "Give, give! without ceasing" [Proverbs 30:15-16]. Come now, hear me, harlots, prostitutes, with your lascivious kisses, you wallowing places for fat pigs, couches for unclean spirits, demi-goddesses, sirens, witches, devotees of Diana, if any portents, if any omens are found thus far, they should be judged sufficient for your name. For you are the victim of demons, destined to be cut off by eternal death. From you the Devil is fattened by the abundance of your lust, is fed by your alluring feasts. You vipers full of madness, parading the ardor of your ungovernable lust, through your lovers you mutilate Christ, who is the head of the clergy ... You snatch away the unhappy men from their ministry of the sacred altar, in which they were engaged, that you may strangle them in the slimy glue of your passion.
And just as the Midianites persuaded them through their prostitutes to worship idols, thus you compel these others, on whom the sign of the cross had been in some measure imprinted, to worship the image of a beast.
Moreover, just as Adam desired among all the fruits of paradise precisely that one which God had forbidden, thus you from the entire multitude of human kind have chosen only those who are utterly prohibited from any alliance with females ... the ancient foe pants to invade the summit of the church's chastity through you ... You suck the blood of miserable, unwary men, so that you might inflate into their innermost parts a lethal poison. They should kill you ... for is there any hand with sacred chrism that you shake with fear to touch, or oil that you do not defile, or even pages of the gospels and epistles that you do not use familiarly [ie., in an obscene way]?
3. Defenses of Clerical Marriage:
Not all priests agreed with the reformers. Many had lived
happily with wives/concubines and were unwilling to give them up; for them,
the Gregorian Reform involved the opposite of ‘family values,' as it did
nothing but dissolve many happy unions.
a. In response to Gregory VII's celibacy decrees, the clergy of Germany wrote:
... the man was clearly a heretic and of unsound mind, who by violent interference would force men to live in the manner of angels, and while denying the ordinary course of nature, would release the restraints on fornication and filthy behavior; that if he should proceed to confirm the decision, they would choose rather to desert their priesthood than their marriages ...
b. Around 1075, an anonymous Norman priest wrote the following:
Since the apostle permits and indulges others to have wives on account of fornication, why are we, who are made from the same matter and assume the same sin of the flesh from Adam's sin, why are we not permitted by the same indulgence to have wives, but instead must suffer to send them away?