Aren't any of the Gang of Four Married?

It' conveys all bishops was a body and all bishops of a region. In the context of the quote, I took it to mean all the bishops in the regions being governed by the CoGA. This as opposed to bishops militant, inquisitors and or accountants.

Annachie wrote:Peter, the normal meaning of episcopate is all bishops, but RFC could have redefined the term for safehold.

The pope thing mentioned above is one of the two ways you can get a married Roman Catholic Priest. Legally, since it happened a few times in the past illegally.

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Annachie wrote:Peter, the normal meaning of episcopate is all bishops, but RFC could have redefined the term for safehold.

The pope thing mentioned above is one of the two ways you can get a married Roman Catholic Priest. Legally, since it happened a few times in the past illegally.

In the RC church, the doctrine of priestly celibacy and priests not marrying had an economic motivation.

Sales of bishoprics were an important source of revenue for the early church. Primogeniture was already firmly established in Europe, with the notion that the eldest son inherited the father's titles, lands, and power. The RC church did not want bishoprics to be heritable, and the solution was a doctrine of priestly celibacy which forbade priests from marrying. It could not prevent priests from having sex, but children of such unions would be bastards who could not inherit.
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Dennis

DMcCunney wrote:

Annachie wrote:Peter, the normal meaning of episcopate is all bishops, but RFC could have redefined the term for safehold.

The pope thing mentioned above is one of the two ways you can get a married Roman Catholic Priest. Legally, since it happened a few times in the past illegally.

In the RC church, the doctrine of priestly celibacy and priests not marrying had an economic motivation.

Sales of bishoprics were an important source of revenue for the early church. Primogeniture was already firmly established in Europe, with the notion that the eldest son inherited the father's titles, lands, and power. The RC church did not want bishoprics to be heritable, and the solution was a doctrine of priestly celibacy which forbade priests from marrying. It could not prevent priests from having sex, but children of such unions would be bastards who could not inherit.
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Dennis

Uh. Primogeniture was not established in Europe until around 1000 or so. And even then, it was only in Western Europe and not "firmly" established - German lands continued to have other systems of inheritance long after primogeniture was established in England/Northern France.

And the sale of bishoprics was not a source of income for the early church (if by early church you mean before Constantine). Simony, or the selling of church offices, was condemned by most church councils. You may be thinking of the annates - which were the payment by a newly installed office holder to the person installing them of a tax. This system was not fully developed until around 1200.

Any sale of bishoprics in the early Middle Ages was usually by laymen, and thus wouldn't have been much of a source of income to the church.

Charybdis wrote:This is what happens when you have time to re-read.

In the foundation book, 'Off Armageddon Reef' (OAR), we have this CoGA requirement;

... both the Writ and the Church’s own regulations also required that any churchman who aspired to the ranks of the episcopate must have married. How else could he understand the physical and emotional needs of the wedded believers for whose spiritual well-being he was responsible? (pg 261)

Yet, there is no textev that I can find that gives the marriage status for ANY of the Go4's marriage status! We have ample evidence of Vicar Zhaspahr Clyntahn's lust and assignations in his own quarters, but as for Vicars Rhobair Duchairn, Allayn Magwair, and Zahmsyn Trynair, they appear to be like contemporary Roman Catholic Cardinals, celibate and unmarried!

Yet, much is made of Clyntahn's abuse of the families of "The Circle" members and how Madame Ahnzhelyk / Nynian's organizaion had gone to dangerous lengths to save some of them along with Adorai (and sons), the family of Charis Archbishop Erayk Dynnys. Of course, we also have Vicar Hauwerd Wylsynn, also listed as NEVER marrying.

So, is it a requirement or a 'requirement'?

I think all of the Go4's vicars are married, if only for convenience sake. It's possible that this policy is not stringently enforced in some cases (like Hauwerd Wylsynn) where there are family connections to ensure promotions (Hauwerd Wylsynn was a Temple Guardsman and had risen through the ranks as a Langhornite). At the same time, I'm certain that someone as ambitious as Trynair or Clyntahn would make the necessary personal sacrifices and marry some woman out of convenience. Erayk Dynnys' wife commented that she and her husband didn't have much of a marriage, yet they had two legitimate sons. And we know Nynian was the illegitimate daughter of a Grand Vicar, which raises the question of why he couldn't marry her mother and thus make her legitimate to avoid a scandal). So I have no doubt that most (if not all) of them are married though it's likely that for many it is a marriage of convenience.

Annachie wrote:The pope thing mentioned above is one of the two ways you can get a married Roman Catholic Priest. Legally, since it happened a few times in the past illegally.

Well, depends on the area... the Eastern Catholics (who are part of the same Catholic Church, in union with the pope) ordinarily have married parish priests, as has been Eastern Christian tradition going back to the 7th century or earlier.

Since we're going to talk about my Church (Roman Catholic) and celibacy allow me to point you to the churches own arguments in support of it.
http://www.catholic.com/magazine/articl ... priesthood
http://www.catholic.com/tracts/celibacy ... priesthood

This will at least give you the theological basis for the churchs position.

This article on the History News Network may cover some of the sociological reason for the change.
http://historynewsnetwork.org/article/696

And finally my own two cents. I remember reading somewhere, and I can't find a reference so perhaps I should be suspicious of my memory, that one of the contributing factors was that the church needed to cleanse itself of what were becoming family dynasties in control of various diocese or even regions. Dad the Bishop would help his sons the priests to work their way up the internal church structure. Since inevitably higher rank churchman were often related to the political powers of Europe it was getting a bit nasty when the Universal church started looking more like an organ of the various national powers. Eliminating married priests meant the nepotism stopped. Maybe not immediately, but over time.
SO celibate priests were a way of cleaning up the priesthood. As I said though, I can't recall my source, so that's not as authoritative a view as I'd like.

In any case, shall we get back to the Church of God Awaiting and the Church of Charis as our fact set? The theological arguments regarding the doctrine, policy, tradition, and canon law of the RC Church could well overwhelm this board and flood out the inter-wibble. We've been refining our positions and logic for 2000 years, so the best way to describe most of it gets to be "it's complicated."

Larry

The difficulty is that we don't actually have a fact set for the COGA, since we can't observe it directly. So people are substituting observations of the various Christian churches, and since for most people that means the Western churches...

It is assumed, since Himself hasn't actually explained his model TTBOMK, that the dynastic structure of the COGA is an extrapolation of what seems to have been happening in the Roman Church before the 10th-century crack-down on celibacy. [it can be noted, BTW, that the nepotism lasted a very long time - the office of Cardinal Nephew was abolished very late in the 18th century, although it wasn't invariably occupied by a nephew of the Pope] How accurate the extrapolation [or the assumption, for that matter] being made is, is an open question, actually. AFAIK, the Eastern Churches, which have maintained a married priesthood, haven't faced any significant problems with nepotism or 'family churches', so it doesn't seem to be an inevitable consequence. However, my guess it that that is in large part due to the power that the monasteries have retained in those churches: it appears that bishops and patriarchs are much more likely to come from the monastic, and therefore celibate, clergy. The governing structure of the COGA, as originally constituted, doesn't really correspond to anything in the Christian churches. As it actually developed, OTOH, it bears a considerable resemblance to the Roman Church in combination with the Italian nobility, as they operated from roughly the 12th to the 18th centuries, although with the balance tilted towards the religious side as the ultimate source of power and patronage. While the Orders are powerful in the COGA, they aren't primarily monastic; monasticism seems in fact to be an incidental, and doesn't assume the importance it has historically held for Christianity. Whether the profound corruption of the COGA can be attributed to that, of course, is something to be debated. Personally I would hold that the fault lies at the foundation itself.

Larry wrote:Since we're going to talk about my Church (Roman Catholic) and celibacy allow me to point you to the churches own arguments in support of it.
http://www.catholic.com/magazine/articl ... priesthood
http://www.catholic.com/tracts/celibacy ... priesthood

This will at least give you the theological basis for the churchs position.

This article on the History News Network may cover some of the sociological reason for the change.
http://historynewsnetwork.org/article/696

And finally my own two cents. I remember reading somewhere, and I can't find a reference so perhaps I should be suspicious of my memory, that one of the contributing factors was that the church needed to cleanse itself of what were becoming family dynasties in control of various diocese or even regions. Dad the Bishop would help his sons the priests to work their way up the internal church structure. Since inevitably higher rank churchman were often related to the political powers of Europe it was getting a bit nasty when the Universal church started looking more like an organ of the various national powers. Eliminating married priests meant the nepotism stopped. Maybe not immediately, but over time.
SO celibate priests were a way of cleaning up the priesthood. As I said though, I can't recall my source, so that's not as authoritative a view as I'd like.

In any case, shall we get back to the Church of God Awaiting and the Church of Charis as our fact set? The theological arguments regarding the doctrine, policy, tradition, and canon law of the RC Church could well overwhelm this board and flood out the inter-wibble. We've been refining our positions and logic for 2000 years, so the best way to describe most of it gets to be "it's complicated."

Larry

thanatos wrote:
… And we know Nynian was the illegitimate daughter of a Grand Vicar, which raises the question of why he couldn't marry her mother and thus make her legitimate to avoid a scandal). So I have no doubt that most (if not all) of them are married though it's likely that for many it is a marriage of convenience.

Presumably because said Grand Vicar was already married to someone else….

My impression is that Eastern Orthodox priests are allowed to marry, but their bishops and archbishops must be celibate. This impression came from a conversation with an Orthodox priest who was himself married.

Don

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Louis R wrote:Personally I would hold that the fault lies at the foundation itself.

Essentially, yeah. I mean, the COGA was set up as a planetary government - the people who designed it didn't care about the religion except as a tool.

The genuine corruption (in the sense of deviation from Langhorne's and Bedard's original intent - the Grand Vicar becoming a puppet, gunpowder being approved because of bribes, Charis being attacked on suspicion*, etc.) strikes me as well within the range of what's seen in Earth secular governments.

*Although Clyntahn's suspicions were actually accurate, so that one's arguable. I don't think it was supposed to work that way though.