Are you an EPFL student looking for a semester project?
Work with us on data science and visualisation projects, and deploy your project as an app on top of Graph Search.
Concept
Clerical celibacy
Summary
Clerical celibacy is the requirement in certain religions that some or all members of the clergy be unmarried. Clerical celibacy also requires abstention from deliberately indulging in sexual thoughts and behavior outside of marriage, because these impulses are regarded as sinful.
Within the Catholic Church, clerical celibacy is mandated for all clergy in the Latin Church except in the permanent diaconate. Exceptions are sometimes admitted for ordination to transitional diaconate and priesthood on a case-by-case basis for married clergymen of other churches or communities who become Catholics, but ordination of married men to the episcopacy is excluded (see Personal ordinariate). Clerical marriage is not allowed and therefore, if those for whom in some particular church celibacy is optional (such as permanent deacons in the Latin Church) wish to marry, they must do so before ordination. Eastern Catholic Churches either follow the same rules as the Latin Church or require celibacy for bishops while allowing priestly ordination of married men.
In the Eastern Orthodox Church and Oriental Orthodoxy, celibacy is the normal for bishops; married men may be ordained to the priesthood, but even married priests whose wives pre-decease them are not allowed to remarry after ordination. Similarly, celibacy is not a requirement for ordination as a deacon and in some Oriental Orthodox churches deacons may marry after ordination. For a period in the 5th and early 6th centuries the Church of the East did not apply the rule of celibacy even for ordination to the episcopate. Lutheranism, Anglicanism and Nonconformist Protestantism in general do not require celibacy of its clergy and allow—or even encourage—clerical marriage. In the past, Lutheran deaconesses in the Church of Sweden took vows of celibacy, poverty and ties to a motherhouse; the vow of celibacy was made optional in the 1960s and in the present-day, Lutheran deacons/deaconesses (both male and female) may marry.
Official source
About this result
This page is automatically generated and may contain information that is not correct, complete, up-to-date, or relevant to your search query. The same applies to every other page on this website. Please make sure to verify the information with EPFL's official sources.