Council of Trent on Marriage

 Had an interesting question posed on the meaning of the Council of Trent's teaching on marriage:

Good morning! I’m really struggling with a teaching expressed by the Council of Trent and wonder if you can help me understand it:

“If any one saith, that the marriage state is to be placed above the state of virginity, or of celibacy, and that it is not better and more blessed to remain in virginity, or in celibacy, than to be united in matrimony; let him be anathema.”

My difficulty isn’t that I think marriage should be considered superior to celibacy. I don’t have any problem saying that both are good gifts from God or even that virginity for the sake of the Kingdom has a unique significance.

What I’m struggling with is the idea that one vocation is objectively more blessed than the other.

If God genuinely calls some people to marriage and others to celibacy, why would faithful obedience to one divine vocation be considered more blessed than faithful obedience to another? If a woman is called to marriage and motherhood and faithfully lives that vocation, in what sense is her state less blessed than that of a woman called to religious life?

Marriage was created by God, instituted before the Fall, elevated to a sacrament, and chosen by God as the ordinary means by which human beings come into existence and are formed in the faith. Every saint, priest, religious, bishop, pope, and even Christ entered the world through a family. The Church itself continues because husbands and wives cooperate with God in bringing children into the world and raising them in the faith.

Given all of that, I don’t understand why marriage would be considered less blessed rather than differently blessed.

Part of why I’m struggling with this is that it seems to have implications for how we understand God’s design. If marriage is truly God’s calling for many people, why would He establish a hierarchy in which those people are called to a less blessed state? Why would all children enter the world through this less blessed vocation? What am I missing about the Catholic understanding of blessing, vocation, and God’s purposes here?

I know this is a defined Catholic teaching, so I’m not looking to argue against it. I’m genuinely trying to understand it because right now it’s one of the teachings I find hardest to reconcile.

And to be completely honest, at the moment my instincts are much closer to “marriage and celibacy are differently blessed according to God’s calling” than to the idea that celibacy is objectively more blessed. I’m trying to understand what I’m missing.

My response: 

A couple of starter points to put the Council of Trent into historical context. First of all, the Council of Trent was an ecumenical council that was called in specific response to the Reformation at the height of the Reformation. Things were spiraling out of control both in what had previously been a fairly unified Western Christendom in terms of the Catholic Church's relation to countries and what have you. 

The Council met off and on for a good 18 years. Many of the delegates had to secretly pass through Protestant countries and areas on pain of imprisonment or execution to attend. It was a bad time for everyone. Countries were rebelling against the Church. People were getting executed over matters of conscience and religion. Neither side really came out smelling like a rose because issues were so heated, and communication was slow and very poor when it happened by the time of Trent. Let's just say that there were plenty of people on every side who were perfect examples of Christians Behaving Badly. 

Now, to officially respond to a lot of the accusations being leveled against the Church by various Protestant groups and theologians, the Catholic Church called the Council of Trent as a formal ecumenical council. There was a lot of study and thought and discernment among the hierarchy of the Catholic Church. The Church was really in a lot of ways on its heels on how best to respond because there were so many accusations and misunderstandings about Church teaching and practice, even within the Church itself. There had been piecemeal answers and dialogues since the outbreak of Luther's 95 theses. Passions were enflamed. And in some of the Protestants' defenses, there was some things that did indeed to be addressed and reformed within the Church. There was corruption going on. There were priests and theologians out there that were teaching things within the Church that were not in keeping with Catholic Magisterium. Now, I won't beat that horse anymore, but suffice is to say, it was a mess that needed official and definitive teaching from the Church itself in the form of an ecumenical council.

 One of the major issues that Protestants brought up (Luther in particularly but his criticisms went back several generations in one form or another before the Reformation) was about the nature of marriage and celibacy. There were Protestants (not all) that believed that basically intentional celibacy for clergy or religious was a form of unnatural degeneracy. Some like Luther even went so far as to say marriage was not even a sacrament but simply a civil agreement for two people to live together. Luther, a former priest, ended up marrying a former nun, so he had his own biases on that issue. Some Protestants looked at Scripture and said that since Peter had a mother-in-law, he must have been married. So, clerical celibacy, so they claimed, was unscriptural and therefore another self justifying proof that the Catholic Church was apostate in their view. 

Not all Protestants were on board with that. Henry VIII, who in many ways was extremely conservative in theology when it suited him, violently rejected the idea of clergy being married. Anglican clergy were to remain celibate, and Henry VIII would not tolerate even the idea of the Protestant married clergy thing. Which, granted, was really weird as he saw himself as the head of the church and was married (and divorced) several times, but that's a side issue for this discussion. Henry VIII also dissolved most of the monasteries and convents and threw celibate monks and nuns out into the street often because he saw monks and nuns as dregs of society who did not contribute to the economy. They needed to go out and get married and get a real job, basically. That was complete nonsense, but that's how he justified it to himself. 

Part of this violent reaction to celibacy was partially due to clergy abuse in the Middle Ages. It was viewed in the Catholic Church in the Middle Ages that celibacy somehow made a person a higher level of human being in terms of moral theology. Part of it was tied to the idea of the sacerdotal priesthood. Regardless, however, the meta message that got sent to laity was that being married was a lesser estate than being celibate. Some Catholic theologians believed that sex was dirty or some sort of necessary evil to produce children. 

This was coupled with a lot of scandals where, as was not uncommon, for priests and sometimes even bishops to publicly be celibate, they'd have basically common law wives or mistresses on the side. Sometimes bishops would father illegimate children and sell them church offices when they got older (that's called simony). Sometimes they would even with church funds keep a "wife" and kids in a house on the side. They wouldn't usually parade that fact around, but it happened. And largely it seemed that many lay people were actually not scandalized by this. They just accepted it as somewhat normal even and just looked the other way as long as the priest or bishop carried on in private. Now, probably most priests remained celibate but there were enough open and notorious cases that it did happen. So, this Protestant outrage at this hypocrisy was not without some warrant. Once the Reformation began in earnest and it because open season on attacking the Catholic church, it created a real theological issue within the Catholic Church on how to respond to this. 

This is where this particular item from the Council of Trent comes in. It was actually a defense of celibacy and the idea that sometimes God calls some people to a vocation of being single. Paul talks about this in his epistles. If God calls you to something, it's a gift. It's not necessary a better or higher estate, it's just what God's plan for you is. It does not mean you are a degenerate or some sort of repressed creeper. It's just part of God's plan. God does not call everyone to the married life, as many Protestants were alleging. Having a vocation of being married or single are both good if that's what God is calling you to. 

Unfortunately, sometimes the language of the Council of Trent is couched in very "us vs. heretics" language that sounds very forceful. That comes from the high passions that were running on both sides at the time. Again, we have to look at the greater truth and get past of the hard language that sometimes the canons from the Council of Trent can come off as.