On Apr 21, 2009, at 9:18 AM, C. G. Estabrook wrote:
This couldn't be further from reality. Who the hell spawned the episcopate--serfs? Clerical celibacy was the iron link binding the Church to feudalism--because clerical office couldn't be inherited recruitment had to come from the aristocracy and no self-perpetuating clerical caste could ever take shape. Meanwhile the lower clergy, deprived of legal sanction for their family lives, became itself an army of serfs for the episcopate--while the Church itself was becoming by far the largest feudal landlord everywhere in Europe. Estabrook would present the Reformation and the French Revolution, which both *began* by abolishing celibacy, as "feudal" movements!
> In fact, the RCC fought a thousand-year battle with feudalism, and
> one of its scars, so to speak, was clerical celibacy. If you'll
> forgive the quotation--
>
> "Celibacy was made the rule in the western church in the course of
> the 11th century in a struggle for the independence of the christian
> movement from feudalism, [which] rebuilt society according to family
> relations, natural and artificial: a vassal was a son to his lord,
> and obligations were respectively filial and paternal. To our eyes
> the feudal order collapsed the distinction between public and
> private; it produced an entire society -- which lasted a thousand
> years, roughly from the 8th through the 18th centuries -- structured
> like the mafia. The church sought to throw off control by the new
> lords of Europe by celibacy, which ended the natural family ties,
> and by what came to be known as 'the investiture controversy,' which
> cut the artificial ones. The uniqueness of the church order that
> grew from feudalism is due in part to the uniqueness of feudalism
> itself -- a polity that finds a parallel only in pre-modern Japan
> (where christianity was officially suppressed)..."
> -- "Sex and Power in Catholicism" <www.counterpunch.org/estabrook0420.html
> >.
Shane Mage
> This cosmos did none of gods or men make, but it
> always was and is and shall be: an everlasting fire,
> kindling in measures and going out in measures."
>
> Herakleitos of Ephesos