Clerical marriage is the practice of allowing clergy to marry. Clerical marriage is admitted in Protestantism, Judaism, Anglicanism, Independent Catholic Churches, and the Japanese sects of Buddhism. The Roman Catholic Church, while allowing married men to be ordained (only exceptionally in its Western form but more commonly in the Eastern Catholic Churches), also excludes clerical marriage. Churches such as the Eastern Orthodox and the Oriental Orthodox exclude this practice for their priests, while accepting already married men for ordination to priesthood.
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Famous quotes containing the words clerical and/or marriage:
“How unpleasant to meet Mr. Eliot!
With his features of clerical cut,
And his brow so grim
And his mouth so prim”
—T.S. (Thomas Stearns)
“Adultery is the vice of equivocation.
It is not marriage but a mockery of it, a merging that mixes love and dread together like jackstraws. There is no understanding of contentment in adultery.... You belong to each other in what together you’ve made of a third identity that almost immediately cancels your own. There is a law in art that proves it. Two colors are proven complimentary only when forming that most desolate of all colors—neutral gray.”
—Alexander Theroux (b. 1940)