Sir, - One could hardly expect Leslie W. Lucas (June 7th) to be impressed by Fr Manning's excellent explanation of the origins of clerical celibacy (May 31st): Fr Manning, after all, is speaking for the Catholic Church. Dr Lucas fails, apparently, to find support for Fr Manning or for celibacy in "his" Bible. If this, of course, is a reference to a Bible of the reformed tradition, mutilated both in text and interpretation by 16th-century rationalists, I am not surprised. Catholic tradition, however, does not merely dwell on the explicit in Sacred Scripture but explicates also, under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, what is implicit.
The utter silence of Scripture about St Peter's wife from before the time of the Last Supper until his own martyrdom as Bishop of Rome indicates to all but the most captious that, by this stage, Peter and his earthly spouse had entered upon a mariage blanc - she does not seem even to have accompanied her husband beyond the confines of Galilee. In fact, in the early centuries of the Church, with the frequent conversion of already married adults to Christianity, clerical celibacy took precisely this form of continence within a previous union, as the Council of Elvira makes plain. Naturally, systematic canonical legislation, which is as descriptive of precedent as prescriptive of posterity, came only later. But it is interesting to note that Pope Siricius, by the end of the fourth century, was already requiring even readers and acolytes to be celibate.
Again Dr Lucas must cultivate the subtlety to understand what is unspoken here - the obvious presumption of celibacy in the major orders. In all Churches with valid sacraments, at any rate, it has been unheard of from the beginning that one invested with the fullness of the priesthood should simultaneously in the full sense be married. - Yours, etc.,
Rev David O'Hanlon, CC, Kentstown, Co Meath.