Articles Quote by Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Priestly celibacy has been guarded by the Church for centuries as a brilliant jewel, and retains its value undiminished even in our time when…

— Pope Paul VI

“During the tenth and eleventh centuries the rule of the Church prohibiting the clergy from marrying appears to have been widely and publicly neglected…

— James Harvey Robinson

“(5.) The working of the Romish system of celibacy, voluntary poverty, and monastic vows, has produced such fruits as prove the principle on which…

— Archibald Alexander Hodge

The vow of celibacy is a matter of keeping one's word to Christ and the Church. a duty and a proof of the priest's…

— Pope John Paul II

“doctrines like papal infallibility and the Catholic teaching on marriage and social morality are believed with a conviction that scandalizes those who do not…

— John A. Hardon

The church may hold whatever it holds with regard to clerical celibacy.

— William P. Leahy

“The common mistake of the religious celibate has been to suppose that the highest spiritual life absolutely demands the renunciation of sexuality, as if…

— Alan Wilson Watts

“as Barbara Tuchman, author of Distant Mirror, put it, “clerical celibacy was a joke.” Despite the previous ban on clerical marriages, nuns, monks, cardinals,…

— Charles River Editors

A celibate clergy is an especially good idea, because it tends to suppress any hereditary propensity toward fanaticism.

— Carl Sagan

Almost every one of the great religions of the world has made special provisions for them, and the woman who has preferred a celibate…

— Mary Livermore

“the age in which the Romish Church had made marriage a legalized tyranny, and the laity, by a natural and pardonable revulsion, had exalted…

— Charles Kingsley

the most grievous wrong of that day ... was to be found in the establishment of the celibacy of the clergy. ... This hideous…

— Lillie Devereux Blake