by Raffy Gutierrez
Download the free e-book Veneration Without Thinking here:
https://archive.org/details/veneration-without-thinking-by-raffy-gutierrez
Chapter 5: Celibate Men Decided For You
Before we accept a doctrine as truth, there is one question we almost never think to ask.
Who wrote it?
Not in the abstract. Not “the Church” or “tradition” or “the wisdom of the ages.” Specifically. By name. With their actual qualifications clearly on the table.
The doctrine that governs your marriage — that declares it permanent, indissoluble, and beyond your power to legally end — was not handed down from heaven. It was written by specific human beings. They have names. They have biographies. And when you read those biographies, something becomes impossible to ignore.
Not one of them had ever been married.
Augustine of Hippo (354–430 AD)
Augustine is the foundation. Everything that follows in Catholic marriage theology is built on what he established in De Bono Coniugali — the three goods of marriage: offspring, fidelity, and the permanent bond. Remove Augustine and the entire structure loses its footing.
Here is who Augustine was before he became the Church’s most authoritative voice on marriage.
For thirteen years, he lived with a woman whose name we do not know. She appears in his Confessions only as my concubine. They had a son together, Adeodatus. When an advantageous marriage was arranged for Augustine, he dismissed her — sent her back to Africa. He then found the wait for his arranged marriage too long and took a second concubine in the interim.
This is the man who defined what marriage must be and what it demands of those inside it.
His personal history does not automatically invalidate his theology. Ideas can have merit regardless of who holds them. But it does complicate, permanently, the claim that Catholic marriage doctrine was built by people with unimpeachable authority over the institution’s demands. Augustine also held that sexual desire within marriage was itself a consequence of original sin — fallen, morally suspect, something to be managed rather than celebrated. That suspicion of the body permeates Catholic marriage theology to this day.
Hugh of Saint Victor (1096–1141)
Hugh was a canon regular — bound by vows of celibacy, poverty, and obedience. He wrote the first systematic Catholic sacramental theology. His ideal for Christian marriage was modeled explicitly on what he believed to be the sexless union of Mary and Joseph.
For Hugh, sexual intimacy within marriage was the lesser good. Permissible, but spiritually inferior to a celibate union. This man set the initial parameters for the theology that would govern the marriages of millions.
Peter Lombard (c. 1096–1160)
Lombard’s Sententiarum Libri IV was the required theological textbook at Catholic universities for approximately four centuries. Every major theologian who trained in those institutions — Aquinas, Bonaventure, Duns Scotus — was trained on Lombard’s categories. He fixed the number of sacraments at seven and included marriage.
He was celibate. He had never been married.
Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274)
Aquinas joined the Dominican Order at approximately eighteen years of age, taking vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience. He lived his entire adult life as a celibate friar. He died at forty-nine having never entered a marriage, never sustained an intimate relationship with another person — and having produced the most authoritative philosophical account in the Catholic tradition of what marriage is and what it permanently demands of those who enter it.
Duns Scotus (c. 1266–1308)
Scotus was a Franciscan friar. His most important contribution for this debate is a distinction he made within Catholic theology itself: the distinction between natural civil marriage and sacramental marriage. He acknowledged, from inside the tradition, that the two are separable categories.
This is the distinction the CBCP resists most vigorously today. It came not from outside critics but from one of their own medieval architects.
The Council of Trent (1545–1563)
Session XXIV of the Council of Trent formally defined marriage as one of the seven sacraments and declared that denying this definition was heresy. Approximately two hundred clergy attended.
Every one of them was celibate. Not one had been married. Not one was subject to the doctrine they were permanently defining for everyone else.
The doctrine that governs your marriage was defined by men who were constitutionally prohibited from entering one. This is not incidental to how the doctrine was built. It is the context in which it was built.
What This Means
A celibate person can have genuine insight into the nature of committed partnership. A man who has never been married can make true observations about what marriage requires. These things are possible.
But when a doctrine is constructed entirely by people who have never lived inside it — ratified by councils composed entirely of people who have never lived inside it — and then enforced on millions who must live inside it with no legal exit — the question of experiential authority cannot simply be set aside.
You were never told who wrote the rules you are living under.
Now you know.
And knowing changes the question. The doctrine was built by identifiable humans. It has also been changed by those same institutional humans — more times, and in more significant ways, than its defenders ever acknowledge.
That is what the next chapter examines.
— End of Chapter 5 —
Next week: Chapter 6 — What God Decided For You. Bahala na, poverty, pagtitiis — and the theology that turned your suffering into a spiritual credential. Free, in full, every week, right here in The City Post. If this made you think, share it with someone who needs to.
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Raffy Gutierrez writes a weekly column on politics, religion, and civil society. The views expressed are solely his own.
