Beginning with early Christian asceticism, Lea traces the long effort to forbid marriage to the clergy: the ante-Nicene church, the Council of Nicaea, legislation and its enforcement, the different path of the Eastern Church, monasticism, and the struggles of the barbarian and Carolingian centuries onward to the Reformation and beyond. This is the enlarged second edition of a work first published in 1867.
A pioneering and still-cited history of a question that continues to stir the Catholic Church. Download the free EPUB.