CLERICAL CELIBACY.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume IV, Issue 191, 24 November 1876, Page 9

CLERICAL CELIBACY.

We read as follows in the Dublin ' Telegraph :' The Bishop of Manchester somewhat astonished his listeners the other day at Warriugton, by demonstrating the practical wisdom of the Catholic Church in its strict enforcement of celibacy on the part of the priesthood. The Bishop entered with great frankness into the question, setting aside all examination into the moral superiority acquired by the sacrifice of the domestic ties so dear to human nature, and the display thereby of the more entire devotion to the Church, and merely taking into consideration the value of the law in its practical and worldly sense. The occasion of the bishop's speech was the anniversary of the Institution for the Relief of the Widows and Education of the Daughters of the Clergy of the Diocese of Chester and Manchester, and, after the luncheon given on the lawn, without which no religious celebration is ever considered complete in England, his Grace, who presided, after being warmed up to the difficult task he had undertaken, while praising the zeal and charity of the institution, ventui ed to remonstrate against the very necessity for its foundation. As president of the feast he felt in duty bound to propose 'Success to the Clergy Widows and Orphans Institution, " but begged to impart a few of the suggestions which had occurred to him with regard to the objects of the charity. He owned to the justice of the sentence pronounced by some members of his clergy w hich stamped him as a hard-hearted bishop because he had so repeatedly refused to prefer a clergyman simply because he bad been imprudent enough to marry without the means of keeping a wife, and had brought into the world a greater number of children than, he could provide for. The bishop owned to a preference for (hose men who could work, and he could not recognize the fitness of the man who had forgotten the lesson of prudence, and whose appeal for prefermeu was founded on no other merit than having a wife and six children, always considered a sufficient motive in the possessor to entitle him to the best liviue in the diocese ; then, encouraged by the approval of his audience the bishop went further still, and argued that marriages amongst the r clergy were evidently arranged when the Protestant Church was in its intancy, out of a mere spirit of opposition. The Catholic Church being bound to celibacy, it followed that the Church of England must be bound to marriage, which was rather an ingenious argument on the part of his Grace- The bishop's candor in owning his great sorrow at perceiving that his clergymen were not slow to go in that direction afforded great amusement. "Indeed they are iather too precipitate, , said the bishop in conclusion, " for I alway observe that the young clergyman least earnest iv his work is sure to be most earnest in the art of making love." The effect produced by the bishop's speech can be easily imagined: great laughter and good humor, d winking amongst the widows and orphan daughters ot the clergy, for whose benefit the entertainment was given, and much pious disapproval amongst the elders of the Cmuvli whose sons and daughters have long since been provided for borne little indignation was manifested also amongst the young curates present, who beheld iv the argument an attack upon their principles it not upon their actual practice ; and many a resolution to marry' waß suspended— many a wise resolve to abstain for a while till the bishop s opinion had become modified was silently adopted by fcho younger branches of the clergy there assembled. The speech is said to have created considerable displeasure amongst the clergy as a body and numberless have been the expostulatory letters received by his Grace since the luncheon at Warrington.