Percy-L: Literary, Religious, Scientific, and Philosophical Discussion of Walker Percy

["Rhonda McDonnell" <rhonda_mcdonnell AT hotmail.com>]

> From: Wade Riddick <riddick AT mail.la.utexas.edu>
> Inheritence is certainly important.  The Catholic Church was also used to
> settle bloody political disputes by the landed estates.  If you were on a
> losing side, you always had the opportunity to go into the monestary where
> celibacy guaranteed you wouldn't have children to come back and reassert
> your familial rights.  It was a way to retire from the bloodlines of
> nobility and make peace deals stick.
If we're speaking of the medieval church, we ought to keep in mind that, for 
a significant portion of the clergy, celibacy wasn't a doctrine that was 
kept. In fact, for just the reasons Wade has pointed out, the church was in 
far worse trouble then than it is now. And it survived, as it will now.

Rhonda

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