NCRegister Blog: What I Learned From Victorian Literature about Priestly Celibacy

As I recently reread Anthony Trollope’s Barchester Towers I commented to my husband that one could use the events of the novel to argue for why the Catholic Church should not have married priesthood be the norm. The novel tells of the conflicts within the Anglican hierarchy of the fictional cathedral town of Barchester set in the fictional English county of Barsetshire in the mid-19th century. It shows what a hierarchical church looks like after nearly 300 years of mostly married clergy running the church from the curates to the bishops. I know that a church where the Queen is the head and the politicians appoint bishops does not perfectly show truths about the modern Catholic Church, but we can still learn lessons from their experience, even those expressed in novels. (I must confess from the get-go that most of my knowledge of the Church of England comes from my extensive reading of Victorian literature, so bear with me.)...

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