This article looks at the debate on clerical celibacy among Czech theologians during the Enlightenment. Drawing largely on their writings, which in many cases served as textbooks in the training of future priests and thus had a significant impact, it analyses the origins, arguments and course of the debate. Doubts about the future of celibacy first appeared in canon law in the 1770s, conditioned in part by secular factors such as populationism. In the late 1780s clerical celibacy was publicly challenged by influential university theologians such as the church historian Kaspar Royko in Prague and the theologian Josef Lauber in Olomouc, a former Jansenist. Their main argument was the widespread non-compliance by priests and its harmful social consequences. The law also had its defenders (e.g. Franz Christoph Pittroff), whose main argument was the traditional one of the need for purity in the Eucharist. During the 1790s the public controversy about celibacy disappeared; but for many years the discourse on the subject remained strongly influenced by Enlightenment thinking.
This study examines when mandatory clerical celibacy was instituted in the Czech lands. At first it was only demanded of candidates to become bishops while other priests regularly had wives and children up to the 12th century. The Papal Curia first intervened in favour of celibacy in 1143 through a mission by Cardinal Guido when married clerics were removed from their posts. Another came with Cardinal Peter in 1197 when he (unsuccessfully) demanded that those being ordained also take a vow of purity. Celibacy was then enforced after the Fourth Council of the Lateran in 1215.