Why Are Some Orthodox Priests Married?

Visitors to an Orthodox parish are often surprised to meet the priest's wife at coffee hour. Many people assume that every Christian priest outside Protestantism must be celibate, because in the Latin (Roman) Catholic Church that is usually true.

In the Orthodox Church many parish priests are married, yet bishops never are, and no priest may marry after he is ordained. The combination is one of the oldest disciplines in Christianity, with a written history running from the Pastoral Epistles to a decisive ruling at the end of the seventh century. For the Catholic side in more depth, see Priestly Celibacy: Apostolic Tradition or Later Catholic Discipline?

In brief

The New Testament assumes that many church leaders are married: Peter had a mother-in-law, and the Pastoral Epistles ask that a bishop, presbyter or deacon be "the husband of one wife." The early canons added a rule about timing: a man ordained unmarried may not marry afterwards, but a man who married first may be ordained and keep his wife. The Council in Trullo (691 or 692), whose canons the Orthodox Church uses, confirmed this for deacons and priests and rejected the Roman requirement that married clergy give up married life. The same council required bishops to live apart from their wives, and bishops came to be chosen from celibates, usually monks. Today an Orthodox man may marry and then be ordained deacon and priest; if he is unmarried at ordination he stays unmarried, and a widowed priest may not remarry and continue serving. The priest's wife has an honored place under a title such as presbytera, khouria or matushka. The Catholic Church agrees that celibacy is "not demanded by the very nature of the priesthood," and its Eastern Catholic churches ordain married men, while the Latin Church keeps a celibate rule with exceptions. Some details, such as the wife's title and customs before the Liturgy, vary by tradition.

Thesis: Married priests in the Orthodox Church are an ancient discipline, "marriage first, then ordination," held together with celibate bishops, and the historical record supports it even where particular stories, such as Paphnutius at Nicaea, are uncertain.

What the New Testament shows

The Gospels mention Peter's household plainly: "Now when Jesus had come into Peter's house, He saw his wife's mother lying sick with a fever" (Matthew 8:14, NKJV). Paul asks: "Do we have no right to take along a believing wife, as do also the other apostles, the brothers of the Lord, and Cephas?" (1 Corinthians 9:5). The Pastoral Epistles assume married leaders: "A bishop then must be blameless, the husband of one wife" (1 Timothy 3:2), and "Let deacons be the husbands of one wife, ruling their children and their own houses well" (1 Timothy 3:12; compare Titus 1:6 for presbyters).¹

The same New Testament honors celibacy. Christ speaks of those who "have made themselves eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven's sake" (Matthew 19:12), and Paul writes that "He who is unmarried cares for the things of the Lord" (1 Corinthians 7:32). Orthodoxy keeps both vocations, married and celibate, side by side in its clergy.

The early canons: marriage first, then ordination

The Apostolic Canons (attributed to the apostles, though compiled later) already state the rule that still governs Orthodox practice. Canon 26 reads: "Of those who have been admitted to the clergy unmarried, we ordain, that the readers and singers only may, if they will, marry." A man ordained to the higher orders while single was expected to remain so.²

The same collection protects married clergy. Canon 5 says: "Let not a bishop, presbyter, or deacon, put away his wife under pretence of religion." Canon 17 reads "husband of one wife" strictly: a man "twice married after baptism" cannot be ordained. Canon 51 threatens deposition for a cleric who abstains from marriage "not by way of religious restraint, but as abhorring them, forgetting that God made all things very good."³

There was some early flexibility. The Council of Ancyra (314), canon 10, let deacons who had declared at ordination "that they must marry, because they were not able to abide so" marry afterwards and keep their ministry, "because it was conceded to them by the bishop"; those who had said nothing were to leave the diaconate.⁴

Paphnutius at Nicaea: a famous story, honestly weighed

The best-known story comes from the historian Socrates Scholasticus. He reports that at Nicaea (325) the bishops considered requiring married clergy to abstain from their wives. Paphnutius, an unmarried bishop from Upper Egypt who had lost an eye in persecution, objected, urging "that 'marriage itself is honorable, and the bed undefiled'" (Hebrews 13:4) and that "none should be separated from her to whom, while yet unordained, he had been united." The council, Socrates says, left it "to the discretion of those who were husbands to exercise abstinence if they so wished." Sozomen tells the same story.⁵

{{debated: Whether the Paphnutius episode happened as Socrates tells it is disputed.}} The surviving canons of Nicaea are silent, and the council's acts, as the NPNF editor notes, "are not extant." Socrates' history runs to 439, more than a century after the council, and the Council in Trullo, which ruled on exactly this question, does not cite the story. The nineteenth-century Catholic historian Karl Joseph von Hefele lists Baronius and Valesius among those who rejected it, and notes that Bellarmine thought it untrue. Hefele himself defended it, judging the arguments from silence weak and the story "in perfect harmony with the practice of the ancient Church, and especially of the Greek Church, on the subject of clerical marriages."⁶ Little depends on it: the Apostolic Canons, Ancyra and Trullo show the same discipline. Paphnutius is a possible witness, not a proof.

The Council in Trullo settles the Eastern rule

In 691 or 692 a council met in the domed hall (trullus) of the imperial palace in Constantinople to issue disciplinary canons for the Fifth and Sixth Ecumenical Councils, which had issued none; hence its other name, the Quinisext ("fifth-sixth") Council. The Greeks, as the NPNF editor Henry Percival notes, treated it as "a continuation of the Sixth Synod," and the Orthodox Church still uses its canons. Rome never accepted them as a body; according to Percival, the pope "absolutely refused to have anything to do with them."⁷ (On how the Church recognizes ecumenical councils, see How the Orthodox Church Knows Which Councils Are Ecumenical.)

• Canon 6: it is "in nowise lawful for any subdeacon, deacon or presbyter after his ordination to contract matrimony," but a man may marry "before he is ordained subdeacon, deacon, or presbyter."
• Canon 13 notes the Roman rule that those ordained "should promise no longer to cohabit with their wives," and decides instead that "the lawful marriages of men who are in holy orders be from this time forward firm, by no means dissolving their union with their wives nor depriving them of their mutual intercourse at a convenient time." It asks clergy to abstain when serving at the altar, "according to their own course."
• Canon 12 forbids bishops to live with their wives after consecration, and canon 48 has the bishop's wife, separating "by their mutual consent," enter a distant monastery at the bishop's expense.

{{very-strong: Canon 13 of the Council in Trullo explicitly rejects the requirement that married priests and deacons give up married life.}}⁸ Canon 12 also shows that some bishops "in Africa and Libya and in other places" still lived with their wives in the late seventh century. Fr. Thomas Hopko, writing for the Orthodox Church in America, says that "Since the sixth century it has been the rule in the Orthodox Church that the bishops be single men or widowers," usually monks.⁹

How it works in a parish today

Marriage comes first

A man who hopes to be a priest and also to marry must marry before ordination to the diaconate. Hopko summarizes: "In the Orthodox Church a married man may be ordained to the priesthood. His marriage, however, must be the first for both him and his wife, and he may not remarry and continue in his ministry if his wife should die. If a single man is ordained, he may not marry and retain his service." The rules "are the same for the deacons as they are for the priests."¹⁰

Widowed priests and celibate clergy

The hardest part of the discipline falls on a priest whose wife dies: he does not remarry if he is to keep serving. How he is cared for is a pastoral matter for his bishop. Because bishops are chosen from single men or widowers, a widowed priest may be considered for the episcopate. Not every priest is married: monks may be ordained (a priest-monk is a hieromonk), and some single men are ordained knowing they will not marry.

The priest's wife

The priest's wife holds no ordained office, but she has an honored place and a title that varies by tradition: presbytera (or presvytera) in Greek usage, khouria in Arabic (from khoury, "priest"), matushka (an intimate form of "mother") in Russian, and other forms elsewhere. Ask locally which is used.¹¹ Speaking to a gathering of priests' wives in 2024, Archbishop Elpidophoros of America said: "The role of the Presvytera cannot be overstated."¹²

Before the Liturgy

Trullo canon 13 asks married clergy to abstain when serving at the altar. How this is applied today is a matter of pastoral guidance and varies; it is left to the priest, his wife and his confessor. For what that service involves, see What Happens During the Divine Liturgy?

How Catholic practice compares

The Second Vatican Council taught that priestly celibacy "is not demanded by the very nature of the priesthood, as is apparent from the practice of the early Church and from the traditions of the Eastern Churches," and it "in no way intends to alter that different discipline which legitimately flourishes in the Eastern Churches." The Catechism adds that in the East "married men can be ordained as deacons and priests," and that "In the East as in the West a man who has already received the sacrament of Holy Orders can no longer marry."¹³

The Latin Church's Code of Canon Law binds its clerics to "perfect and perpetual continence for the sake of the kingdom of heaven" and therefore to celibacy, though a married man may be ordained a permanent deacon.¹⁴ Exceptions exist: Anglicanorum coetibus (2009) lets the ordinaries for former Anglicans petition the pope, case by case, to ordain married men as priests.¹⁵ In 2019 the Amazon Synod's final document proposed ordaining "suitable and respected men of the community with a legitimately constituted and stable family" in remote areas; it was a proposal, not a change in law.¹⁶

Eastern Catholic churches ordain married men; a 2014 document of the Congregation for the Eastern Churches says all may do so except the Syro-Malabar and Syro-Malankara Churches. The document is candid: from 1890 Rome restricted married Eastern Catholic priests in North America, and "Deprived of ministers of their own rite, a number estimated at around 200,000 Ruthenian faithful passed to orthodoxy." It then let Eastern Catholic hierarchs with their own jurisdictions outside the traditional territories ordain married men; elsewhere the Congregation decides case by case.¹⁷ The best-known case is St. Alexis Toth, a widowed Greek Catholic priest whom Archbishop John Ireland of St. Paul "refused to recognize," questioning "how Father Alexis could have been a Catholic priest since he had been married." In 1891 Fr. Alexis and 361 parishioners were received into the Orthodox Church; he was glorified in 1994.¹⁸ This is history; Catholic policy has since changed.

Objections, answered gently

"Married priests were originally bound to continence"

Some Catholic scholars argue that the early Church ordained married men but required them to live in continence from ordination onward, and that the Western rule preserves this. Ignace de la Potterie, in an essay on the Vatican's website drawing on Christian Cochini and Cardinal Alfons Stickler, faces the paradox squarely: "how can one base the celibacy of priests on the evidence of texts which talk about married ministers?" His answer is continence, "to which, in fact, married ministers were bound."¹⁹ The Western evidence for continence laws is real. The Orthodox reply is that the Eastern canons point the other way: Apostolic Canon 5 forbids a cleric to put away his wife, Ancyra let some deacons marry, and Trullo canon 13 names the Roman rule and rejects it. Vatican II itself calls the Eastern discipline legitimate.

"Celibacy is higher, so all priests should be celibate"

Orthodoxy agrees that celibacy for the kingdom is a high calling, which is why it keeps monasticism and chooses bishops from celibates. But Paul's preference in 1 Corinthians 7 is advice, and the same apostolic letters list married bishops and deacons.

"Why not marry after ordination, or remarry when widowed?"

Many Protestants read "husband of one wife" as faithfulness in marriage and see no reason a pastor should not marry or remarry at any time; some note that 1 Timothy 4:3 warns against those "forbidding to marry." The Orthodox reply is that the Church does not forbid marriage, and its canons condemn clergy who despise it. The early canons read "husband of one wife" as "married once" and treated ordination as fixing a man's state in life. That reading is old and consistent, though a Protestant may reasonably read the text differently.

What we can say confidently

• The New Testament assumes married church leaders and also honors celibacy.
• From the Apostolic Canons onward, the Eastern rule has been marriage before ordination to the higher orders, none after.
• Trullo canon 13 rejected the Roman requirement that married deacons and priests give up married life; canons 12 and 48 separated bishops from their wives.
• The Catholic Church teaches that celibacy is not required by the nature of priesthood.

What varies or remains disputed

• Whether the Paphnutius episode happened as Socrates and Sozomen tell it.
• Whether the earliest married clergy were expected to live in continence.
• Trullo's exact date (691 or 692) and its standing in the West.
• The title of the priest's wife, practice before serving the Liturgy, and the care of widowed priests, which vary by tradition and are guided by the bishop.

Conclusion

When you meet a priest's wife at coffee hour, you are seeing a very old Christian pattern. The Church honors marriage as a holy mystery and honors those who give up marriage for the kingdom. It places married priests among the families they serve and draws its bishops from those who have left everything to follow Christ. Both are ways of serving the one Lord, who blessed the wedding at Cana and also called people to leave home for his sake. For more, see our guide to Holy Orders, our study of Paul on marriage and celibacy, and the Apostolic Succession guide.

Notes

1. Matthew 8:14; 1 Corinthians 9:5; 1 Timothy 3:2, 12; Titus 1:6; Matthew 19:12; 1 Corinthians 7:32, all NKJV.
2. Apostolic Canons 26 (numbered 27 in some editions), NPNF2 vol. 14, ed. Henry R. Percival.
3. Apostolic Canons 5, 17 and 51, NPNF2 vol. 14.
4. Council of Ancyra (314), canon 10, NPNF2 vol. 14.
5. Socrates Scholasticus, Church History 1.11, trans. A. C. Zenos, NPNF2 vol. 2; Sozomen, Church History 1.23, trans. Chester D. Hartranft, NPNF2 vol. 2.
6. Percival, notes on the First Council of Nicaea, "Proposed Action on Clerical Celibacy," NPNF2 vol. 14, quoting Hefele, History of the Councils vol. 1; Socrates, Church History 7.48 (the history ends in Theodosius II's seventeenth consulship, 439).
7. Percival, introductory note to the Council in Trullo, NPNF2 vol. 14. NPNF gives the date as 692; it is also commonly given as 691.
8. Council in Trullo, canons 6, 12, 13 and 48, NPNF2 vol. 14.
9. Thomas Hopko, The Orthodox Faith, vol. 2, "Holy Orders" (Orthodox Church in America).
10. Hopko, "Holy Orders."
11. OrthodoxWiki, "Presbytera" (titles of the priest's wife in various languages).
12. "Archbishop of America: The role of the Presvytera cannot be overstated," Orthodox Times, July 2, 2024.
13. Second Vatican Council, Presbyterorum Ordinis 16 (1965); Catechism of the Catholic Church 1579-1580.
14. Code of Canon Law (1983), canon 277 §1; on married permanent deacons, canons 1031 §2 and 1042 1°.
15. Benedict XVI, Anglicanorum coetibus (2009), VI §1-2.
16. Synod of Bishops, Special Assembly for the Pan-Amazon Region, Final Document (October 26, 2019), 111.
17. Congregation for the Eastern Churches, Pontificia Praecepta de Clero Uxorato Orientali (June 14, 2014), Acta Apostolicae Sedis 106 (2014): 496-499, English translation posted by the Byzantine Catholic Archeparchy of Pittsburgh; compare the translation at byzcath.org.
18. Orthodox Church in America, Department of Christian Education, "Saint Alexis Toth, Confessor and Defender of Orthodoxy in America."
19. Ignace de la Potterie, "The Biblical Foundation of Priestly Celibacy," Congregation for the Clergy, vatican.va.

Bibliography

Primary sources

• The Holy Bible, New King James Version. Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 1982. Bible Gateway: https://www.biblegateway.com
• Socrates Scholasticus. Church History. Trans. A. C. Zenos. NPNF2 vol. 2. Buffalo, NY: Christian Literature Publishing Co., 1890. Book 1: https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/26011.htm ; Book 7: https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/26017.htm
• Sozomen. Church History. Trans. Chester D. Hartranft. NPNF2 vol. 2. Book 1: https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/26021.htm
• Percival, Henry R., ed. The Seven Ecumenical Councils. NPNF2 vol. 14. 1900. Apostolic Canons: https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/3820.htm ; Council of Ancyra: https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/3802.htm ; Council in Trullo: https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/3814.htm and introductory note https://ccel.org/ccel/schaff/npnf214.xiv.ii.html ; Nicaea, "Proposed Action on Clerical Celibacy": https://ccel.org/ccel/schaff/npnf214.vii.viii.html

Orthodox and patristic sources

• Hopko, Thomas. The Orthodox Faith, vol. 2, Worship, "Holy Orders." Orthodox Church in America: https://www.oca.org/orthodoxy/the-orthodox-faith/worship/the-sacraments/holy-orders
• Orthodox Church in America, Department of Christian Education. "Saint Alexis Toth, Confessor and Defender of Orthodoxy in America": https://www.oca.org/cdn/PDFs/DCE/nasaints-alexis-toth.pdf
• OrthodoxWiki. "Presbytera": https://orthodoxwiki.org/Presbytera
• "Archbishop of America: The role of the Presvytera cannot be overstated." Orthodox Times, July 2, 2024: https://orthodoxtimes.com/archbishop-of-america-the-role-of-the-presvytera-cannot-be-overstated/

Catholic sources and other scholarship

• Second Vatican Council. Presbyterorum Ordinis (1965): https://www.vatican.va/archive/hist_councils/ii_vatican_council/documents/vat-ii_decree_19651207_presbyterorum-ordinis_en.html
• Catechism of the Catholic Church, 1579-1580: https://www.vatican.va/archive/ENG0015/__P4X.HTM
• Code of Canon Law (1983), canon 277: https://www.vatican.va/archive/cod-iuris-canonici/eng/documents/cic_lib2-cann208-329_en.html ; canons 1031 and 1042: https://www.vatican.va/archive/cod-iuris-canonici/eng/documents/cic_lib4-cann998-1165_en.html
• Benedict XVI. Anglicanorum coetibus (2009): https://www.vatican.va/content/benedict-xvi/en/apost_constitutions/documents/hf_ben-xvi_apc_20091104_anglicanorum-coetibus.html
• Congregation for the Eastern Churches. Pontificia Praecepta de Clero Uxorato Orientali (2014), Acta Apostolicae Sedis 106 (2014): 496-499. English translation: https://www.archpitt.net/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/5ba54656e97d29dc3b6c-167cb41a96f65863ccf1c72215e1a1e4.r28.cf1.rackcdn.com_Acta%20AS%20Married%20priests.pdf ; alternative translation: https://www.byzcath.org/index.php/news-mainmenu-49/4436-pope-francis-restores-right-of-eastern-catholics-to-ordain-married-men-worldwide
• Synod of Bishops, Special Assembly for the Pan-Amazon Region. Final Document (2019): https://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/synod/documents/rc_synod_doc_20191026_sinodo-amazzonia_en.html
• de la Potterie, Ignace. "The Biblical Foundation of Priestly Celibacy." Congregation for the Clergy: https://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cclergy/documents/rc_con_cclergy_doc_01011993_bfoun_en.html