strong feeling grew up among the
laity that church revenues should not go to support the priest's
family.[4] Lastly, such partial attempts as we have already described to
enforce upon the clergy a special rule of continence, by their very
failure, suggested more heroic measures. Therefore, side by side with
the evidence for difficult enforcement of the old rules, we find an
equally constant series of new and more stringent enactments.

The first church council which definitely forbade marriage to the higher
clergy was the local Spanish synod of Elvira (A.D. 305). A similar
interpretation has sometimes been claimed for the third canon of that
general council of Nicaea to which we owe the Nicene creed (325), but
this is now abandoned by the best authorities on all sides. There can be
no doubt, however, that the 4th century opened a wide breach in this
respect between the Eastern and Western churches. The modern Greek
custom is "(a) that most candidates for Holy Orders are dismissed from
the episcopal seminaries shortly before being ordained deacons, in order
that they may marry (their partners being in fact mostly daughters of
clergymen), and after their marriage, return to the seminaries in order
to take the higher orders; (b) that, as priests, they still continue the
marriages thus contracted, but may not remarry on the death of their
wife; and (c) that the Greek bishops, who may not continue their married
life, are commonly not chosen out of the ranks of the married secular
clergy, but from among the monks."[5] The Eastern Church, therefore,
still adheres fairly closely to the rules laid down by the Apostolical
Canons in the 4th century. In the West, however, a decisive forward step
was taken by Popes Damasus and Siricius during the last quarter of that
century. The famous decretal of Siricius (385) not only enjoined strict
celibacy on bishops, priests and deacons, but insisted on the instant
separation of those who had already married, and prescribed the
punishment of expulsion for disobedience (Siric. _Ep._ i. c. 7; Migne,
_P.L._ xiii. col. 1138). Although we find Siricius a year later writing
to the African Church on this same subject in tones rather of persuasion
than of command, yet the beginning of compulsory sacerdotal celibacy in
the Western Church may be conveniently dated from his decretal of A.D.
385. Leo the Great (d. 461) and Gregory the Great (d. 604) further
extended the rule of celibacy to subdeacons.