Orthodox bishops must be celibate. That’s the rule. But it wasn’t always this way, and understanding why it changed tells you something important about how the Church thinks about marriage, priesthood, and what it means to shepherd God’s people.
In the early Church, bishops could be married. St. Paul writes to Timothy that a bishop should be “the husband of one wife”, he’s not requiring marriage, but he’s clearly allowing it. We know several married bishops from the first few centuries. St. Gregory of Nyssa had a wife. So did others. Nobody thought this was strange.
But something shifted between the fourth and seventh centuries. The Church started choosing bishops exclusively from among celibate priests and monks. By the time of the Quinisext Council in 691-692 AD, this became the fixed norm. Canon 12 of that council established what we still practice today: bishops are chosen from monks or from priests who’ve never married.
Why the change? It wasn’t because the Church suddenly decided marriage was bad. We still ordain married priests and deacons. A man can get married, then be ordained a priest, and continue his married life. That’s normal. That’s expected, even. Most of our priests at St. Michael and throughout the Antiochian Archdiocese are married men with families.
But a bishop’s job is different. He’s not just serving one parish. He’s overseeing an entire diocese, sometimes covering territory the size of East Texas and beyond. He’s traveling constantly, ordaining priests, consecrating churches, settling disputes, caring for widows and orphans, managing church property. He’s got to be available at odd hours for crises. A priest in Beaumont can go home to his family after Vespers. A bishop might be in Dallas one day, Houston the next, then flying to an Archdiocesan meeting in Pennsylvania.
The Church came to see that this kind of total availability required freedom from family obligations. Not because family is bad, but because you can’t serve two masters. You can’t be fully present to a wife and children while also being fully present to an entire diocese. Something has to give, and the Church decided it shouldn’t be the diocese.
There’s also a theological dimension. The bishop is called the father of his flock. His people are his children. The diocese is, in a sense, his bride. This isn’t just poetic language. It’s how the Church understands the episcopal office. A married man’s first obligation is to his actual wife and actual children. That’s as it should be. But a bishop needs to have no competing loyalties.
So the Church draws its bishops from the monasteries. A man becomes a monk, takes vows of celibacy, poverty, and obedience. If he’s called to priesthood, he becomes a hieromonk. And if God and the Church call him further, he might be consecrated a bishop. He’s already given up marriage. He’s already committed to a celibate life focused entirely on prayer and service.
Sometimes you’ll hear about bishops who were married earlier in life. That happens. A priest’s wife dies, and later he takes monastic vows and is eventually made a bishop. But he’s celibate by the time he’s consecrated. The rule holds.
This isn’t arbitrary. It grew organically out of the Church’s experience over centuries. The early Church tried it both ways and discovered that the episcopal office functioned better when filled by celibate men. It’s a discipline, not a dogma, meaning it’s theoretically changeable, though it’s been stable for over thirteen hundred years. Some Orthodox scholars occasionally discuss whether married bishops might return, but that’s academic conversation. The lived practice of the Church is clear.
What strikes me is how this shows the Church’s realism about human limits. We can’t do everything. Marriage is holy, but it’s demanding. The episcopacy is holy, but it’s demanding. Trying to do both well is nearly impossible. So the Church makes a choice, not because one path is holier than the other, but because each requires the whole person.
If you’re exploring Orthodoxy and this feels strange, I get it. Most Protestant churches don’t have bishops at all, or if they do, those bishops are often married. But spend time around an Orthodox bishop and you’ll see why the rule makes sense. These men are on call 24/7 for their flocks. They’re spiritual fathers to hundreds of priests and thousands of laypeople. That’s a full-time calling, and then some.
