Trullo Fixed What Rome Would Later Change

The discipline that lets an Eastern parish priest marry and keeps its bishops celibate was not always settled practice; it was fixed by canon in a single council. The Quinisext Council, held at Constantinople in 692 and known in the East as the Council in Trullo, gathered to complete the disciplinary work the fifth and sixth ecumenical councils had left undone. Its sixth canon confirmed that a man already married when he was ordained deacon, priest or subdeacon could remain married and continue living with his wife; what it forbade was marrying after ordination, and a widowed priest remarrying. The same council, in canons twelve and forty eight, restated an older rule from the age of Justinian that a bishop must be unmarried and, in practice, drawn from the monasteries. The West took a different road. Mandatory celibacy for the whole priesthood, not only the episcopate, hardened into universal law only later, at the Second Lateran Council of 1139, well after Trullo had already settled the Eastern discipline in the opposite direction. Rome and Constantinople were formally still one church when the two paths diverged, so the split in practice predates the schism between them and was never itself the cause of it.