Beard
Western Christianity

At various times in the history of the Western world and depending on various circumstances, the Catholic Church permitted or prohibited facial hair (barbae nutritio, literally meaning "nourishing a beard") for its clergymen. A decree of the beginning of the 6th century in either Carthage or the south of Gaul forbade clerics to let their hair and beards grow freely. The phrase "nourishing a beard" was interpreted in different ways, either as imposing a clean-shaven face or only excluding a too-lengthy beard. In relatively modern times, the first pope to wear a beard was Pope Julius II, who in 1511–12 did so for a while as a sign of mourning for the loss of the city of Bologna. Pope Clement VII let his beard grow at the time of the sack of Rome in 1527 and kept it. All his successors did so until the death in 1700 of Pope Innocent XII. Since then, no pope has worn a beard.

Beards have been associated at different dates with particular Catholic religious orders. In the 1160s Burchardus, abbot of the Cistercian monastery of Bellevaux in the Franche-Comté, wrote a treatise on beards. He regarded beards as appropriate for lay brothers, but not for the priests among the monks. In about 1240, Alberic of Trois-Fontaines described the Knights Templar as an "order of bearded brethren"; and, on the eve of the suppression of the order in 1312, out of nearly 230 knights and brothers questioned by the papal commissioners in Paris, 76 are described as wearing a beard (in some cases specified as "in the style of the Templars"), while another 133 are reported to have shaved their beards, either in renunciation of their vows or in a bid to escape detection. Randle Holme, writing in 1688, associated beards with Templars, Teutonic Knights, Austin Friars, and Gregorians. Most Latin Church clergy are now clean-shaven, but Capuchins and some others are bearded. Present Canon law is silent on the matter.

Although most Protestant Christians regard the beard as a matter of choice, some have taken the lead in fashion by openly encouraging its growth as "a habit most natural, scriptural, manly, and beneficial" (C. H. Spurgeon). Amish and Hutterite men shave until they marry, then grow a beard and are never thereafter without one, although it is a particular form of a beard (see Visual markers of marital status). Diarmaid MacCulloch, professor of ecclesiastical history at the University of Oxford, writes: "There is no doubt that Cranmer mourned the dead king (Henry VIII)", and it was said that he showed his grief by growing a beard. However, MacCulloch also states that during the Reformation Era, many Protestant Reformers decided to grow their beards in order to emphasize their break with the Catholic tradition:

it was a break from the past for a clergyman to abandon his clean-shaven appearance which was the norm for late medieval priesthood; with Luther providing a precedent, virtually all the continental reformers had deliberately grown beards as a mark of their rejection of the old church, and the significance of clerical beards as an aggressive anti-Catholic gesture was well recognised in mid- Tudor England.
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