Clerical marriage Orthodox Communion (Constantinople, Alexandria Egypt, Antioch Syria, and Jerusalem). As stated above, the majority of Roman Church Priests at that time were married. Therefore, when some churches that followed western rites and traditions were brought back into communion with the Orthodox Churches beginning in the 20th century, their right to have married clergy, provided they were married before ordination, was restored. The practice of clerical marriage was initiated in the West by the followers of Martin Luther, who himself, a former priest and monk, married Katharina von Bora, a former nun, in 1525. It has not been introduced in the
Catharine Littlefield Greene source for this claim, and to date there has been no independent verification of Catharine Greene's role in the invention of the gin. At the end of a long courtship, Catharine Greene was married to Phineas Miller on June 13, 1796, in Philadelphia's First Presbyterian Church. The President and Mrs. Washington served as witnesses to the wedding. Despite previous success and their best efforts, Mulberry Grove fell upon hard times by 1798. Catharine and Phineas, in financing the cotton gin firm of Whitney and Miller, had lost a great deal of money in a land scam. Caty was forced to