Celibacy is not the problem, AJ...
(BTW, thanks for that excellent website of concerned Catholics, which I find heartening).
I am confident that the majority of Catholic priests hold to their vow of celibacy. There is plenty of room for disagreement about whether such a vow is appropriate or necessary, but the vow itself does not inevitably lead to sexual misconduct. Most religious people believe in sacrifice in one form or another as being good for the soul. It sells us short as human beings to argue that we are so weak and helpless as to be unable to resist our bodily urges, that we are powerless to control our behavior. I don't know about you, but when I was in the service as a young man I remained celibate for long periods of time a a matter of necessity, as did many of my shipmates. To put it delicately, there are ways to release the pure bodily urges without involving others, and indeed such urges eventually have a way of relieving themselves without conscious help. It is a great exaggeration to say that anyone who undertakes a vow of celibacy is hopelessly doomed to fall from grace because the body will inevitably overwhelm the spirit. To say this demeans us as humans, and portrays us as mere animals. I believe that the majority of Catholic priests took their vow of celibacy seriously and have had the moral strength to hold to it. Again, this does not mean that the need for such a vow in contemporary times should not be open to reconsideration, for a variety of reasons.
It is an entirely different matter to raise the issue of whether the Catholic priesthood, as a cloistered male culture, may attract homosexuals who become priests for the wrong reasons. I went to a Catholic prep school as a boy, and was able to observe the recruitment of boys for seminaries where they would train to become priests. Even a a naive kid, I could see that something was not right with this. We were too young and inexperienced at that age to make such a life-determining choice. I don't have the slightest doubt that there were boys who opted for the priesthood for entirely the wrong reasons, including the fact that they were struggling with their sexual identity. I think that a lot of the Church's problems right now are the result of over-zealous recruiting of priests in the past, with insufficient psychological screening of candidates. Whatever one may believe about the link between homosexuality and child abuse ... the mere fact that the priesthood has become skewed toward a heavily homosexual profession makes it not healthy or properly balanced in its own right, as would be true of any other people-oriented profession. |
