If this is true the Catholic Chuch is in grave trouble.
By Julia Duin THE WASHINGTON TIMES
Starting today, 290 of the nation’s Catholic bishops will meet at the Capitol Hyatt for their yearly business meeting and to tie up loose ends on the massive sexual-abuse crisis that has shaken the U.S. Catholic Church to its core in the past two years.
Although it’s been less than a year since the church revealed that there were 10,667 cases of abuse committed by 4,392 priests in a 50-year period, the message at the meeting will be that the crisis is under control.
Read the entire article on the Washinton Times website.
That’s not the only crisis they’re having, evidently:
“ROME – The Vatican acknolwedged yesterday a damning report detailing dozens of cases of Roman Catholic priests and missionaries forcing nuns to have sex with them, including one case in which 29 nuns in a single diocese became pregnant.”
(see here)
I don’t think this is a “gay” crisis or even specifically a “pedophile” crisis. I must ask my Orthodox friends whether the issue is in fact celibacy or something else. Fr. Jacobse, would you yourself have become a member of the clergy were this mandated or would it have been irrelevant?
The Roman Catholic Church is among the few religious denominations left that require its members to remain celibate. This area is still, in my opinion, not very well understood and I’d like to see a non-partisan objective study as to the psychological and spiritual effects this causes on the clergy.
Homosexuals and pedophiles were such long before they became priests. Celibacy doesn’t cause it, as the good Roman Catholic priests prove. Rome’s problem is that they let the wrong men into the priesthood.
Orthodox practice creates a larger pool. It is not so much that Orthodox priests can get married, but that married men can become priests.
Would I have become a priest if I had to remain single? No.
What are we to consider as “the wrong men”, exactly? I’m thinking the Catholic Church would be better served by hiring eunuchs, as it seems the number of priests who are actually able to perfectly live out the vow of celibacy is not all that great.
As with any job, the question is not whether the applicant will always feel like living out their responsibilities and vows (I can guarantee you they won’t!) but whether they have the requisite self-discipline to carry out those vows.
I think in the past, some gays (as well as pedophiles) have entered the priesthood thinking that a constant exposure to the liturgy and the Eucharist would “heal” them of what they do not want. When they’re left to struggle with the same issues after many years, they are understandably left with a sense of failure and give up.
More important, I am not so cynical to believe that very many priests enter the priesthood so they can have greater exposure to easy sex with men or minors. There are far easier outlets for this than living a life that demands as much self-sacrifice as the priesthood does. And certainly not for $18,000 a year.
The real issue is not celibacy, but whether or not there is an environment of asceticism within which a priest can function. Sexual temptations seem to be the big one right now that Satan is using to derail the ministry of the Church. Catholic, Protestant, and Orthodox are all falling. Celibacy alone does not guarantee sexual continence. There have been a number of Orthodox priests guilty of the same kinds of crimes. Ours hasn’t made much national press simply because we don’t have the sheer numbers of congragants that Roman Catholics do.
Ultimately the solution to the problem is for the Church as a whole to live a more contient life in the midst of a sex saturated and sex obsessed world. How many of us indulge our fantasies thinking them harmless.
We receive the kind of leaders we deserve.
Let’s not write off the Catholic Church as a denizen of rapists, pedophiles and homosexuals. There are a many more good men serving as priests and women serving as nuns in the Catholic Church, then there are bad men taking advantage of children. Besides I don’t think the Orthodox would stand to well were one to start examining the homosexual behavior that goes on among Orthodox monks, all of whom are unmarried celibate men, BTW. As Michael rightly points out, the issue is not celibacy, it is living within a sex-saturated culture, and Greek culture is just as sex-soaked as American culture. My wife knows plenty of stories, told to her by those who have visited the monastaries on Mt. Athos, about monks found in … aahhemm … compromising positions.
I just hope that if/when a scandle like this emerges in the Orthodox church that the response by the leadership will be more definitive. The RC leadership lost a lot of credibility in the way they have handled this issue.
The policy in the GOA is that when any allegation is made, the state attorney is notified who begins an investigation, and a second investigation is undertaken by the Church.
St. Mark’s in Boca Raton has written what is becoming the model on handing any kind of sex crime issue on the local level (Policy & Procedures for the Prevention of Sexual Misconduct). One of the main authors, Fr. Gregory Waynick, now serves on the Archdiocese committee dealing with these matters. Locally however, there is a greater danger of abusers being volunteers than clergy. This is true of Protestantism as well.