What is it about the Catholic Church's discipline of celibacy that causes everyone to flip out? Abstinence and chastity are such mind blowers to the modern world.
Your assertion that the discipline of celibacy was a purely pragmatic measure designed to reduce corruption in the Middle Ages is utterly false. There is a long and deep theological foundation for it and historically, the Spanish Council of Elvira (295-302) is the first recorded case of actual enactment (as oppsed to its theological underpinnings which go back much further).
You cannot compare the Church’s policy of compulsory clerical policy to the Boy Scouts. Boy scout members are allowed to have girl friends and they can marry when they are old enough. I belong to an all male organization, the Knights of Columbus, and we’re allowed to have wives and girl friends.
Abstinence and chastity are the preferable state for any individual not married. As the father of a twelve year old daughter, I highly value chastity and abstinence! Trust me on that one. I have never believed that Holy Orders and Holy Matrimony need to be mutually exclusive. The Lord commands us to be fruitful and multiply. The Lord wants us to celebrate life, not celibate life.
The Council of Elvira was quite limited in scope and not embraced by the full Church. Compulsory clerical celibacy was not institutionalized in the Western Church until the First Lateran Council in 1123. Compulsory clerical celibacy was never enthusiastically embraced in the East and to this day Orthodox priests can be married men. There are also Catholic churches in the Middle East and in Eastern Europe which also permit marriage among the clergy. We have a number of married priests in my own archdiocese, mostly converts from other churches, and they do just fine I might add.
What is it about the Catholic Church’s discipline of celibacy that causes everyone to flip out? Abstinence and chastity are such mind blowers to the modern worlD.
No, they are Human Nature blowers to the world since creation. The sexual urge has been powerful always. As seen in any recorded history, the sexual urge will out. Abstinence and chastity among young hormonal people will not, in general, work.
That is not to say that priests cannot remain chaste. Some can. But all? Probably never happened at any point in human history.