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To: sageb1
It isn’t a Catholic problem. It is a societal problem. Priests, or any clergy who have molested are held up by the media because they are expected to be above sin. Please take your Catholic bashing elsewhere.

What makes the Roman Catholic Church stand out is that it is a single worldwide hierarchy. That it had a decades-long policy of handling molesting priests through its own internal process rather than reporting them to the civil authorities. That for a long time it treated molestation by priests as a sin problem rather than a criminal justice problem. That it had the means to reassign priests to another parish without fanfare.

These are no longer the policies of the Church, and the political realities that led the Church to try its own -- that is, to insist that clergy be tried by the Church rather than by the civil authority -- are long gone. But when you mention molestation by clergy members of other denominations, you're talking about (in most cases) a diffuse body of churches. When you talk about school teachers, you're talking about thousands of school administrators and school boards. The RCC stands alone as a body with an authoritative hierarchy that had a flawed policy that encompasses hundreds of cases.

I think another factor is that a lot of Protestants find the notion of a celibate priesthood odd. My personal hypothesis is that a lot of folks who have sexual urges they consider sinful -- whether it's homosexuality, pedophilia, or in some cases simple heterosexual lust -- look to the oath of chastity as a means to control and sublimate their desires.

Priestly celibacy does not cause sexual deviancy any more than 12-step programs cause addiction. Both attract people who are trying to escape something. And in both those populations, some will fail.

88 posted on 12/23/2007 2:56:47 AM PST by ReignOfError
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To: ReignOfError
True.

But celibacy is Church Law, not God’s Law. The Catholic Church recognizes that. And as Church law, the Catholic church can change it. I think it would be better for the Catholic Church to allow marriages for secular priests and maintain celibacy for the “regular orders” like monks.

But that is merely my personal opinion and not meant to be a criticism of the Catholic Church, an organization I as a Protestant have great admiration for.

Both Protestants and Catholics have a lot to be ashamed of from back in reformation days, but I think most people fail to realize that "heresy" or "Papism" back then was judged by the temporal authorities more as a form of treason to the State Monarch's choice in religion, whoever he or she might be, rather than from a purely doctrinal perspective. I.e. politics was every bit as important as Theology, and sometimes even more so - look at Cardinal Richelieu and the the Thirty Years War in Germany, or England supporting Catholic Portugal against Spain.

The important thing is to remember what we have in common and to fight together against Islam. As far as personal religious differences among ourselves - live and let live.

REMEMBER - one of the reasons Islams made such quick inroads in the eastern Mediterranean basin was due to “Orthodox” persecution of other Christian sects there. The muzzies tolerated them and so they thought they had it better under Islam.

Time showed they thought wrong.

140 posted on 12/23/2007 7:56:01 AM PST by ZULU (Non nobis, non nobis Domine, sed nomini tuo da gloriam. God, guts and guns made America great.)
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