How about some Catholic pinging here?
The following article is from Zenit News Agency.
Date: 2004-09-12
Celibacy Seen as a Gift That Edifies the Church
So Says Father Cencini, Consultor to Vatican
SANTIAGO DE COMPOSTELA, Spain, SEPT. 12, 2004 (Zenit.org).- A priest who is not profoundly spiritual is "a poor celibate," says a consultor to a Vatican dicastery.
"Priestly celibacy is not an exclusive characteristic of priests of the Catholic rite, and even less so an imposition of the Church, but a gift received for the edification of the community," said Father Amedeo Cencini, when referring to the topic he alluded to during a meeting of seminary rectors and formators in Spain.
Father Cencini is a professor at the Salesian and Gregorian universities of Rome, and a consultor to the Congregation for Institutes of Consecrated Life and Societies of Apostolic Life.
He explained during an interview with ZENIT that the Church "does not impose celibacy on anyone, it simply chooses priests among those who have received this charism."
"What is most important is that the celibate make these motivations his own and live his celibacy as a choice of love, with a thankful heart free of egoism, and with a profoundly spiritual attitude," he said. "If the priest is not profoundly spiritual, he is a poor celibate."
The priest continued: "The recent scandals of certain Churches must not lead to deception, because there is no scientific proof that shows that in the realm of ecclesiastical celibacy this type of problem is more frequent than in other realms."
On the contrary, "the testimony of a celibate priest, convinced of and happy with his celibacy, is particularly necessary today," Father Cencini said.
According to the expert, each priest "must continually ask himself if his celibacy gives testimony of nostalgia for God, if it is able to convey that to love God is not a law, an effort, a renunciation, or violence to nature, but that it is good because it opens the heart and opens one wide to others."
Father Cencini also alluded to scandals involving child sexual abuse that arose in some dioceses. "Pedophilia, as is known, is recurrent and, because of this, no one with these tendencies can be admitted" to the priesthood, he said.
The picture of the ordination ceremony shown on the link which I've posted is my parish church. It's fairly obvious from the picture and the demenour of the priests, servers and acolytes that this parish is not into hanky panky.
If so many young men hadn't been sodomized as altar boys and seminarians, I suspect there would be more vocations today. Here's a pertinent recent traditio.com commentary which relates...
Just another proof of the Newchurch of Hypocrisy. JPII in 2002 supposedly told American cardinals in secret not to permit their presbyters to violate the young. Now, an investigative report by the Dallas Morning News shows that the pope's words were hollow. Rome is harboring the criminal perverts in Rome!
The News found that seven presbyters accused of sexual crimes, some of them runaways from law enforcement in the United States, are living in Rome around the Vatican. These priests are ministering with the full knowledge and consent of church officials.
The News found that the heads of religious orders who transferred sex criminals to the Rome office didn't bother to notify the Diocese of Rome about the alleged abusers' presence. Here's your quiz for today: who is the bishop of Rome? Why, JPII, of course! Does nobody who works for him take seriously his secret words on sex crimes? Apparently not.
If we accept JPII as head of the Church, we have to hold him personally responsible for allowing Novus Ordo bishops and presbyters to violate young Catholics. He has been publicly silent on the most vile crimes of his officials, like Abp. Rembert Weakland, of Milwaukee, who for years had an "affair" with a young catamite. The catamite attempted to blackmail the archbishop, who then stole some half a million dollars from the poor box, as it were, to pay off the blackmail. The archbishop, appointed by JPII, confessed his crime to the police a day before he was to be service an indictment.
The pope's comment: silence. Do we have a functioning pope? Or is he so spaced out that he is non compos mentis and can perform no valid action? Or is he so immoral that he would let his own officials violate young people and seminarians without so much as word of public chastisement? Whichever of the answers you choose, the JPII has to be the Bad Pope with the longest pontificate in the history of the Church.