Peter was married.
Less than two percent??? At it's apex, the USCCB's John Jay Study reported that 4% of all (US) priests serving from 1950 until 2002 were accused of abuse. The John Jay study puts real numbers on that percentage:
The study said that 4,392 clergymen—almost all priests—were accused of abusing 10,667 people, with 75 percent of the incidents taking place between 1960 and 1984. During the same time frame there were 109,694 priests, it said........68 percent of the allegations were made against priests ordained between 1950 and 1979, while priests ordained after 1979 accounted for 10.7 percent of the allegations.
For the entire 52-year period "the problem was indeed widespread and affected more than 95 percent of the dioceses and approximately 60 percent of religious communities," said the study.
[Faithful Departed author Philip] Lawler points out that while less than five percent of American priests have been accused of sexual abuse, some two-thirds of our bishops were apparently complicit in cover-ups. The real scandal isn't the sick excesses of a few dozen pedophiles, or even the hundreds of priests who had affairs with teenage boys -- the bulk of abuse cases. No, according to Lawler, it is the malfeasance of wealthy, powerful, and evidently worldly men who fill the thrones -- but not the shoes -- of the apostles. In case after case, we read in their correspondence, in the records of their soulless, bureaucratic responses to victims of psychic torture and spiritual betrayal, these bishops' prime concern was to save the infrastructure, the bricks and mortar and mortgages. Ironically, their lack of a supernatural concern for souls is precisely what cost them so much money in the end.
-- from the thread Kneeling Before the World
Genesis — 18 God said, “It is not good for man to be alone”. [...] 24 For this cause a man shall leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave to his wife [...]
I am a Protestant (partially because of this disagreement with Catholicism). I do not think God intended men — even priests — to be alone.
And, while I think the “celibacy leads to pedophilia” charge is WAY overblown — I think there may be something to the thought that priestly celibacy tends to lead men with homosexual tendencies into the priesthood.
If a faithful Christian man were struggling with attraction to his own gender, the priesthood is a good place to go where his marital status, lack of dating and/ or sexuality will likely not be questioned. This is obviously not universally the case — but I would bet the percentage of priests with homosexual urges exceeds the percentage of the general male population with homosexual urges.
SnakeDoc
1Timothy ch 3
v2: A bishop then must be blameless, the husband of one wife,
vigilant, sober, of good behavior, given to hospitality, apt to teach;
Peter was indeed married.
Natural is a word that can be brought to the phrase “the way God made it”.
Priests should be free to choose....it ain’t natural the way they have it set up..