let me preface this by saying i consider myself a faithful Catholic, but one who is very privy to the “sausage factory” that is the inner workings of church governance and administration. My parents were regular hosts to travelling priests and religious passing through area, active in their parish council and frequent guests at the dinner table of the local archbishop.
I myself count among my friends many priests and religious who serve in fairly high offices in Rome and elsewhere, several high ranking church laity, and a psychologist who serves at one of several secure hospitals operated in the US for treating mentally ill priests (yes including THOSE kind).
SO I say this with all the love possible for mother church, but truth is truth.
At this point, The majority of ordained priests from the 1st world are gay. Simple as that, and this has been true for probably 50+ years and the Church has been well aware of it, and seen it as a “win-win” of sorts.
Once the ranks of the priesthood were swelled , especially in America by the ranks of children of Catholic immigrants, particularly Irish and Italian who had large families and held to the tradition of “one for God”-that is that one of their sons, usually the youngest, was expected to join the priesthood.
As these immigrant groups marched up the ladders of material success, they became less devout, and what was once seen as an honorable job, (and one with a steady income and job security) became seen as more of a burden, largely owing to the celibacy requirement-which meant no grandchildren at a time when family size was shrinking anyway.
Into this gap came a generation of men who embraced celibacy, in part, out of a fear of their own sinful, sexual desires. The Church has always said that homosexuality per se is no sin, only homosexual acts are. Therefore, even knowing many of these men for what they were saw this as a “win-win”- a way to keep young men away form a life of sin and a way to keep the ranks of the priesthood strong and vibrant.
Unfortunately this acceptance paved the way for the pedophilia scandals in which we are now embroiled. The “gay rights movement” and the “sexual revolution” came along and told men gay and straight to embrace their desires, not be ashamed of who they were. embrace promiscuity, abandon marriage etc. As this message spread through our culture, The celibate priesthood started looking like an archaic and unattractive thing to most healthy young men, who were being told by their culture that there was something wrong with them if they wanted to live a life without sex.
Vocations all but dried up by the mid 1980’s in the US. Seminaries that once graduated classes of 50 or 100 were ordaining only 6-7 priests a year. And because of that scarcity, to their everlasting shame, the administrators or those seminaries began overlooking things that once would have gotten people thrown out on their ear, and they either eased the complex psychological screenings they used to use to weed out the unfit.
This how so many pedophiles got in. Most of them were horrified at their own desires and so like the gays before them ran to the shelter of celibacy. They should have been screened out, but the Seminary administrators were simply too desperate for bodies. Likewise homosexuals were permitted to be a lot more open, and even active about their sexuality because they were needed so desperately.
It is my opinion that this will not stop until we take a real serious look at lifting the celibacy requirement altogether. There already are married priests in the Roman Catholic rite, and the sky has not fallen. If we don’;t want Benedict “Glory of the Olives” to be the 2nd to last Pope as St Malachy reported prophesied, we need to take a very serious look at re-opening vocations to married men again.
I have long suspected that. That viewpoint isn’t going to go over well with the Catholic crowd around I fear.
Get thee behind me Satan. You seem to be clueless. Are you sure you are not some leftist troll?
Sorry, no. The homosexuals who molested the altar boys aren't looking to get married. What will stop this is a rigid return to the Church's prohibition of gays in the priesthood.
I'd be happy to drive 35 miles every Sunday past a multitude of closed or dying parishes to be ministered to by a straight orthodox holy Catholic priest.
Oh wait...never mind...I already do.
The Church has always said that homosexuality per se is intrinsically disordered, and that entertaining homosexual fantasies is a sin.
The rest of your sophisticated post may reflect what you think of as "all the love possible for the mother church" but your version of the truth is not truth. Pedophiles are not helped by marriage. Neither are homosexuals. Celibacy is not the problem.
Excellent post.
There is no reason to cling to the celibacy rule in the modern Church.
Some of Jesus’s own apostles were married men.
Let’s go back to the common sense of Our Lord.