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So the history channel was outright lying?
I do wish people would stop confusing celibacy with chastity, though. The vow of celibacy is a vow never to formally marry. The vow of chastity is the vow to behave themselves. In French the word "celibataire" simply means a bachelor, in accord with the Latin.
Pray to St. Peter Damian for reform.
Is the Pope just making up these celibacy rules because of a power trip, or does he have Scriptural basis for them? What would give him the right to impose rules where the Bible doesn't authorize him?
The broad outline of the last fifty years of celibacy scholarship shows that something has occurred that not infrequently causes misunderstandings in historical research: a one-sided formulation of the question has produced one-sided answers. Scholars took the present discipline of celibacy in the Roman Catholic Church as their point of departure and searched for a pattern of clerics in the unmarried state in the first centuries. This, however, they did not find -- at any rate, not for all clerics. The question that they should have asked is whether the early Church perhaps knew a different discipline of continence. This was the approach of the older German scholarship in the nineteenth century. But that was though to have been refuted scientifically, and so these contributions were consigned to oblivion. Actually, if this deficit has not become evident already, it ought to when on looks at the Church's legislation. That is to say, according to canon law an exclusively unmarried clergy, as we know it today, existed at all only after the Council of Trent (1521-1545). Even the above-mentioned Second Lateran Council, which is repeatedly cited as the beginning of the history of celibacy, did not intend to exclude married men from holy orders; it merely declared marriages contracted after the reception of orders to be invalid (canon 7). [Emphasis added.]
It seems that not changing the celibacy laws at this juncture makes the most sense. Fact is, the Church had rules for its priests, the rules were broken, and now there is a crisis. Assuming that this is a logical sequence of cause and effect, discarding or changing the rules doesn't change anything. First, enforce the rules...get rid of the rule breakers and enablers. Then, see what the church looks like...will there be an upsurge in vocations among qualified men who will now be comfortable in the Church environment as priests?
Throwing away celibacy at this time will just create a whole new set of situations to deal with. I really think the problem was the enablers who moved the degenerates around. Without that, this small percentage could've been dealt with before the problem got out of control.
There's a thought. Perhaps this is the treatment needed for the pedophile priests. Turn them into "eunuchs". Is it too late to propose this as an addendum to the charter drafted by the bishops in Dallas?