I haven't contributed to this blog in some time, but I just found this in my e-mail inbox from veteran political commentator Harold Meyerson about how the Roman Catholic Church needs to get rid of priestly celibacy to stop the epidemic of pedophile priests. I couldn't agree more: I've long felt that if you demand as a condition of employment that you can't have any sort of normal sex life, hetero or homo, it shouldn't be a surprise that you draw an awful lot of sexual weirdos to your profession.
Mark Gabrish Conlan
•••••
Meyerson on TAP
A Modest Proposal for Fixing the Catholic Church. By now, I must have read a dozen articles on the Pennsylvania grand jury’s revelations of the horrors and abominations that 300 Catholic priests inflicted over a period of 70 years on their parishioners, the vast majority of them children. Each of those articles offered various prescriptions on how the Church should deal with its pedophiles and sadists, how it should change its culture of clerical permissiveness.
None of those prescriptions, I fear, will really change anything, however—because they are providing answers to the wrong question. A serious effort to make the Church more decent can’t begin by asking how the Church should crack down on its miscreants. The first question those who seek to save Catholicism must grapple with is why the Church is so damned different. Why have there been more assaults and molestations in the Catholic Church than in the Eastern Orthodox, or the Episcopal, or Protestant denominations, or the other world religions? What Émile Durkheim wrote in his classic study of comparative suicide rates applies as well to the comparative rates of clerical abuse: They “can be explained only sociologically.”
And what is sociologically distinctive about Catholic clerics is that unlike clerics of other faiths, they must take a vow of celibacy. This has required the Church to drape a veil of secrecy over all the sexual activities—from long-term consensual adult relationships to the torture of children—in which its priests, being human, engage or struggle with or try to repress. The conjoined cultures of celibacy and secrecy narrow the field of clerical recruits—who already include the good and the occasionally holy who are found in the pulpits of all religions—but also to those who feel they must keep their sex lives secret, who fear to express their sexual desires openly, among whom we find, as the grand jury found, misogynists, pederasts, sadists, and everyday monsters. We find such people in many places, of course, but the fact that they congregate disproportionately in the Catholic priesthood suggests that the inextricably intertwined cultures of celibacy and secrecy is what draws them in. The faith’s core belief that sex is sinful (save, sort of, for married procreation) is thus what ultimately underlies the sexual depravity of so many of its priests. No church can survive an irony this corrosive, once that irony is known to all.
What the Church needs to change, then, are its core beliefs about women and sex. Given that doctrinal change takes some time, however, here are some handy concrete steps that the Church might take now to rid itself of its malevolent priests: First, eliminate the celibacy idiocy. That alone would bring a higher share of normal humans into the priesthood. Second, admit women to the priesthood, mandate that all seminaries go co-ed, and—following the maxim that it’s better to be safe then sorry—remove the current generation of priests and bishops to remote monasteries, supplanting them with the current generation of nuns and the new, non-celibate recruits of both genders. Triple the size of the College of Cardinals, with all the new recruits coming from orders of nuns and from prominent and humanistic members of the Church laity.
Francis, I’m a fan, but this is no time for dilly-dallying. Écrasez l'infâme and bring in the gals. ~ HAROLD MEYERSON
