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A general observation of current trends within all spectrums and denominations of Christianity highlight a shortage of candidates for the ministry. This is not simply a problem for the RC church, stemming from the issue of compulsory celibacy and the ordination of women. Other variables must be involved as protestant denominations obviously address these issues, yet still experience a shortage of ministerial candidates.

William:

The theologian Hans Küng is very much correct in his analysis regarding one of the reasons in the recent "allegations" of sex abused cases...Is the complusory celibacy....

(Dennis Junior)

I thought the Pentateuch ws the problem.

It is probably too late for a change in the compulsory celibacy rule to prevent the decline. The revelations of sexual abuse, and in particular the cover up by senior church officials, has revealed a cynical hypocracy among churchmen and has come on top of the onslaught by scientific rationality.

Urbanisation, literacy, radio and TV, and now the internet, has widened the sources of information available to ordinary people, so that the priest in his pulpit, and even the Pope have lost their unchallengeable authority. It is not surprising that so few young men are now attracted to a career in the priesthood.

Do you like the way he tried to slip in the ordination of women at the end there? Can't do it Kuhn - Pope has already infallibly ruled on the issue.

It must be a great relief for all those children abused by their parents to know that it would only have been worse if their parents had been celibate.

I'm confused.

How can a shortage of priests be described as "catastrophic"?

Sounds great to me.

Post 5,

Will there ever be any situation where a subject that is troublesome for the catholic church comes up and mccamleyc won't try to spin his way out of it for the church?

The Chairman of the German Bishops' Conference had the courage to say it: hundreds of boys have been abused by German priests over the last fifty years, fifteen thousand incidents of child abuse are reported to the German police every year.

Also interesting: the British statistics for child abuse indicate a ratio of six girls to one boy, in the Murphy Report it's two boys to one girl.

Besides, the Bible teaches that God expects EVERYONE who is not married to abstain from sexual activity of whatever kind.

You want me to roll over when faced with modernists like Küng? Don't think so. I'm allowed to engage in debate; that's what the blog is for. In this case you have the usual nonsense starting with "compulsory" celibacy. How can it be compulsory if no one forces you to become a priest? If you don't want celibacy you don't become a priest. It's hardly rocket science.

As for vocations, they are on the increase worldwide and reflect the prevailing faith. If people don't believe and practise their faith, their children are hardly likely to become priests or nuns.

"Is compulsory celibacy part of the problem?"

IMO - NO. Very few humans opt out of sex for any reason. I don't have a stat on that but someone must.

Those who have taken a vow of celibacy to join this or that religious group seem to say the words but not walk the talk. Stories abound from cloisters of debauchery. One has only to read the stories of the Marquis de Sade or biographies of the Bogias to get an inside look at the reality.

Historically families overstocked with kids tended to tithe the extras to the church, see Hildagard von Bingen, etc. BTW the rape of women continues around the world and the RCists continue to stand in the way of them having access to planning for parenthood technologies.

Women and men that freely chose to join monastic orders did it to avoid marriage but not sex.

Seminaries have always been hotbeds for same sex relationships. Altar boys were traditionally groomed for the priesthood through sex.

The problem with celibacy is that it is a big lie as most will acknowledge.

One Roman Catholic manager/bishop in the Times, UK, today claimed this is new and blamed the wild times of the Sixties refusing to admit that the behaviours are endemic to the corporation and always have been. Post the Sixties and modern feminism what was hidden is now up for public discussion. In any event why cover it up? IMO it is because without the sex where would new priests come from?

We can't forget either this fantastic documentary:
Sex crimes and the Vatican


For those who missed this broadcast please watch the video:

How paedophile priest was allowed to evade justice


How is it that this pedophile is living a nice life in the Canary Islands and not indicted?

@ William Crawley - I listened to the podcast in which you tried desperately to get some commitment from the Catholics on a child abuse policy in Ireland. Why bother with that when the people who make the laws must be held accountable? A clear legal statement from NR, the Republic and in fact all nations manding a ZERO TOLERANCE FOR CHILD ABUSE is long overdue. Why didn't your drill a lawmaker on the issue and please follow up on the priest hiding in the Canary Islands. Surely INTERPOL should be on the case too.

While some desperately poor, intelligent kids may have opted for a joining the rolls of cult pushers many with twisted values did it as there was no fear of prosecution. That is still the status quo isn't it or all of the creeps would be doing time.

Sex perverts keen to abuse children now head to Thailand to do the dirty as shameful as that is.

Once again may I repeat few would join any religious group if they weren't initiated, branded as infants. Is it really fair to count the those who do not give consent? The anonymous poor around the world continue to suffer and yet we do nothing. Then again nothing is done in Ireland.

Belief in god, the supernatural, is the manifestation of quirky primitive brain activity and religions are the corporate presence of such.

@ William Crawley please do your job as a journalist and get tough with the lot of them. Allowing one more person the pleasure to inflict irrational beliefs on anyone is immoral.

Also - when will everyone brave up to asking 'why the Vatican' - it is neither a normal nation or corporation.

I will also assert that the Italian mafia boys learned their stock and trade for corruption in the RC church. They were altar boys too.

Iam celibate but married, please don't tell my "Trouble & Strife" I've said that.

John, why - don't you think she would have noticed..?

Lucy's kind of deranged, isn't she? Wonder should someone let Social Services know.

A joke for you all. An atheist, let's call him Brian, is complaining to his Christian friend - "it's not fair, you guys have loads of holidays and special days, Christmas, Easter, Good Friday; the Jews have yom kippur and hannakuh; atheists don't have any special day". "Of course you do" replied his friend, Graham, "1st of April".

Does anyone know a good abdominal surgeon? I think my sides have just split.

The celibacy rule was a necessary complement to the practice of confession and absolution. A celibate priest could listen to the sexual fantasies and misdeeds of the laity, without being compromised by his own sexual inclinations. People were told that the priest was not a sexual being and therefore could be entrusted with the confessions of everyone, including daughters, wives, sons, etc. It was a form of mass self-delusion where everyone pretended to believe that priests were special and not subject to the same sexual drives as normal people.

The celibacy rule has always been a source of hypocrisy. Priests are just ordinary human beings and therefore they have sexual drives as a simple matter of biology. The hypocrisy has long been known. In 'The Canterbury Tales' by Chaucer, written long before the Reformation, there are many references to corrupt practices. For example, the Pardoner is clearly gay and he and the Summoner are presented as an unsavoury couple. The Summoner also uses confession to get young girls and boys in his power. The sexual implications are clear.

But, as MacCulloch pointed out in his television history, the Church used confession and absolution as a source of income. The sinners had to pay. Therefore the Church would not give up the practice and therefore it had to persevere with the celibacy rule, despite the scandals and hypocrisy.

As Cicero said "Cui bono?" If you wish to understand why the Catholic church is committed to celibacy, look to its finances.

Heli, you've hurt my fellings now, all the time "there's me" thinking I was the most hansom boy on the planet, outside GV.

The wife just told me the other day, she only married me for my money, seeing I am a nearly a millionaire in Zimbabwe dollars.

I never can get my head around this debate....can someone explain to me why priests are forbidden to marry when Peter was clearly married in the NT??

@ john dynes - Careful now and please don't retire early as wives don't want half the income and twice the husband.

Celibacy may be part of the problem but it is important to keep in mind that it is just PART of the problem. The real root cause has to include power. Power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely. In Ireland, those who abused children were not just priests but many others in the employ of the Catholic Church who were not celibate. It also included coverups by the bishops who were not motivated by ungratified sex drives but by maintaining the church's power and influence. The escape from criminal prosecution by secular authorities proves the Church's absolute power there, Ireland is for all practical intents and purposes a theocratic state no better than Iran. At least in Iran we see public protest and resistance, in Ireland the population is so cowed by the church it passively accepts whatever is imposed by it.

The effort of the Church will be to divert attention from this underlying fact and instead impose the explanation that some mentally ill individuals were unwittingly permitted to commit these crimes and that higher church officials were misguided in not acting more swiftly and decisively to expose and root out the problem. "We're sorry, it won't happen again. We've taken steps to see to it." If that explanation is accepted by society, you can bet your last cent that sooner or later it will happen again because the root cause will remain, concentrated power ceded by society to the church. The best real remedies would be lots of hard prison time for the perpetrators including the bishops with well publicized publically viewed trials and crushing financial penalties imposed in the form of punitive fines and actual and punitive settlements in civil court trials against the entire church. In other words they must be hurt badly for what they have done. Only this will remind them not to do it again.

"Then Peter said: Behold, we have left all things, and have followed thee. Who said to them: Amen, I say to you, there is no man that hath left house, or parents, or brethren, or wife, or children, for the kingdom of God's sake, Who shall not receive much more in this present time, and in the world to come life everlasting." Luke 18:28-30

We have celibacy for priests following the example of our High Priest, Jesus Christ, who was celibate.

We know well that people who don't control their libido aren't improved by marriage.

Are the jokes on this blog getting worse, or is it just me?

The count of the number of souls that can be proven to have been tortured and destroyed by the minions of the Catholic Church in recent decades as demonstrated by evidence numbers in the many thousands. The number that can be proven to have been saved is zero. The ledger is clearly heavily weighted on one side.

Given the surprise from evidence in Ireland that the torture inflicted on children was not only psychological and sexual but physical, can the Catholic Church's crimes against humanity be said to be any different today than they were during The Inquisition other than by numbers and their systematic nature centuries ago? If they are not the same, then what makes them different?

I am trying to understand what makes the crimes of the Catholic Church qualitatively different from the crimes in the Balkins. Since Ireland can't or won't prosecute what would seem to be the most heinous of crimes against humanity, is there any explanation of why the entire Catholic heirarchy right up to the Pope shouldn't be brought before a tribunal at the ICC in the Hague to determine if and what punishment is appropriate?

If there is no compelling reason why it shouldn't, but it isn't, then I will conclude that this is one more piece of evidence for what I have always contended, the ICC is a purely political instrument, not a judicial one and its use is only selectively sanctioned by political expediency to punish those crimes where political influence is insuffecient to supress it.

OT

A couple of points. Most priests take a vow of celibacy which is a promise not to get married. Others take a vow of chastity (and a promise of celibacy) which is not to have sex.

I dont see a problem with people who choose celibacy. But we are asking for trouble when it is foisted upon them as it is now.

And mandatory celibacy was not practiced by the Catholic Church for a thousand years. It was changed because the Church kept losing property when the eldest son of a priest chose to get married. It is also do with the use/abuse of power and keeping women out of the picture.

William Crawley;

"Does St Paul disagree? "But if they can't control themselves, they should go ahead and marry. It's better to marry than to burn with lust." (I Cor 7: 9)"

I don't know what the theory of law is at the ICC but I don't think motivation or inability to control oneself qualifies as an acceptable defense, it certainly doesn't under American theory of law except in the most remarkable of circumstances such as a brain tumor. In the the only viable defense is the inability to know right from wrong, that is the insanity defense even if it is judged to be temporary insanity. This cannot be the defense for those higher up who participated in the cover up. There the only defense is plausible denial of knowledge of the crimes. The test in the US system is "knew or should have known." Given the evidence of systematic crimes and coverups in the US cases which came to light before Ireland, the Pope would be hard pressed to plausibly deny that he should not have strongly suspected or known that similar crimes were occurring in other places for the same reasons. I posted previously that I suspect eventually we will see that these crimes have been systematically duplicated everywhere the Catholic church is operative. The recent revelations in the Netherlands and Germany I think will still turn out to be the tip of the iceberg.

The crux of the issue which the Catholic Church refuses to address at least publically is whether or not its policy of manditory celibacy attracts men to the priesthood who have a propensity to commit these types of crimes in the expectation that the Church will aid and abet them by both creating opportunities to commit them and by helping to cover them up. The public obsession with the moral issues seems to have clouded the fact that there is strong evidence that a large number of serious felonies have been committed, felonies that are going unprosecuted and unpunished.

The Catholic church has at its disposal the expert advice of psychologists and psychiatrists who can shed light on the matter. What it fears most is that the answers it gets may be in direct contradiction to its longstanding theological dogma. At that point the Church would have to choose between changing its dogma acknowledging its prior error or continuing to lay itself open as a conspirator in these crimes. What has been reported in the press so far about the Pope's statements suggests that he is not in the real world.

Jesus is mostly likely a myth. That being said, the origin of the legend is in Hebrew culture. Way back BCE it was pretty much illegal for any Jewish male to NOT FATHER CHILDREN, that is one of the prime directives of the tribe. By age 33 a Jewish male should have many children and no doubt wives with exhausted uterus.

The Romans of that period were pretty good at record keeping and the only bits around this story that survive are as invented by Saul of Tarsus, a man with particularly nasty ideas. He could be the poster boy for patriarchal misogyny.

Human Sexuality 101 is a good place for people to start to learn about libido and grasp that we all do it. Few people abstain.

I want to know why the Vatican continues to exist. That terrible corporation infects the psyche of millions and it must stop. Is there any signs of it even moving towards gender equality and embracing human rights, um no.

Morality is an ever changing zeitgeist as Richard has so clearly illustrated.

William

The Irish Times carried an article today entitled, "Papal meeting set to bring scandal closer to Vatican."

I believe the gist of it is that authorities are now going to investigate how much the Pope knew about abuse which was going on when he was a Bishop in Germany.

It also claims that senior church figures in Germany, Austria and the Vatican are now publicly connecting abuse to mandatory celibacy.

Can you put the article up here? (Or can anyone find a link to it?)

This comment was removed because the moderators found it broke the house rules. Explain.

rjb;

"And mandatory celibacy was not practiced by the Catholic Church for a thousand years. It was changed because the Church kept losing property when the eldest son of a priest chose to get married."

I do not think this a plausible explanation. Not only is the land, the buildings, and all of those elements needed to perpetuate and operate the religion the property of the Church, not the priest's, the priest can be required to sign a binding contract turning over legal possession of all of his worldly goods to the church which would leave his other heirs with nothing.

"It is also do with the use/abuse of power and keeping women out of the picture."

This sounds far more likely. The Catholic Church fears women because it knows that in any conflict between a man's loyaly to the church and its doctrines and his loyalty to a wife, there is every chance the wife will win. The church fears the power women have over men due to their sexual attraction. That is why it shuns all sexual interaction between men and women except for the procreation of more people, hopefully in the Church's mind more Catholics. The Church instinctively knows its enemies, those forces which threaten it and human sexuality is one of them. In the battle against scientific knowledge it has already lost. It is losing this one too.

Marcus

In case you hadnt noticed, I aint sticking up for them and certainly not making excuses for them. Just attempting to answer OT's question.

You are spot on about the mysogyny though.

Lucy, I don't buy the "Jesus was a myth" thingy - if anything, the embarrassments and silly stuff in the gospels are pretty good evidence (in my view anyway) that a messianic pretender of this name existed, tried surfing donkeys into Jerusalem, and got crucified when his reinforcements failed to attend the planned rendezvous at Gethsemane. At least, this fits with the gospel of Mark. Yes, Saul Paulus (nephew of Sergius Paulus, the governor of Cyprus, and rich young firebrand, disaffected by the decadence he found in Jerusalem after going there to rediscover his Judaism - my hypothesis - it may be incorrect!) simply invented a lot of it. But not all. It is certain that the resurrection is a myth; Jesus never appeared to his disciples or anyone else after his execution, and his body was taken for definitive burial to Galilee, just like the young man at the tomb said.

And Peter definitely was married; it is pretty unlikely that Jesus wasn't married, but we just don't know.

"Definitely", Helio?

But Jesus was married, for sure; I saw a film about it once.

:-)

Very interesting RJB.

But I am now equally perplexed by the possibility that RC priests have a choice of which vows to take??!!

A cynic might say that the first you mentioned could theoretically allow him to engage in sexual relations so long as he does not get married.

Can you clarify this for us and perhaps even give us a hyperlink to more info?

Neither did I know that priests were allowed to marry for so long in the RC church.

I sure agree with you scrupturally speaking, some choose not to marry but there are no scriptural grounds for imposing it universally.

As we know Paul condemns those that impose celibacy and forbid eating of certain foods as "doctrines of devils".

1:Tim4

OT

OT

Generally speaking, diocesan priests take promises, orders guys (missionaries etc..) take vows.

Diocesan - promise of obedience to the local bishop (and his successors), and a promise of celibacy (not to get married.) Each priest will also have made another promise when they became Deacons, to believe in the Gospel of Jesus Christ and to "teach what you believe." A very significant choice of words, I always thought.

Orders - vow of obedience, vow of chastity, vow of poverty, and for some orders, a vow of perseverence. These vows are generally lived out in community so are deeply connected with community life.

You are correct to say that a diocesan priest who has sex has not broken his promise of celibacy. However, depending on who or what he had sex with - including just by himself - he will undoubtedly have broken one of the hundreds of other rules there are regarding sexuality.

Its also important to point out that these promises/vows are mandatory. They are imposed as conditions of being admitted to the priesthood, not freely chosen.

Is compulsory celibacy part of the problem?

I don't think cumpolsory celibacy is part of the problem in the RC church William, cumpolsory celibacy IS the problem.

I have absolutely no doubt that if nuns and priests were alowed to marry, instances of child sexual abuse within the RC church would fall to the same levels as that in a normal secular society.

From the rite of ordination of a deacon:

The bishop speaks to him in these or similar words:

By your own free choice you seek to enter the order of deacons. You shall exercise this ministry in the celibate state for celibacy is both a sign and a motive of pastoral charity, and a special source of spiritual fruitfulness in the world. By living in this state with total dedication, moved by a sincere love for Christ the Lord, you are consecrated to him in a new and special way. By this consecration you will adhere more easily to Christ with an undivided heart; you will be more freely at the ser­vice of God and mankind, and you will be more un­trammeled in the ministry of Christian conversion and rebirth. By your life and character you will give wit­ness to your brothers and sisters in faith that God must be loved above all else, and that it is he whom you serve in others.

Therefore, I ask you:

In the presence of God and the Church, are youre­solved, as a sign of your interior dedication to Christ, to remain celibate for the sake of the kingdom and in lifelong service to God and mankind?

The candidate answers:

I am.


You'll notice that it must be freely chosen. No one is forced to become a priest or deacon.

In further news, married couples protest that they are expected to be faithful to their spouse. "I wanted to get married" says Maisie Murphy, "but I was forced to commit myself to one person to the exclusion of others - that's why I have so many affairs because I was forced to do it".

Chris, all that cabbage is founded on an unsupportable premise - that celibacy is somehow "better" than normal human sexuality. That is a lot of nonsense (as are the "pastoral epistles" - whoever wrote them, certainly not Saul Paulus). Priests (and it pains me to say it) are just ordinary homo sapiens like the rest of us. They do not have a hotline to god, they cannot do anything that any other human can do. They are not special, are not consecrated. The chief evil in this mess has not even been the moral shortcomings of the priesthood, but the shocking behaviour of the Roman Catholic cult as an institution. Indeed, this is institutional, corporate paedophilia. If this cult were a company, they would be wound up, and the CEO imprisoned.

Heliopolitan,

Correct. The fact that cases of paedophile abuse by Catholic priests have occurred in many different countries shows that the system is at fault. This is not a matter of a local problem, "a few bad apples", as the Vatican maintains; it is a by-product of the system, which is the church itself.

At 15 above, I argued that celibacy must be seen as a necessary complement to the practice of confession and absolution.

The practice of confession grants a priest ample opportunities to dwell on the sexual fantasies of the young. It is perfect for targetting victims. The priest sits in the confessional, encouraging some youngster to blurt out all their 'sinful' thoughts and acts. The priest elicits every shameful thought and deed and the child's confessions give the paedophile all the leverage he needs to win over his prey. If it was happening over the internet, we would call it 'grooming' immediately.

Claiming for itself the power to absolve sins has given the Catholic church a strong hold on its subjects, the laity. The whole practice of having people confess to the priest who then 'absolves' them is an effective way of bolstering the power of the church over the people. "You must go to confession" is a useful rule for a controlling organisation. It puts the priest in authority over the laity and thus puts his behaviour beyond the bounds of normal parental caution. Of course, there is no question of the priest confessing to the laity in return, which would keep him on an equal footing with them - no, he only does that with one of his own kind - another insider.

At the end of confession the priest says "I absolve you of your sins." What an excellent device for emotional enslavement! The priest inflates his own authority and the laity are left feeling grateful for this 'benign' exercise of power. And the paedophile can corrupt his victim, tell them that their actions were sinful and then absolve them for those 'sins'. If you wanted to design a system which would create opportunities for paedophiles and then help them to cover their tracks, you could not do better than the Catholic practice of confession and absolution.

Unfortunately, the Catholic church amassed its great wealth through the practice of confession and absolution. It is unlikely to give up that source of revenue and so it will not give up the celibacy rule either. A few victims along the way it regards as collateral damage.

There is the selection problem also. The priesthood (I would suggest) may be more attractive as a career option for young men who are really confused about their sexuality, or (of course) who wish to target vulnerable youngsters, as in the case of Michael Cleary. Because so many of them are at least a little screwed up to start with, and the ones that aren't will soon become so, behaviour that in civilised society is seen as abnormal is thought perfectly normal in this bizarre clique, so no-one picks up on it. The only scrutiny or oversight is in the hands of people who are at the very best morally naive and inept, or even warped.

So how to fix the problem? Of course I would like to see the whole sordid edifice razed to the ground, but practically ditching celibacy and male-only requirements would at least mitigate some of the trouble, and go at least some way to rehabilitating this ridiculous organisation.

That will of course (as AD points out) mean that people will need to sort out "absolution" for their perceived wrongs directly with the universe (however they perceive that) without the intermediary of someone in a potentially exploitative relationship, but Prods have been doing that for years, and it seems to work for them.

but the shocking behaviour of the Roman Catholic cult as an institution. Indeed, this is institutional, corporate paedophilia. If this cult were a company, they would be wound up, and the CEO imprisoned

Gosh Helio, I'm shocked. You're beginning to sound just like Cecil Andrews.

Its actually interesting to note and compare the reactions of the Church as abuse cases come to light in each country. There is a pattern.

All sorts of defense mechanisms in place - But most abuse cases take place in the home, not the Church... The police didnt do their job properly... These people are just liars on the take...

One of the patterns is without doubt the Vatican attempting to distance itself from all of this in an attempt to protect Ratzinger. Irish Bishops forced to resign when they were only following his orders. Cardinal Law rewarded for his silence. A German Vicar General made to carry the can for a decision which was Ratzinger's, which allowed a pedophile priest into the diocese of Munich where he abused children while Ratzinger was Archbishop there.

However, in terms of revelations of obscene behaviour by Catholic clergymen, the worst is yet to come, I fear. Africa was a favourite 'dumping ground' for pedophile priests. The horror stories from there are just starting to emerge.

rjb you chill my blood to think of it.

ot

"Now the Spirit expressly says that in latter times some will depart from the faith, giving heed to deceiving spirits and doctrines of demons, speaking lies in hypocrisy, having their own conscience seared with a hot iron, FORBIDDING TO MARRY, and commanding to ABSTAIN FROM FOODS which God created to be received with thanksgiving by those who believe and know the truth. For everything created by God is good, and nothing is to be refused if it is received with thanksgiving." (1 Timothy 4:1-4)

"...but if they cannot exercise self-control, LET THEM MARRY. For it is better to marry than to burn with passion." (1 Corinthians 7:9)

"Now when Jesus had come into PETER'S house, He saw his WIFE’s mother lying sick with a fever." (Matthew 8:14)

"Do we have no right to take along a believing WIFE, as do also the OTHER APOSTLES, the brothers of the Lord, and Cephas [i.e. PETER]?" (1 Corinthians 9:5)

I think Helio's "Selection Problem" gets closer to an explanation than quasi-Freudian references to repressed sexuality.
The RC Church seems to have created a low-risk, target rich environment for abusers. Lot's of opportunity, little chance of being caught and few sanctions if you are caught.
Now if that has occurred across cultures and in various legal systems then it would be sensible to blame those at the top of the hierarchy.

In fact my explanantion puts the blame firmly on the hierarchies shoulders. They did not invent celibacy - they did allow criminal activity to flourish under their watch.

However we may well see married Priests as a result of this crisis - it is unlikely to help recruitment.

GV

GV

Abusers dont put their names down for the priesthood and go through six years philosophy and theology in order to gain access to victims. Thats taking the concept of 'grooming' a bit too far. (Abusers are good at grooming, but not that good.)

These abusers were products of a system. The majority of them went to a junior seminary, taken from their families at the age of eleven or twelve.

The Bishops and Cardinals actually knew that connection decades ago. During all of that "vow of silence' period, which lasted decades, they were the only ones who knew. (The Media are only catching up.)

Thats why they shut the seminaries down. The Media still havent grasped it yet. Every single, last one of them knew, or at the very least, had heard what was going on, and ALL of them chose to cover up.

RJB

Sexual dysfunctional individuals may seek out professions and lifestyles that help them hide, or even rationalise, their problems. Helio is quite correct to raise that possibilty. It would not be the case, then, that mere celibacy creates perversity. Rather celibate communities might attract a higher proportion of those with sexual dysfunction than would otherwise be expected. That would include those whose dysfunction may tend towards rape fanatsies, etc.

I'm not suggesting that paedophiles, specifically, are more likely to opt for "Priest" on careers day than "teacher" or "youth worker". However a paedophile is more likely to commit sexual crimes in a low risk environment. In high risk environments, oddly enough, they usually manage to control their behavior.

Another factor that is ignored is the "culture of brutality" that you have described in some detail. Rape (of children or adults) can be as much an expression of power and contempt. And criminals usually have to "dehumanise" their victims before and after their crimes. Casually beating a child for a minor misdemeanor is a good way of dehuamnising them in a perpetrator's mind.

Roy Baumeister argues that violent crime results more often than not from "threatened narcissism". As my pupils put it, some tube thinks they're the centre of the universe, and get violent when someone else bursts their bubble.

Now if children were dehumanised in some Catholic Schools, and some Priests had narcissistic streaks that were nurtured in some fashion by the hierarchies, you have a recipe for disaster.

These considerations have much more explanatory power than appeals to sexual repression. That explanation seems too simple to deal with the complexities. But celibacy does play some role in explaining the level of abuse on this account. It was not "managed" properly. The hierarchy seems to have turned a blind eye - and we would expect them to.

After all, why acknowledge the deep structural problems in a system that has promoted you to significance? More power to the laity should be one outcome.

GV