CarnalNation

The stories are all over the news, no need to repeat them here, but what the heck: Trusting Parents and Their Innocent Children Betrayed! Pedophile Priests! Cover Ups by Church Officials! Scandal! Abuse! Etc.!

What's a (possibly guilty) pope to do? Well, how about changing?

Yeah, that may be a lot to ask. But there are not a multitude of ways to get out of this predicament with any dignity intact, much less with a church that the faithful have faith in. Or that the believers believe in. But face it, Pope, change is inevitable. For all of us. I understand that the Church prides itself on being consistent, as it has been for hundreds and hundreds of years, including the pedophilia issue. Now you have a truly historic opportunity and lots of reasons to take it.

Yes, an opportunity.

The Church didn't always insist on celibacy and still doesn't in certain places and under certain circumstances. Celibacy became official in the Middle Age, and the Church made use of the inheritances of the young men joining its ranks. Instead of having wives, children and concubines to spread their wealth among, they left all their wealth to the Church when they died. Some believe this was the reason for enforced celibacy in the Catholic Church and can provide documentation to back up that theory. To this day, some of the eastern churches don't require celibacy, married men who become priests do not need to divorce their wives first, and clergy converts from other churches may become Catholic priests while remaining married.

But for most of the Church's priests, celibacy is a requirement, “perfect and perpetual celibacy.” That means no sex for the rest of your life.

NO SEX.

For The Rest of Your Life.

Not even with yourself.

To say mass, priests must confess their sins regularly. One might expect there to be quite a bit of talk about sex in the confessionals. This is legally protected speech in secular courts by the sanctity of the clerical relationship, meaning that such secrets cannot be revealed in court under most circumstances. According to some sources, however, the confessional booth is where a lot of connecting with others of like minds and inclinations takes place. (Wasn't there a porn scene in a confessional once? Or twice?)

There's nothing like sharing a mutual secret to keep priests shuffling each other from one crime scene to another rather than to a new home under a different, more secular authority with men who haven't taken the same kind of vows they have. It's not intentional blackmail to have secrets on each other like that. It certainly wasn't intended to be.

In addition to the secretive nature of wanting to keep your own sins private, there is an institutionalized secrecy for the “greater good of the church.” Clergymen take a vow to uphold the Church and keep it free from scandal. Like most religious institutions, Catholicism believes its laws to supersede those of secular governments. So “mental reservation” can be practiced to uphold this higher level oath to the Pope and the Church, even when a secular criminal court might call what just happened a lie. Or perjury.

So we have a situation in which men live together, under a vow that they will not have sex, and feel compelled to keep secrets about who breaks their vow, how often, and with whom. As for “how often and with whom,” studies have estimated that up to 50% of priests engage in sexual activity, and 30-50% of them are homosexual.

The Church came up with the term “transitional homosexuality” in the mid 1990s to explain that the priesthood is not really that gay: Gay men are not disproportionately attracted to the clerical life. You see, priests just find themselves in a situation where if they fall off the sexual abstinence wagon, it will be with a man. The Church is the largest homosocial organization in the world. Most of the residences house males only and only men have positions of power or influence. So it might look like it's also the most homosexual organization, but it's just “situational” (which is what they call homosexuality in those other authoritarian male-only residences).

But homosexuality and pedophilia are not related. Let me repeat that: homosexuality and pedophilia are not related. So why does the scandal seem to be focused on pedophilia with boys? It could be that the press sensationalizes what seems most scandalous to them and that, of course, would be homosexual pedophilia. The one-two punch! But that's the easy answer. There's more to it than that.