Priestly celibacy wrongly blamed as cause of pedophile abuse by Atila Guimaraes

NEWS: April 15, 2002

Bird’s Eye View of the News

Atila Sinke Guimarães

STRANGE MARRIAGE– In face of the general furor against child abuse by Catholic priests and even by Bishops, some of the principle American Catholic leaders are trying to deviate public indignation to an issue useful for the progressivist cause. Applying this strategy, the Jesuit magazine America blamed priesthood celibacy for the scandals. It reported: “A nun said she feels great shame, pain and powerlessness and called for a new model of Church. ‘The male celibate hierarchical structure is falling apart,’ she said” (April 1, 2002, p. 5). Commenting on the March 15 editorial of The Pilot, the Boston Archdiocesan newspaper, America went on: “The editorial said the scandals have raised serious questions in the mind of laity. Among the questions are these: Should celibacy continue to be a normative condition for the diocesan priesthood in the Latin Church? If celibacy were optional, would there be fewer scandals of this nature in the priesthood?” Therefore, the progressivist America endorsed the more “conservative” Boston Pilot and reached the same conclusion: to question priestly celibacy.

Cardinal Roger Mahony of Los Angeles, head of the most numerous American Archdiocese, also issued an invitation to debate celibacy: “I have never said that we can’t discuss these things,” Mahony said, adding that Eastern rite Catholic priests can marry. “It works out fine” (Los Angeles Times, March 27, 2002). Addressing the same topic, Archbishop Rembert Weakland of Milwaukee wrote in a March 19 letter, “Perhaps this will be the moment when the larger issue of priestly ministry in the Church will be faced” (ibid). Finally, a Chicago representative of the radical progressivist movement Call to Action, Linda Piecczynski, had this to say about the discussion of marriage among priests: “One bright spot in this whole horrible business of the sex abuse scandals is that it does seem to be creating an atmosphere for transformation” (ibid.).

Enough information. Let me analyze for a moment.

Two causes

The whole question of celibacy is not being presented correctly at its base. The persons I quoted above are trying to present the priests who abuse children as men with a normal attraction for women. Thus all their problems would be resolved if they could just marry. But these men are not attracted to the opposite sex, not at all. They are homosexuals and pedophiles. When they follow their lower instincts, they seek out men, and worse, boys. If marriage would resolve the problems of these priests, according to this absurd logic, it would have to be a homosexual marriage, or a monstrous pedophile marriage. Is this the kind of marriage that the opponents of celibacy are calling for?

The American Catholic Hierarchy and the Vatican are trying to avoid dealing with the real causes of the problem. There are two main causes, in my opinion.

First, the clergy was always a sacred order, essentially separated from the world in order to sanctify it. “If you had been of the world, the world would love its own: but because you are not of the world, but I have chosen you out of the world, therefore the world hateth you” (Jn 15:19). The separation of priests from the world is a reality that is not subject to discussion. It exists per se, as a natural consequence of the Sacrament of Orders. However, Council Vatican II ordered these very people to adapt themselves to the world. Then they began to leave their sacred sphere to assimilate themselves into the world. Either way the fruit is bad. Because with this adaptation the clergy in fact acquired the vices of the world – among others, the unnatural vice of homosexuality and pedophilia. Notwithstanding, the world never really considered the clergy as integrated into it. On the contrary, it continued to consider the clergy as a separated order. All the abuses the world tolerates among "its own," it cannot admit in the Catholic clergy. Thus, the general indignation. I say this as one who is categorically opposed to these crimes and the despicable clergy who commit them. I contend, however, that a major cause that led to this degradation was adaptation to the world and the imitation of the world.

Second, Vatican II in effect abandoned the militancy of the Catholic Church. The general mood that prevails today is one where there are no more real enemies trying to conquer the Church, no more battles for the Faith, no more need for the combative spirit. This new “Tolerant Church” has fostered a hypertrophy of charity to the detriment of the Faith. Everything is love, forgiveness, and unity with heretics, Schismatics, Jews and pagans. In a word, the virtual death of the Church Militant transformed this new ecclesiastical structure into an effeminate Church. It does not surprise me that this institution does not attract real men, but effeminate ones and homosexuals. Hence, the consequences: Manly youths have deserted the halls of the seminaries; men of value have distanced themselves from the priesthood, and the opposite kind has made their shameful entrance. If you still find some virile men, often they are progressivists who exert their energy to conquer what remains to be dominated in the Catholic Church. They are still combative but their militancy is being applied for a destructive purpose.

Neither the Pope nor the American Hierarchy will agree with my analysis because of their compromise to support Vatican II in all events and against all evidence.

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