Organization of Pedophiles agrees to settlement

Well, I think you've hit at the heart of the problem. There are too many (not many, but enough) priests who go into the seminary because they think entering a celibate culture will "cure" their urges when it only exacerbates them.

I think an extreme suppression of emotion is rarely a good thing, and, in my personal experience, the Catholic Church encourages suppression in many ways. I can only imagine that priests face that suppression a lot more than someone who was just raised in the Church.

But changing a culture of anti-sexuality (or at the very least, a forced paradigm of what is "proper" sexuality within the Church) would go a long way toward helping the priesthood regain some semblance of respect. Acknowledging their humanity -- people's natural desire for intimacy, people's natural emotional attraction to other people; i.e. allowing priests to have real human relationships, involving sex and marriage and family -- would be a step in the right direction.

 

True, buck, but it ain't gonna happen. The church as a whole is getting MORE conservative, an American influence is waning.

There was a great article in the Atlantic Monthly a few years back examining why world religion is getting more conservative, rather than less. It has to do with which areas of the world are supplying the growing population of Christians, and the abandonment of religion altogether among many in the West who find no room for themselves in this environment. In a sense, choosing the highway over "my way."