buckweaver
Active Member
- Joined
- Apr 4, 2005
- Messages
- 18,033
Bob Cook said:As for the problem being solved by priests marrying -- I fully support the idea of women priests and married priests. But a lot of child molesters are married men, so there's no guarantee a noncelibate priesthood would result in no more kid-diddlers. At the most, it would prevent men from becoming priests for the mere reason of suppressing their urges.
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.