AUSTRALIA
WA Today
November 15, 2012
Joseph Wakim
The royal commission into ”institutional responses to child abuse” will not have the authority to review one vexed issue: the mandatory vow of clergy celibacy.
While we should be careful not to confuse correlation with causation, one compelling question cannot be avoided – why do Eastern Catholics and other churches with married clergy rarely encounter claims of child sex abuse?
As a Maronite Catholic, with an uncle who was a married priest with four children, this choice of celibacy or marriage has been functional since the church’s foundation.
Catholic churches in the East, the birthplace of Christianity, have always had married clergy.
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