UNITED STATES
Commonweal
Paul Blaschko February 17, 2015
Any college-aged man entering a Catholic seminary during the ongoing crisis of the priestly sexual-abuse scandals does so with a certain amount of self-consciousness. Alongside predictable questions raised by the decision to embrace a life of celibacy, the seminarian faces widespread doubt about whether the church is capable of providing the formation necessary to produce well-adjusted, sexually healthy priests. Some critics of the church see sexual abuse as the natural result of celibacy, which they regard as a psychologically unnatural way of life. On this view, there is nothing mysterious about the church’s failure to provide adequate sexual formation, since the very attempt to form sexually normal celibate men poses an impossible task. The only solution to the problem of priestly sexual abuse would be to drop mandatory celibacy.
[This article is part of a larger package of stories on the priesthood. Read all of them here.]
But this view is simplistic. For one thing, most sexual abuse is committed by non-celibates, a lot of it within families. For another, the percentage of celibate clergy who abuse tends to mirror the percentage among their non-celibate counterparts in other faiths, as well as among secular professionals. And even if the alleged psychological abnormality of celibacy explains why a particular priest commits abuse, it does nothing to explain the equally or more troubling fact that large numbers of non-abusing priests and bishops have been willing to ignore, or in many cases cover up, the actions of those who did. The critique of celibacy alone cannot explain why priests systematically shirked their moral duty to report such crimes, or why bishops chose to assign and reassign serial child molesters to unsuspecting parishes. It does not account for the systemic nature of the church’s failed response to the abuse of children, and this is at least partly what makes these scandals so heinous.
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