AUSTRALIA
Triple Hack – ABC
After they are ordained, Catholic priests can’t have sex or get married. This week the Royal Commission asked the question: could the tradition of celibacy have partly led to the high rates of sex abuse in the Church?
Here are the church’s own figures:
* 40 per cent of the members of the brothers of St John of God had allegations of abuse made against them between 1950 and 2010
* That’s compared with 20 per cent of Marist brothers and 22 per cent of Christian brothers
* Between January 1980 and February 2015, 4,444 people alleged incidents of child sexual abuse
* 1,880 people holding positions in the Catholic Church, including priests, were identified as alleged perpetrators
The same day these figures were released, Dr Michael Whelan, a Marist priest, told the inquiry that the church’s law of celibacy was misguided and should not be in place. He said celibacy was “a huge issue for the Catholic Church and we have to deal with it”.
The argument usually runs like this – on one side are those who say that celibacy produces sexual frustration which then finds outlets in pedophilia or some other deviant sexuality. Alongside this is the related argument that paedophiles are harder to detect among celibate men, and for this reason the tradition of celibacy draws paedophiles to the priesthood.
The counter-argument is that not all celibate men or women abuse children. Most of this abuse happens within the family. Blaming celibacy distracts from the real causes of child abuse. This is basically the official view of the Church, though there are dissenting voices.
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