The current attention given to a very old problem within the Catholic Church, that of required celibacy of its clergy, has stirred little controversy outside of the Church but has caused much angst within the Church.  When adult men (mostly men) abuse little boys it is a cause for alarm because it is deemed unnatural, distasteful and illegal in most places.  In antiquity it was quite the norm to include children in the bedtime activities of their elders.  There has always been a trade in little children to satisfy the tastes of pederasts, very few of whom would be recognizable on the streets because otherwise they would appear to look “normal”.

While the world watches, the Catholic Church would rather not deal openly and honestly with the significant number of Priests whose persuasion is perversion. It is a delicate subject and is handled mostly by not handling it at all.  Like armies that send their unworthy leaders to far off places as punishment, the Church moves its offending Priests to distant new locations.  This is deemed punishment although unlike the measures taken to protect citizens when offenders are released from prison and settle in an area all interested parties do everything but erect huge signs with arrows pointing to the place where there is no refuge.  This is one of those crimes that serving a prison sentence does not involve rehabilitation.  The dirty little secret (which I think everybody knows) is that sending a pederast to prison is a present to him because of the huge population where possibilities abound to live a conjugal life as long as official vision is averted or wishes not to see.

But, the Catholic Church is not the sole institution where preying on little children is the rule rather than the exception.  We blow up reported instances so that that it looks as though all the adult members of that institution seem to share the blame. It would be so easy for elderly Church rulers to say that although the reports are that Jesus never married or seemed to cohabit with women rather than his disciples, this never was his requirement for his followers to copy. It is my thought that for nearly two thousand years Church Priests to voluntarily become celibate would not help them become better priests.  To require of them not only poverty, obedience AND chastity flies in the face of what actually are well known practices WITHIN the Church.  Popes with mistresses are part of the history of the Church. The crime is requiring chastity, an unnatural state, of all priests’ flies in the face of reason and the human condition that requires activity resulting in reproduction.

 I am now old and am chaste by nature rather than by will but I still feel sympathy for the clergy that willingly, “In the Footsteps of Christ”, foregoes human nature and substitutes an unnatural and indefensible rule.