When Rome Will Ditch Celibacy

Even for such an exceedingly top-down organisation, I think the institution is too large, wide-spread, too personnel-entrenched, for any one leader to root out child-rape in anything like a thorough manner. Attempts must be made, of course. 

The core issue is that the celibacy requirement, whatever spiritual/practical benefits the Church believes may accrue from it, by its nature invites psycho-sexually compromised men — who realise they are afflicted or no — who would, naturally, seek the shelter of, the neighborhood respect-conferring benefits of, this unique institution.

Absent the celibacy rule, the percentage of these compromised men in Church service would fall for the haven would not offer the active safe-harbor it remains for these men; fewer of these afflicted would seek the priesthood.

The Church has mandated priestly celibacy since around the year 600. Prior to that, the Universal Church had no universal rule, only the less than wholly clear Pauline notion that celibacy (for everyone) would be a terrific spiritual way to go (if only it made any practical sense). 

If it were ever to amount to a question of Church institutional survival, there would be a hundred and more spiritual arguments offered in the College of Cardinals for ditching the celibacy mandate and ditching would win hands down.

Whoever the Pope were to be at such a perceived crisis-point, liberal or conservative, he’d be on the ditching side of the argument…that’s the nature of all very old, vast, successful institutions that have survived the throes of the cultural and political change Rome has faced.

The institution will always alter itself in the name of service, and of perpetuity.