But chastity did not work as a good solution for the priests who have hurt hundreds of children (rape, pedophilia, lust, etc, from your list)…and these are men of God who pray all day and believe in church teachings and in Jesus.
Some argue that chastity (priests not being able to get married) contributed to the problem in these circumstances.
So there must be something else we can do beyond chastity to try and solve these issues. Something more, or something else. We must keep trying.
If I were to say chastity did not work for me because I became pregant, I would really being saying I failed chastity.
You assume they were men of God who prayed all day and believed in the church teachings and Jesus but I wouldn’t make that assumption. It might be true but by your post it sounds to me as though you don’t understand what a pedophile is.
“Pedophiles find ways to be around children as often as possible. They get jobs as teachers, camp counselors, schoolbus drivers, daycare workers, or even enter the priesthood. They volunteer as Boy Scout leaders, church or secular youth workers, or with organizations such as Trucker Buddy International. Of course most of the people in these professions and volunteer positions are not pedophiles, and are indeed honest, moral and upright people, but most pedophiles will seek out these type of occupations and volunteer positions.” This quote was taken from
crimeshots.com. It’s a true crime website and perhaps not the most scientific (though I’ve read a lot of true crime and there is a LOT of forensics reported in them - much more so than your average news media.)
People using the argument for allowing priests to marry are naive at best. Do you think someone who is sexually attracted to children will be cured of this by having sex with an adult?
“The onset of pedophilia usually occurs during adolescence. Occasional pedophiles begin their activities during middle age but this late onset is uncommon. In the United States, about 50% of men arrested for pedophilia are married.” According to
minddisorders.com it doesn’t seem to work.
I don’t think chastity is the whole cure anymore than just eating healthy is the entire cure to someone who is severely obese. Chastity helps people who don’t have any sexual fixations and eating healthy helps people who just eat a little too much or eat the wrong things sometimes. But for people outside of those definitions there are complex psychological issues at work, and sometimes even deviant biological causes that need to be addressed. But in both cases the suggestions are necessary.
To say chastity is the wrong suggestion is to say that sex is somehow the solution. Part of chastity is not having sex therefore if it has no place in the solution then having sex is a component that must be utilized.
I think the very word chastity offends certain people and when you look at it honestly it does so because it is terribly inconvenient to them and it implies a spiritual practice to the secular mind (which can also be offensive to some people). The idea of chastity being effective is very threatening to our culture here in America (not to exclude those of you not in the States) and it will be fought tooth and nail no matter what arena it is applied in - even pedophilia. Because if it encroaches on the world farther than that then the billion dollar porn industry will lose a lot of money, human traffickers in America won’t make more money than Google like they did in 2007, thousands of strip clubs would be shut down, the big pharma monster would lose billions in revenue from birth control, hospitals wouldn’t be treating as many women for breast cancer due to the spike in estrogen from birth control (they’ve also found a correlation between traces of birth control in the water to a rise in prostate cancer in men), and a million abortions wouldn’t happen which sounds like quite a bit of revenue as well. That’s just what came to the top of my head - there are many other ways the practice of chastity would take a huge chunk of profits away from many other businesses.
So when you fight against chastity, aside from your own lust, who else are you fighting for? Whether it is your intention to or not, you are also protecting the interests of business monoliths that crush humanity underfoot for financial gain. And the problem of corporate greed is something Catholics and secularists alike can probably shake hands on even if we focus on different aspects of the problem. There isn’t a lot of money to be made on morality and believe it or not that is a huge factor in why it is under attack.
I have to admit that I am confused, chastity and lust are contradictory. It is impossible to be truly chaste while lusting. Chastity does not equal no sex, it basically equals living in a pure way according to your state in life. Married people are called ot chastity just as much as religious and single people are. How is chastity not the solution to lust?