Explain to him that the priesthood isn’t a “job” like being a banker or street sweeper - you can’t “take away” a priest’s priesthood any more than you can take away a mother’s motherhood, or a man’s manhood - when he is ordained, it becomes a permanent part of him.
However, even the mere suspicion that a priest may have done something wrong is enough to get him suspended from parish work, these days, and moved to a monastery or administrative office where he can’t encounter children or women.
This is very sad, especially since it was only a very few, high-profile priests who were reported on over and over and over and over again, with the same story being repeated thousands of times, until it seemed as if thousands of priests had done this same awful thing, instead of just a few priests, a long time ago. Those priests have been in jail for a really long time now - they won’t be getting out, and some of them are already dead. But the media loves to harp on these stories and repeat them again and again, to make it seem as if there is some kind of an epidemic in the Catholic Church.
