Vatican’s McCarrick report says Pope John Paul II knew of misconduct allegations nearly two decades before cardinal’s removal

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That is exactly what I said, Ora.. In healing the family we heal the Church. Both-and.

Gracious, I knew communication between people was spiralling downward but it’s worse than ever.

You are attempting to put ‘the Church” before the family. In fact, you’re actually doing the ‘either-or’ instead of the ‘both-and’ because you’re insisting that the fault started with ‘shepherds’.

Also, last I knew the Church wasn’t into ‘relevance’.

And, to be frank, if somehow there arose a massive public atonement, all clergy who had ever been guilty of a sexual sin were publicly defrocked, a new cadre of priests were trained and there existed a machine that could track every sin of thought, word, and deed, and these priests were NEVER guilty of a sexual sin… . There would still be plenty of people on these threads grousing that ‘It isn’t enough. They need to do more. No smoke without fire. You can’t trust them.” For so many of the Armchair pope crowd, even if somehow everything was done by the Church that they ever thought was necessary to be done, they would still grouse that it hadn’t been done before and therefore was no good.
 
stpurl said:
You are attempting to put ‘the Church” before the family. In fact, you’re actually doing the ‘either-or’ instead of the ‘both-and’ because you’re insisting that the fault started with ‘shepherds’.
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No I’m not. The Church needs to work in parallel. But up to a point. How on earth are families supposed to heal without a healthy Church to support them? With a Church so preoccupied with and unable to get to the root of her own rot, that she can no longer effectively shepherd?

And the shepherds must acknowledge their own responsibility. They’ve been wrestling with this issue for a millennia+. It’s time to stop burying their heads in the sand and tackle the problem and find the root cause. And to start leading again.

Also don’t fool yourself that family breakdown is a new development. No-fault divorce is recent but in the past the depravity came out in other ways: spousal abuse, alcoholism, and yes sexual and physical abuse of children. Because of the taboo about divorce, and laws favouring men, women had to put up and shut up or be ostracized and forced into poverty if they left. Frankly, that was no better.

Even St Paul spoke of these issues in his epistles. We really haven’t changed that much except that modern means of communications mean we can head to our perdition at warp speed.

I’m sorry but blaming it all on “modern society” just strikes me as a cop-out. We are all responsible for our own actions, including the clergy.
 
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The root cause of the sex abuse crisis in the Catholic Church is celibacy! Celibacy is falsely believed to be superior to marriage. They are different vocations. Some people are called to be single and celibate. Some people are called to be married. You cannot create a celibate vocation where none exists. Saint Paul speaks to this truth. A celibate priesthood is not a hiding place for closeted, immature homosexuals, and most certainly not a place for pedophiles! Allow sexually and psychologically mature men with the gift of celibacy AND married men into the priesthood and the incidence of pedophilia and pederasty will necessarily plummet. It’s up to Catholics to determine if they want a faith with a role in the world. I wish you well.
 
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I agree with you but I think you have to dig even further below the surface to figure out “why celibacy?”

I have my theories. I’ll leave it at that unless someone wants to discuss privately via PM, because I’m sure many here would find them upsetting.
 
The Church enforced celibacy in the 11th century in order to acquire land and wealth. It then created a theology to support a celibate priesthood. The problem is that the early Church had both celibate and married priests. Eastern Christianity maintains a celibate and married priesthood to this day. It’s biblical. Celibacy is not superior to marriage. A single, celibate vocation is very rare. Most people are meant to marry. If you burn, you should marry. If you are homosexual, you must carefully discern if the priesthood is your calling and commit to celibacy in an all male environment. Pedophiles need to be barred from serving anywhere in the Church, especially with children. There’s no reason why married men cannot be priests! A family is not an impediment. The laity should not depend on priests to fulfill all their spiritual needs. We are to take an active role in ministering to one another.
 
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Seriously, you have a slightly mixed up view of Church history.

First, celibacy and marriage always coexisted in the Church.
Second, where on earth do you get the ‘11th century enforcement to get wealth?” I’d like to see some primary sources there. Because, in earlier times, there had actually been cases where priests ‘handed down’ their parishes to their sons, but this was hardly ‘keeping wealth’ from the church itself.

What was happening, and well before the 11th century, was that as the Church grew and the parishes grew larger, it became more obvious in the WESTERN Church, which was dealing in those centuries with much more evangelisation (not the easiest thing to be a priest going out to serve the barbarian tribes with your wife and kids along, you know), a lot more small scale and large scale uprisings (again, there was a bigger need for unmarried men to serve for defense), and above all a recognition in this area, unlike the Eastern Church where after the full scale Muslim conquest leaving the Eastern half more homogenous, more ‘civilised’ with people closer to Byzantium for the most part, far closer overall than people in Northern Europe were to Rome, which led to smaller parishes overall and a more patriarchical society and a ‘disdain’ for celibacy as showing a wish for ‘youth’ and a supposed unwillingness to take on family responsibility; but in the West it was seen that there was more a need for those societies, which were so much more heterogenous and diverse, to have a priest who was not ‘tied to a family’ but who could, especially in large and diverse parishes, be ‘single minded’. For example in 11th century England a priest who was living near the border of Scotland could have a parish with Anglo Saxons and Celts and Picts and various ‘tribes’. If the priest married a women from one ‘tribe’ it could be seen as favouritism to that tribe. Plus the family could be used as hostages, for bribery, etc.

But the whole concept of celibacy as something wrong and not priestly is itself totally wrong.

And frankly, in the US alone, looking at the state of marriage and the family, the huge divorce rates, the number of children whose rates of mental illness and suicide are skyrocketing, where Cyberbullying is endemic, etc., the idea of asking priests to take on a culture which had been geared to ‘single men’ for centuries and suddenly throw women and children into the mix, is appalling. While celibacy is a discipline and can be changed, we don’t need ‘change for change’s sake’ and above all, we don’t need to assume that if there are problems with sexual abuse in the Church that it’s ‘because of celibacy’. Not hardly. There are problems with sex abuse because the entire nature of the family and of sex itself have been over the centuries distorted and disparaged.
 
These statistics are astounding!

"Sipe stood by his estimate that 6 percent of Catholic clergy have some history of sexual abuse, with some dioceses and religious orders seeing figures nearing 25 percent. And in his books –"A Secret World in 1990 and “Celibacy in Crisis” in 2003 – he presented evidence backing this claim: “At any one time no more than 50 percent of priests are practicing celibacy.”

Sadly, Richard Sipe died on the eve of the Pennsylvania report in 2018. 😭😭😭
 
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Even if the statistics were true, that doesn’t indicate that celibacy is the CAUSE of the problem, does it?

I know from your history, which you were courageous to share, that your understanding of celibacy itself is not ‘in sync’ with the majority of individuals. And others on these threads who have family with SSA are naturally inclined to search for a ‘solution’ within the Church that in essence elevates the ‘exception’ in order to disprove the norm, or makes their family member seem more ‘sinned against than sinning’, etc.

The fact remains that CELIBACY itself (a discipline which an individual priest freely chooses as part of his vocation, not something he is ‘forced into’) is not the cause of sexual abuse any more than heterosexuality is a cause of sexual abuse, nor homosexual INCLINATIONS (not actions) being a cause of sexual abuse.

Sexual abuse occurs when individuals freely choose to act on their own inclinations, against the teachings of the Church.
 
I am not really sure what you mean by this statement, “I know from your history, which you were courageous to share, that your understanding of celibacy itself is not ‘in sync’ with the majority of individuals”. I am Asexual, meaning I don’t experience sexual attraction to either gender and also Aromantic, meaning I don’t experience romantic attraction. How does my being Aroace invalidate my opinion that there should be married and celibate priests? That is not a heretical position. Please clarify!
 
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If one has not mastered their own sexuality, whatever it may be, living the celibate life is not something that is going to be an easy thing.
From my conversations, with many priests of all ages, the one thing they all say is that their “sexual formation” was something that was never discussed.
Many priests I know went from elementary school to a seminary style high school then right into seminary. Talking about sexuality was never part of their formation.
Therefore many grew up with very unhealthy ideas about sex and sexuality. And that is why we have the problem we do today.
 
I must disagree. As many have noted, the problem has existed to some degree from pretty much recorded time and certainly from the inception of the Church.

Until the 20th century with its urbanisation, the majority of young men who went to seminary lived in rural households or in marginally industrialised small towns and cities where not only did one grow up rather quickly (after all, child labor still existed barely 100 years ago in the US) but often in a multigenerational household.

No, it is only since Dear Old Sigmund, Carl, and the psychologists of the 20th century started to speculate about sex and ‘lack’ that you get seminarians and leaders of the mid 20th century onward speculating about the young men’s sexual formation.

So why were there problems in prior centuries when by the criteria of today’s ‘men must have sexual formation’ the young men entering had plenty of knowledge, yet STILL had problems with abuse?

No, this is just another example of attempting to put 20th century psychology as the sine qua non.

It is also (and I’m not charging you personally, be assured) yet another example of an anti-masculine bias. Oh the poor fragile young men of late decades, so stupid (as compared to the women who apparently never had any of this problem); so prone to all kinds of abusive behavior due to their lack of knowledge and inability to control themselves, etc.

Honestly, as the mother and grandmother of boys/men, I find the current climate to be as oppressive with regard to the masculine as our society supposedly was to the feminine. The big difference is that we are supposed so educated now and with so much experience understanding WOMEN that it is unconscionable that we are acting out with the same kinds of ‘oppressions’ with regard to men now.
 
Since you yourself do not possess sexual feelings it must be hard for you to imagine the way others who DO possess such feelings may react. I know I find it difficult to imagine being asexual/a romantic. A person like you then would first find no difficulty at all being celibate since you do not experience sexual attraction. Most people would find it quite difficult, thereby making it a true sacrifice. However, ‘difficult’ does not equal ‘impossible’.

So with the above, as well, the only reason I would imagine you would consider marriage would be for a kind of secondary gain; i.e. companionship, financial. Most people though in addition to those things desire sexual attraction which in itself helps, though is not required, for long term mutual love and fidelity.

As a comparison, a person who felt no particular desire for any kind of nutrition whatsoever would be rather unhelpful in a discussion between a vegetarian and a carnivore, as he would not see any real difference in the points of view. I would have thought you would be advocating in that kind of way for BOTH celibacy and marriage, but you seem to have a real DOWN on celibacy, and that surprises me.
 
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stpurl said:
A person like you then would first find no difficulty at all being celibate since you do not experience sexual attraction. Most people would find it quite difficult, thereby making it a true sacrifice. However, ‘difficult’ does not equal ‘impossible’.
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Or simply unattractive to young heterosexual men. As in “why bother” when I can have an active sexuality, a life companion, children and grandchildren eventually? When the alternative is loneliness, not having a licit active sexuality, and being in a seminary with men who aren’t like-minded, have a higher than normal proportion of homosexuals among them and where there is an active but clandestine homosexual subculture creating a culture of hypocrisy?

That’s more than a sacrifice, that’s mental torture.

No wonder vocations are falling off a cliff. And since today it’s no longer necessary to wrap homosexuality under a cloak of secrecy, I can understand also why gay men wouldn’t want to bother either.
 
Well see, the whole idea of ‘getting something out of it’ as opposed to offering something to God is part of the problem.

Also, as nobody seems willing to accept, the role of celibacy in the Latin rite of the Catholic Church has been around for centuries and centuries. Amazingly enough, the Church produced a slew of honourable manly men who would have been terrific husbands and fathers, but ‘offered their single service’ to the Lord without whinging and complaining about how much they were giving up, how ‘unfair’ it is, etc.

Another point: Over in Africa, there are a lot of fine, upstanding and YOUNG Catholic men who are joining the priesthood and who have been adhering to their vows of celibacy, even ‘right now’. So again, quite frankly, what we have in our current Western society is a cadre of people who have been brainwashed and psychoanalysed and given ‘self-esteem’ and ‘diversity’ training up the wazoo and who now feel they are entitled to have sex, be priests, be married, be practicing homosexual/lesbian (because hey we want women priests too), trans/etc and to hades with the Church’s disciplines, doctrines, OR dogma. “I want to serve the God I have made in MY way”.
 
I think being Aroace gives me a unique perspective on human sexuality. I am not against celibacy. I believe in the model of Eastern Christianity and having both married and celibate priests. I said in an earlier post that most people are Allosexual and Romantic. Allosexuality means to experience sexual attraction to one or both genders. Romantic Orientation, “also called affectional orientation indicates the sex with which a person is most likely to have a romantic relationship or fall in love”. Asexuals experience no sexual attraction to either gender and are approximately 1% of the human population. Aromantics experience no romantic attraction to either gender and can be of any sexual orientation, but comprise “25.9% of Asexuals”.

Celibacy is NOT a higher vocation. It is a different vocation. Celibacy is a spiritual gift. Those that are able to be celibate and choose to be celibate should be supported, but it is bad theology to enforce celibacy upon members of the clergy who are oriented towards marriage and family. Homosexuals are a unique problem. They are Allosexuals with same sex attraction in an all male vocation. If they have a Romantic orientation, there is additional conflict. Pedophiles should be barred from ALL ministries, especially the priesthood!

The Catholic Church needs to follow the model of the East. You will still have celibate priests, but you will also stop the unbiblical practice of barring married men. In addition, the wives of married men will be able to contribute their gifts, knowledge, and talents in service to the Church.
 
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I repeat, celibacy is not forced upon the clergy of the Roman church. It is a free choice for the glory of God.
 
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