Priestly celibacy

Sooner or later, bad ideas take their toll. Priestly celibacy is another example of pious hope triumphing over experience and common sense. In past eras, common sense took the form of looking the other way when it came to priests having mistresses or visiting prostitutes. On the principle that "hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue," allowances were made for the fact that a human being charged with emulating Jesus was likely to fall off the wagon from time to time.

That can't be conceded in our elevated age, of course, so instead we have priests with an entirely new take on the idea of ministering to the young. Thus do the elderly ecclesiastics at the Vatican find themselves presiding over a moral and financial catastrophe, and aren't they doing a bang-up job so far.

Sometimes old ideas become new all over again. The famous early Christian theologian and scholar Origen (c. 185-254), following Matthew 19:12, castrated himself. If the Pope can't bring himself to countenance priestly marriage, then maybe OFS (Origen's Final Solution) could be revisited as the lesser-evil alternative to child molestation. More sopranos for the choir, too.

Byron


Below from Wikipedia:

Celibacy for priests is a discipline in the Roman Catholic Church, not a doctrine: in other words, a church regulation, but not an integral part of Church teaching. It is based upon the life of Christ and his celibate way of life. However the first pope, St. Peter, as well as many subsequent popes, bishops, and priests during the church's first 270 years were in fact married men, and often fathers...

New opposition appeared in connection with the Protestant Reformation...The Reformers made abolition of clerical continence and celibacy a key element in their reform. They denounced it as opposed to the New Testament recommendation that a cleric should be "the husband of one wife" (see on 1 Timothy 3:2–4 above), the declared right of the apostles to take around with them a believing Christian as a wife (1 Corinthians 9:5) and the admonition, "Marriage should be honoured by all" (Hebrews 13:4). They blamed it for widespread sexual misconduct among the clergy...

Because the rule of clerical celibacy is a law and not a doctrine, exceptions can be made, and it can, in principle, be changed at any time by the Pope. Nonetheless, both the present Pope, Benedict XVI, and his predecessor, spoke clearly of their understanding that the traditional practice is unlikely to change.