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Saturday

May292010

Catholic Priests and the Women Who Love Them

Saturday, May 29, 2010 at 5:16AM

Not since the days of the Borgia popes have there been so many scandals surrounding Roman Catholic priests and their vows of celibacy. In addition to the ongoing bruhaha about pedophila and its cover up, we now have a group of 39 Italian women, all of whom have had affairs with priests, writing a letter to the Pope asking him to reconsider priestly celibacy.

There’s a certain irony here, dontchathink? Henry VIII must be rolling with laughter in his grave. British journalists hopped on this story yesterday. I can hardly blame them. It was on the websites of three London papers, the Telegraph, The Daily Mail, and the Mirror. The American media largely ignored it.

Here’s what the Mirror had to say:

Thirty-NINE women who had secret relationships with priests want the Pope to abolish the ban on sex.

The women, some giving their names, spoke out after a cardinal suggested celibacy could lead to further abuse by priests.

They said on a website: “To become effective witnesses to the need for love, priests need to experience it fully, in the way their nature demands it.”

Earlier this month a survey of Italians revealed more than 50% had lost faith in the Catholic Church and more than half believed priests should be allowed to marry.

One Antonella Carisio, 41, told how her two-year affair with a priest ended after church officials found out and he was moved.

The Telegraph put it this way:

A group of Italian women in relationships with priests have sent the Pope a letter pleading for an end to the celibacy rule. The last time a churchman raised the issue of priestly celibacy, it was in the context of the paedophile scandals: Cardinal Christoph Schönborn of Vienna suggested that the two were linked, and that the Church ought to ditch celibacy in order to allow its priests to channel their erotic energy in a sensible, grown-up way. The Pope swatted the cardinal like a fly, reiterating the Church’s holy principle of celibacy.

The Guardian weighed in with this:

Dozens of Italian women who have had relationships with Roman Catholic priests or lay monks have endorsed an open letter to the pope that calls for the abolition of the celibacy rule. The letter, thought by one signatory to be unprecedented, argues that a priest “needs to live with his fellow human beings, experience feelings, love and be loved”.

It also pleads for understanding of those who “live out in secrecy those few moments the priest manages to grant [us] and experience on a daily basis the doubts, fears and insecurities of our men”.

image source: jobsanger

Here’s What I Have To Say

Kudos to these brave women for bringing yet another facet of the dysfunctional Vatican attitude about sex out of the shadows into the light. Their point that priests should be allowed to experience love in the normal way like other men is well taken. In fact, while I doubt that clerical celibacy has anything to do with pedolphilia ( most pedophiles are neither gay nor priests) I do think it has something to do with the dysfunctional Vatican view of human sexuality that is so much in the news lately. Certainly, celibacy as a spiritual discipline has a long and ancient history in many religions, and perhaps it makes sense in a closed, monastic community or for hermit monks in caves—but clearly it isn’t working for the everyday Roman Catholic clergy and has not been for a long time. The Church has sort of painted itself into a corner on this one. When you set the clergy up as special, unique, and having magical powers conferred by the Apostolic succession, you set that same clergy up for secrecy, deceit, failure and guilt. But in order to retain your power, you can’t change the rules of the game…. or can you?

Priests are human beings too. Even the pope has a confessor. Perhaps it is time to take a good hard look at the elephant in the Vatican living room. That’s what these women are asking for and they are right. From St. Paul and St. Augustine on down, the Church’s fear of women and dislike for sex has created nothing but dysfunctional deception.

Let’s hear it for these women and the Catholic priests they love. They are doing their best to help the Church as well as the men who run it move to a healthier, more honest view of human sexuality.