Thank you for the Jan. 22 editorial “Portland diocese displays brazen lack of empathy” as well as Victoria Hugo-Vidal’s column, “Who tells the church what it must do to be forgiven?”
The Catholic Church has a basic problem of requiring an abnormal sexual lifestyle of priests and nuns. Namely, they may not marry and are segregated by gender.
A bit of history is needed here. History unknown by most Catholics. Of necessity the following is a brief and limited account skipping the many, many wars and struggles between Christian factions over the centuries.
Prior to 334 A.D. the church was largely an underground movement in the Roman empire. Emperor Constantine I recognized Christianity, took control of it, and built its structure like Rome’s with a central master, himself, having power of both pope and emperor. The church went from a grassroots movement to a bureaucratic, military power. Religions and governments were barely distinguishable from each other from the time of Christ to the 1600s and there were countless wars over control of both throughout what is now Europe and northern Africa.
Constantine’s structure held together despite those wars for about 700 years but over time monasteries developed throughout what is now Europe. Young men learned monasteries made them exempt from taxes and military service. As monks they could marry and had sexual access to serf woman. When the local duke had a fight with his neighbor, his primary source of war funding came by selling land to the monks. Over time the monasteries became bigger and bigger land owners and both the dukes and serfs came to resent and resist the ravages of the monks’ boys’ clubs.
In 1054 Pope Gregory VII, fearing rebellion against the church, imposed celibacy and ended marriages of priests and monks. It took 200 years to implement the ban, which held off the Protestant reformation for 500 years. Over those years the priesthood became a secure and safe place for sexually confused and homosexual men to hide right in prominent, publicly respectable positions.
Thus the church’s problems of today. Sexually confused teenage boys are today unlikely to accept celibacy and become priests. Personal options and facts about sex are available to them. The church’s bureaucracy in Rome is the hardest core of old believers. They will not accept women as priests or spouses of priests. To sustain their control of both their own personal problems and the church’s world wide structure, they are stuck in the male only exclusionary system of the last thousand years.
The church should admit that its insistence on celibacy and exclusion of women invites problems and will lead to its eventual irrelevancy. It should acknowledge to its members that priests were once married and there is no justification for exclusion of women and men as married clergy.
In my earliest school years I attended a Catholic school and was subjected to angry priests and nuns. As I matured I came to believe they had been trapped as confused adolescents into lifetimes of loneliness and I wondered what kept them priests and nuns.
I am not surprised that fewer and fewer young men are becoming priests and I am mystified by the docility of women accepting their exclusion from the priesthood.
Phillip Davis is a resident of West Gardiner.
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