Does any scholarly, educated person know WHY the Pope doesn’t get rid of the unnatural celibacy requirement for priests? Anyone who has taken college Sociology I has learned Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs and knows that the need for sex is right up there and equal to the drives to eat, to sleep, to breathe, and to eliminate. To REQUIRE a human being to NOT acknowledge his sex drive is the same as requiring a person to stop breathing, eating, etc. (the OTHER needs listed in the hierarchy).
The celibacy requirement for Catholic priests was started in Medieval Times because the Church needed the money, and wives and children cost MONEY!! In these times, when the Church has become one of the richest institutions in the WORLD, I do believe it would be cheaper to allow priests to get married and have an acceptable means for their sexual drives than to have to pay exorbitant insurance premiums for “Sexual Predator” insurance policies and to pay off claims from injured victims because these thwarted sexual needs have made individuals go wacky!
It is a fact that many priests turn into alcoholics, have affairs and illigitimate babies, attempt other, more “secure” or “hidden” sexual outlets, such as pedophilia or bestiality, no matter how abnormal or distasteful, just to have AN outlet of any sort, besides the unsatisfactory choice of lifelong, lonely masturbation. Besides, the requirement of celibacy also provides an innocent cloak or cover for people ALREADY warped into pedophiles (an incurable sexual perversion, by the way!) and homosexuals to join and NEVER have to go through the pain of “coming out of the closet” as in the “outside” world.
Do not BEGIN to believe that ONLY little boys are the victims from this SICK command from the Pope and his predecessors. The victims are the little boys, their families, their future lives, the young girls, their future lives, their families, the priests themselves, who wanted so much to be “good” priests, but found how impossible that is when the age of real sexual need and drive becomes reality. There are innumerable victims!! The ONLY cure is to abolish the celibacy requirement!
Maerzie