Should the Catholic Church Do Away With Celibacy and the Seal of Confession?

by Michael John Scott

The Catholic church has a serious, if not epidemic problem with priests preying on little children, and with its higher-ups covering up the sexual abuse scandals.  This has been going on for decades, if not centuries, and has been widely reported.

A new report from Australia is recommending the church lift its bizarre, antiquated celibacy requirements. Theoretically, if the clergy could have sex with, say, wives, they wouldn’t be chasing after the altar boys.  This should make a lot of sense, because, when you think about it, the rampant abuse of children at the hands of the church has gone on long enough

What makes it worse is the way victims are treated, often being victimized again and again by the investigation and cover-up.  The members of the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sex Abuse, have just concluded a five-year investigation into child sex abuse in Australia and they have concluded that the so-called “seal of confession” should be broken for those who confess to child abuse.  Priests hearing such confessions from fellow members of the clergy should be required to report the content of these confessions to higher-ups and even the civil authorities.

The flip side of that requirement, unfortunately, is such a rule could deter those guilty of abusing children from confessing their crimes.

The mandate, at the least, would deliver a clear message to abusers that they could not simply ‘fess away their crimes and go their happy molesting ways. At least the mandate shows the church, as a whole, had shifted its focus from self-protection to committed concern for the victims. NPR notes:

“We have concluded that there were catastrophic failures of leadership of Catholic Church authorities over many decades.”

In Australia, there are real numbers on the black heart at the center of the church and NPR reports:

“More than 15,000 people contacted the commission to share their experiences of abuse, more than 8,000 of them spoke personally with the commissioner about the trauma it caused, and approximately 2,500 cases have now been referred to police.” 

While it’s true that the commission found churches of other denominations guilty of similar abuse, the report concluded that the Catholic Church was by far the worst offender. Fully seven percent of priests who served in the country between the years of 1950 and 2009 had been accused of sexually abusing children.

It’s high time the Catholic Church took a tough look inward and changed its way of dealing with criminal clergy. Tossing the celibacy requirements is a bold first step; treating clergy who abuse children as the criminals they are should be a no-brainer.

When it comes to abuse of children, the policy of the Catholic Church – of any church or place of religious affiliation, for that matter – should be one of zero tolerance.

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