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Leading Catholic: Let priests have sex
Published: 23 Nov 12 09:19 CET | Print version
Online: http://www.thelocal.de/society/20121123-46339.html
Abolishing celibacy for priests would encourage more to take up the cloth, Alois Glück, president of the central committee for German Catholics argued on Friday.
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But Glück admitted that since the Vatican was unlikely to change its stance on the issue in the foreseeable future, lay Catholics would hopefully play a bigger role in local parishes. "Women will have to take up more responsibilities," he said.
He added that the Catholic Church was facing a crossroads - either centralizing decisions or distributing responsibilities among priests and lay people. But he warned that "centralisation of the spiritual guidance of the congregation will necessarily lead to alienation from the Church."
The German Catholic lay organization is due to meet for its autumn conference in Bonn on Friday, where the further development of the Church will be one the central themes. "We have to be aware that the number of christened and people who feel connected to the church is dropping sharply," he said.
The Local/bk
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Your comments about this article:
That is just what we need. More priests, yay
Many men have become priests because they were ashamed and felt great guilt about their sexuality, and that includes not only pedophilic but also homosexual tendencies, and often this shame has been caused by growing up Catholic and having had instilled the forbidding and restrictive sexual mores that Catholicism has unfortunately made itself a name for. For these poor unfortunate men, the celibate priesthood offered a chance to rid themselves of their sexuality which they were so much taught to loathe. But as we all know, you can't forever suppress the fact that for better or worse you are a sexual being, and that's also in the end why so many priests have gone on to abuse defenseless children.
The only answer to this is not to open the Priesthood for marriage, but for the Catholic Church to rethink its entire stance on human sexuality.
Unfortunately, we are - pardon the pun - much more likely to see hell freeze over before that is ever going to happen.
The good thing about the catholic church is that it is very robust in its teachings and principles, at least it has not changed its stance in most of the aspects for 2000 years. How can someone trust something if it change all the time. I hope Church remains as it is. Why is that everything has to be defined based on SEX. Even the title of this article says priests should be allowed to have sex, while the topic that was actually discussed was about allowing priests to get married.
Thankyou TheLocal for being the new catholic newspaper.
Regarding the specious arguments offered by some here that ordaining married men to the Priesthood would solve the sinful and criminal behavior of the small percentage of pedophiles and ephebophiles masquerading as Priests, I wonder what explanation they have for the sexual crimes of those in the public education system since you can't blame that behavior on the vow of celibacy? I also wonder what knots they'd tie themselves into in attempting to explain why the overwhelming majority of pedophiles are married men.
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/08/24/opinion/main1933687.shtml