Flawed Priests

A reader writes:

You wrote: "The problem is the distorted and contorted sexuality that celibacy and total power can create in many clerical psyches".  Its a widely-used meme: that there is something about the Catholic experience that distorts otherwise good priests.  That view overlooks a potentially fatal flaw in the Catholic Church's structure.

Thomas Merton wrote at length about the immense scrutiny he underwent in order to prove his vocation.  I seem to recall him mentioning that his non-Catholic background only led to greater scrutiny than those of his peers raised in the Church.  Many of his peers were deemed not to have a vocation and rejected.  I have in mind that Merton did not go beyond vague assessments that those rejected didn't have a calling.

Today, as Catholicism fades in the developed world, and diminished interest in the clergy has rendered the vocations process an open door to virtually any male, we know now why there was strong scrutiny back when interest levels allowed the Church to be picky: while gay male pedophiles are a thankfully small cohort in the larger society, the Catholic priesthood is an attractive career for such folks.  Its easy to imagine that triaging potential priests through the vocations process would eliminate most of these dangerous pedophiles.  Nowadays in the developed world there is simply little such triaging.

I was raised Catholic, went to a Catholic university, then married a Protestant and now worship in the Lutheran Church.  The view from my window is that the Catholic Church is the religious equivalent of the QEII, a most beautiful and stately ship, with a giant hole in the hull that will eventually sink it, and while the passengers tut-tut and fret about the hole, no one with the authority to repair the ship has any interest in doing so.