Blame Celibacy?

DiA reacts to the Vatican's statement on sex abuse:

Look, sex with underage boys is an area where you don't want to be displaying your connoisseurship and nitpicking about aesthetic distinctions. The Catholic church is one of the greatest cultural institutions of western civilisation, but the evidence increasingly tends towards the conclusion that it will be unable to adjust to modern social and sexual norms and values unless it scraps clerical celibacy. And it is impossible to imagine that happening in the foreseeable future. The church is starting to look like a massive institution that cannot survive in its current form, but that lacks the capacity to make the changes needed to avert disasterlike so many other institutions these days.

What's frustrating is that the issues which are undermining the Church are not that central to its core doctrines. Celibacy is a pragmatic issue, not one of eternal truth. Ditto women priests. To fixate on sex, as the Church now does, is also a trivial thing sub specie aeternitatis.

What matters is the commandment to love one another and God, to serve our fellows, to help the needy and practice the daily duty of forgiveness. This is so hard for so many of us. I fail all the time. And that is why so many of us need the church to guide and help us on this pilgrimage. To exclude and condemn and clench with white knuckles onto non-vital issues, such as stopping priests from ever having a real sexual and emotional relationship with another human being, or casting half of humanity out of church leadership, is, in my view, a warped perspective. 

But when these policies have also led directly to turning the church into an international syndicate for the protection of child molesters for decades, insisting that no discussion of them can take place is a form of psychosis.