Playing the Waiting Game  , yes, waiting  either for the crisis in lack of adequate pastoral leadership and service to  just solve itself, or for the activist married priests to grow old and  disappear, has been the Vatican strategy for the last two decades. But    Playing the Waiting Game is no longer a practical strategy to adopt so  as to ward off millions of dollars in legal fees and settlements for the victims  of clerical sexual abuse (TIME, March 25/02, Costs of Penance,  pp. 47-48). 

Now, the Vatican is putting the blame for the  current crisis of clerical sexual abuses on the presence of homosexuals in the  priesthood and on the inadequacy of seminary training. This Vatican strategy  is simply to divert attention from the real culprit of clerical sexual  aberrations ( promiscuity, rape, pedophilia and ephebophilia or hebophilia),  which is mandatory celibacy ( cf. Rev. Dr. Heinz Vogels, Celibacy:  Gift or Law ?, p.11 ).

The ulterior motive for the  cover-ups( Silence and  pay outs of hush money by church officials ) is TO KEEP THE FAÇADE AT ALL  COSTS and to give the impression THAT MANDATORY CELIBACY IS WORKING, WHEN  IN FACT IT HAS BEEN A FAILURE AND A SCOURGE SINCE IT WAS IMPOSED IN 1139 ON AN  UNWILLING MARRIED CLERGY. To enforce it Pope Urban II issued an unchristian  decree:   The married priest who refuses to separate from his wife and children  will be put in prison, and his wife and children to be sold into slavery   (Rev.  John Shuster, 39 Popes Were Married). 

The shining examples of the utter failure of  mandatory celibacy,  which Our Lord Jesus never intended ( Mt. 19:11-12 ) and the New Testament never  envisioned ( I Cor. 7:7; 9:5; I Tim. 4:1-4 ), are Pope Alexander VI who had 3  mistresses and 8 children; Cardinal Hans Groer, former archbishop of Vienna,  Austria; Archbishop Juliusz Paetz of Poznan, Poland; Bishops Symons and  O  Connell, former bishops of Palm Beach, FL, and so on and  on.

Pope John Paul II reiterated the teaching of  the Second Vatican Council that celibacy is not essential to the priesthood  and that marriage as a means to holiness is on par with celibacy.   The words  of St. Matthew  s Gospel (19:11-12; 19:29) do not furnish arguments to affirm the  inferiority of marriage or the superiority of virginity or celibacy & the measure  of Christian perfection is love   (L  Osservatore Romano, Apr. 15/82). Still, the  Pope continues to insist that for priests in the Latin or Western Catholic  Church, celibacy is the means to come closer to Jesus. So all priests are bound  by the law of mandatory celibacy to live as celibates.

Unfortunately, as Rev. Dr. Heinz Vogels  contends,   The ability to live as a celibate is, as Jesus says in Mt. 19:11-12,    not given to all  . Therefore, celibacy is not good for all, because for those  priests who have not received the gift of celibacy but who, nevertheless, face  the demand of the law that they refrain from marriage, celibacy becomes a  suppression of their God-given disposition to be completed by a partner, which  often results in neurosis. And worse still, such suppression may even lead to  aberrations such as promiscuity, rape, and pedophilia.   Robert Pledl, a Catholic  attorney representing the St. Lawrence Seminary victims in Mount Calvary,  Wisconsin, believes that   mandatory celibacy creates a clerical world where    women and children are the enemy & The accumulating scandals signal the need for  reform   ( Time June 7/02).  Thus, those priests in the active canonical ministry who have not received the  gift of celibacy, may choose either to pretend like the ministers in the story  of   The Emperor's New Clothes   to live a celibate life and thus please the Pope  and avoid being a neurotic, or do the right thing by not leading a double life  and getting married. There are over 100, 000 married Roman Catholic priests  worldwide who are being punished by the Vatican for doing the right thing !  

The possibilities of celibacy as a freely  chosen state of service are overshadowed by the documented realities of celibacy  as a forced condition of becoming a clergyman in service to an institution. It  is late in the day for popes to do what they have refused to do, despite the  obvious evidence of celibacy as a problematic state: examine celibacy in depth  for the sake of both their priests and their  people,    writes Rev. Dr. Eugene C. Kennedy in   Does Celibacy Work for the Catholic  Church ?  Let us pray that the Holy Father will have the humility to change his  mind like Jesus did in Mt. 15: 21-28, and have the courage to restore  optional celibacy for priests, which was the practice for the first 12 centuries  in the Latin or Western Church, and which is still the practice in the Eastern  Catholic Churches (TIME, March 25/02,   Let Priests Marry  , p.48; April  1/02,  CAN THE CHURCH BE SAVED ?   pp. 17ff; Steve Lopez,   Church's Scandal Starts  With Celibacy  ).