Immutable Qualifications

"Everybody's been struck by how quickly Rome responded. Clearly, Rome saw that there was sufficient substance to the allegations. They would not have told him to stand down unless they thought there was something worth investigating."
Austen Ivereigh, director, British church advocacy group Catholic Voices

"Other people will be under greater pressure to stay away. There has been nothing like this before. It is almost as if the fact that the Pope resigned rather than dying in office has created a degree of instability in the Catholic Church."
Michael Walsh, author The Cardinals

Taking support from Keith Cardinal O'Brien's tendering of his resignation as archbishop of St.Andrew's and Edinburgh, and stating he would wish not to become a distraction, and therefore he would not take part as one of the 118 cardinals assigned to select a new pope, support groups for victims of pedophiliac priests have seen their campaign taking on new life.

They are now renewing their calls for the Roman Catholic Church to take up its responsibility to its injured flock. To rescue themselves from the obloquy of public disgust to and the distressed distrust of the faithful by having Roger Cardinal Mahony of Los Angeles, Justin Francis Cardinal Rigali of Philadelphia, Godfried Cardinal Danneels of Belgium and Sean Cardinal Brady of Ireland, stand aside.

In the process come to the realization, long overdue, that celibacy offends nature. The deliberate distortion of human desire creates a degraded soul. "Many priests", informed Cardinal O'Brien in a BBC interview, "have found it very difficult to cope with celibacy as they lived out their priesthood and felt the need of a companion"; the isolation is soul-deadening.

He has his own history pre-dating his elevation in the church hierarchy. Three priests and a former priest had complained to Pope Benedict XVI's representative in Britain of "inappropriate contact", and an "inappropriate approach". Which the Cardinal himself rejects as a reflection of reality.

Yet, celibacy is a concept alien to human nature, and some theorize it attracts men whose confused and guilt-laden reaction to their homosexual tendencies feel it offers redemption for them. That becoming part of the church will alleviate in some miraculous way their fascination with a forbidden attraction.

There are those church experts who believe a disproportionate percentage of gay men are represented in the priesthood. Their religious beliefs inform them that their attraction to men will doom them forever as outcasts, and to join the church which welcomes them yet straitjackets their sexual impulses will result in their being saved from themselves.

The best laid plans of men are as nothing to nature. Many mental health professionals are also of the opinion that men grappling with a sexual attraction to children might also end up in the priesthood in the all-too-often vain expectation that the saintliness that would descend upon them would aid them in denying their debased attraction.

This is a societal problem of painfully far-reaching proportions. And it is a particularly acute problem for the Roman Catholic Church which imposes upon its shepherds the faith obligation to be true to a sacrament that the orthodox, conventional Church has invested itself in as the first order of qualifications for those answerable directly to Christ and to tend gently to the laity entrusted to them.