THE ROMAN CATHOLIC CHURCH SEX SCANDAL
WASHINGTON,D.C. — I was one of seven grandchildren who spent the formative years of our lives growing up at Stanyard Creek, Andros, with our grandparents, Benjamin and Mabel Elliott. My grandfather was the catechist at St. Rita’s Roman Catholic Church, where I was baptized and christened, and attending church every Sunday was mandatory. In fact, in addition to Sunday morning Mass and Evening Service, the grandchildren also went to Sunday School in the afternoon when the teachings of Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ were nurtured by Bible study, prayer and other spiritual disciplines.
The various settlements of Andros were not easily accessible by roads back then, and we had a priest named Father Alto who used to make the rounds of the various settlements by sea in a sailboat called The Star. Because Andros is the largest of the Bahama Islands, Father Alto visited Stanyard Creek once every three weeks or so, and on those Sundays when he was not there, Papa was responsible for conducting church services, but because he was not an ordained priest he could not give Holy Communion.
My commitment to the teachings of the Roman Catholic Church that were instilled in me as a boy have remained unwavering over the years, although there were periods during my teenage years and in my early twenties when I strayed away from the dictates of the Christian lessons I learned and the God-fearing principles that governed my life growing up with my grandparents in Andros.
This is why the current sex scandal that has engulfed the Church that has played such an important role in my Christian growth and development from I was an altar boy at St. Rita’s in Stanyard Creek — when the Mass was still said in Latin and we learned the verbal rituals of the proceedings by rote, in order to properly assist the priest — has been so hard for me to attribute to human frailty, although in essence pedophilia is a detestable manifestation of human imperfection.
Reports that both Pope Benedict XVI and his successor Pope Francis are among other top Catholic Church officials who “were aware of sexual misconduct allegations against a top American cardinal years before that prelate resigned this summer,” as reported in the Washington Post, left me in a virtual state of shock because I am one of those totally committed Roman Catholics who believe that questioning decisions made by the Holy See borders on being sacrilegious.
That accusation, according to The Post, was contained in “a letter from Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò, who was recalled from his D.C. post in 2016 amid allegations that he’d become embroiled in the conservative American fight against same-sex marriage,” and “was first reported by the National Catholic Register and LifeSite News, two conservative Catholic sites.”
In the current toxic political atmosphere in the United States, “conservative” has become somewhat synonymous with “racist”, but in this case I think opposition to “same-sex” marriage is what prompted Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò to send “shockwaves through the Catholic world,” as described by The Post, which also claimed that Pope Francis “and other church leaders are facing a bitterly polarized Catholic Church and some Francis critics, including Viganò, are calling for the pope to step down.”
Despite the very serious predicament that the Holy Father now finds himself in, to call for his resignation, in my view, is not the answer to the Church’s current pedophilia problems. I think that now is the time for the Roman Catholic Church to give serious consideration to the eradication of its celibacy policy for priests which, in my view, has established the Church as a “safe sanctuary” for pedophiles.
The current celibacy policy unfairly denies far too many young men who would be excellent priests the opportunity of making a commitment to serve the Roman Catholic Church and their God in this manner. To ask a heterosexual male to “permanently” suppress his natural desire to have sexual relations with a woman is equivalent to asking a habitual gambler to go to a casino and not gamble. It also sends a “welcome message” to homosexuals and pedophiles that they have a religious shelter in which to freely practice their deviant lifestyles.
I know several committed Roman Catholic men who have served as Deacons in the Church and some who are still Deacons who would have been excellent priests, except for the fact that they fell in love with a woman they decided to marry. One of the most passionate sermons that I ever heard preached was by the current Minister of Education Jeff Lloyd when he was a Roman Catholic Deacon during one of my visits to Nassau some years ago when I attended Mass at my former parish Church Our Lady’s on Deveaux Street. He was married when he initially became a Deacon, but after his wife died he met another lovely lady that he decided to marry, but Church rules stipulated that if he did he could no longer be a Deacon.
In Freeport, where I lived for 12 years before moving back to Washington, D.C., in 2013, Deacon Nixon Lindor at my parish church in Freeport, Mary Star of the Sea, functions as if he is a full-fledged priest, but he also is happily married to a wonderful lady.
What makes this celibacy policy all the more troubling to me is that historically it only became a requirement for priests centuries after the Church was established. Based on information gleaned from the Internet the first written “mandate requiring priests to be chaste came in AD 304.”
“The practice of priestly celibacy began to spread in the Western Church in the early Middle Ages. In the early 11th century Pope Benedict VIII responded to the decline in priestly morality by issuing a rule prohibiting the children of priests from inheriting property. A few decades later Pope Gregory VII issued a decree against clerical marriages,” the Internet article noted.
It added, “The Church was a thousand years old before it definitively took a stand in favor of celibacy in the twelfth century at the Second Lateran Council held in 1139, when a rule was approved forbidding priests to marry. In 1563, the Council of Trent reaffirmed the tradition of celibacy.”
Surely, given the current sexual scandal, there will never be a better opportunity than now for the Holy See in Rome to abandon this archaic church doctrine.
