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What are priests and nuns really doing?
Some people think that Catholics are sexually repressed, but if you’ve seen the news any time in the last decade you know there’s a lot of scandal revolving around the Catholic church.
For a while it was hard to turn on the television and not see something about some sort of Catholic church scandal. Religious leaders were being jailed for pedophilia, pregnant nuns were being shipped off to secret locations and there was more sex in the church than most would have guessed. For devoted, religious people, they were really getting it on.
Now, priests and nuns are supposed to be completely devoted to God, and they’re supposed to commit their bodies to Him, promising never to have intercourse or sexual pleasure of any kind ever again. Am I the only one who sees the problem there? For one thing, if God loves you and designed you to have sexual urges and feel sexual pleasure, why would he force you to deny that? And we all know that the more you try to resist something, the more you want it. Sexual desire is a natural part of the human condition, trying to pretend it doesn’t exist isn’t going to make it go away.
I’ve never understood the Catholic requirement for nuns and priests to give up sex. Christian pastors and the like can be married and have children. Leaders of other religions are allowed to marry and procreate. Some religions even consider sex to be a valuable and powerful tool of faith as well as love and procreation. Giving up pleasures of the flesh out of love for one’s deity may seem a noble idea, but it is highly problematic, and not very wise.
Think of a smoker or drinker trying to quit. The harder they try to quit the more they want that thing that they’re trying to stay away from. Now, admittedly, those are addictive tendencies that one could eventually learn to control, but it’s a similar process. The thing is, smoking and drinking aren’t natural, they’re not part of our design. Sex and sexual pleasure are natural and part of our design. Asking a mere human to deny their natural instincts is like trying to teach a fish not to swim. No God or religion should expect people to deny their nature and bar them from such a natural and wonderful part of life.
So what does this have to do with all the church scandal? It’s simple: When you try to force people to go against their nature, they’re going to find ways to do things anyway. I may be wrong, but I think that’s why there are so many Catholic priest pedophiles. It’s not that the church is full of homosexuals or child rapists, it’s that the church makes them that way. Tell a man he can never have sex again, then surround him with soft, sweet young boys all the time. What do they expect? That’s how nuns end up pregnant too. When men and women can get together, they will, and babies happen.
I think it’s long past time for the Church to take a good look at things and make some changes. God said go forth and multiply, right? So why can’t priests and nuns have the option to marry a loving partner before the eyes of God and bear children? It seems a logical choice. And, if some people can uphold a commitment to celibacy, good for them, and they should have the right to do so. But let the rest have the option to live a normal life so they don’t fornicate in secret or become pedophiles.
