Is clerical celibacy a marker of Catholic faith?
VATICAN CITY (VATICAN CITY)
Union of Catholic Asian News (UCA News) [Hong Kong]
October 18, 2024
By Jean D’Cunha
Read original articleClerical celibacy is an issue that the ongoing final sessions of the Synod on Synodality should have discussed. However, the hierarchy continues to peripheralize it, despite its deleterious impacts on witnessing Christ and evangelizing.
Historically, the androcentric Roman Catholic Church has been mired in an endless crisis over clerical celibacy and chastity with pernicious implications, especially for its lay and religious women and children.
Apart from explicit violence against them by the celibate clerics, the hierarchy’s double standards of male sexual morality have placed the burden of blame, shame, guilt and sin on women survivors — the proverbial Eves, and have treated women in relationships with clerics as moral pariahs.
The abusive clerics have almost always emerged relatively unscathed as gentlemen of the cloth. Despite its claim of being the custodian of morality, the Church has reneged on accountability behind the smokescreen of theological and legal semantics.
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