NO REGRETS: Father Gari Ruthenberg of the Holy Redeemer Church in Liberty City says the sex scandal shouldn’t cause a knee-jerk reaction against celibacy.
The nation's oldest Catholic newspaper editorialized in a special edition on Friday that the church should open discussion on whether Roman Catholic priests should be celibate, a church law for nearly 900 years.
''If celibacy were optional, would there be fewer scandals of this nature in the priesthood?'' asks the editorial, written by Monsignor Peter Conley, executive editor of The Pilot, the 173-year-old newspaper of the Archdiocese of Boston. Conley is a close associate of Cardinal Bernard F. Law, the newspaper's publisher and head of the Boston archdiocese.
More than 100,000 copies of the 28-page supplement to the weekly paper were printed -- four times its usual run -- and will be distributed after Mass in parishes there Sunday.
The editorial also asked two other questions:
• Does priesthood, in fact, attract a disproportionate number of men with a homosexual orientation?
• Why are a substantial number of Catholics not convinced that an all-male priesthood was intended by Christ and is unchangeable?
The editorial comes as the Archdiocese of Boston is under sharp attack for moving a priest, John Geoghan, whom it knew to be a child molester, from parish to parish. Geoghan, now defrocked, is accused of molesting 130 children over 30 years in six parishes.
The revelations about Geoghan -- and other Catholic priests who have resigned in recent weeks over allegations or admissions of sexual misconduct -- have brought the celibacy issue into focus.
A growing number of psychiatrists and former priests implicate celibacy in the crisis facing the Catholic Church, whose parishioners have been shocked in recent weeks by damaging disclosures that dozens of priests have been sexually abusing boys. Last Friday, Bishop Anthony J. O'Connell resigned from the Diocese of Palm Beach after admitting he sexually abused a teenage male student at a Missouri seminary more than 25 years ago.
Johns Hopkins University psychiatrist Frederick Berlin has raised the question of whether celibacy rules might be attracting the wrong kinds of young men to the priesthood.
''In some cases, sexually confused people, including those attracted to children, might have thought that by leading a celibate life in a seminary they could make it a non-issue,'' he says.
Eugene Kennedy, a former priest and now professor emeritus of psychology at Loyola University, did a survey of the church's sexual problems and wrote The Unhealed Wound: The Church and Human Sexuality (St. Martin's Press, 2001, $19.95).
''Pedophilia among priests has been mostly against boys,'' he said in an interview. ``But I think [the offending priests] are more asexual than homosexual. They're underdeveloped human beings who have not well delineated their sexual identity. They go through religious training that controls them so much that no development takes place. And they emerge into the world like fragile plants from a hot house, unable to cope with the outside world.
``They seek out children because they're children themselves. If celibacy weren't mandatory, [seminaries] could draw from a much wider cross-section of the population.''
Around the world and in South Florida, reactions differed to the newspaper's stance on a controversial subject long held under wraps.
In Rome, a Vatican spokesman, the Rev. Ciro Benedettini, said:
``The pope has spoken to this. He has said celibacy remains, it is a great gift to the church. He has spoken clearly in favor of celibacy.''
In South Florida, Thomas Wenski, auxiliary bishop of Miami, interpreted the newspaper's editorial not so much as a call for debate over the merits of celibacy, but a call for the clergy to talk to their faithful ``to give reasons why we believe the things we believe.''
''Celibacy is here to stay,'' he said. ``That doesn't mean we shouldn't try to clarify to people why we hold it to be a value.''
Gari Ruthenberg, 39, a priest at Holy Redeemer Catholic Church in Liberty City, worried that Friday's editorial might be a knee-jerk reaction to the pedophile priest panic.
Making marriage available won't solve the problem of sexual deviancy, he said. ``You're talking about someone who is a pedophile, someone who is in need of serious psychological help.''
Celibacy's opponents point out that nothing in the Bible requires priests to be celibate -- that Jesus Christ chose St. Peter, who was married, to lead his church.
Joining the attack on celibacy are groups like Chicago-based CORPUS, a service group of 20,000 ordained priests who decided to marry despite the church's prohibition, and who are mostly banned now from official church duties.
''We believe there is no reason why the sacramental priesthood shouldn't be open to both women and men regardless of marital status or sexual orientation,'' says group vice president Russ Ditzel.