Sex and The Single Priest

For he who gives scandal, it would be better to have a great millstone hung around his neck and to be drowned in the depths of the sea."

The message thundered out of the Vatican with the force of the Gospel from which it was taken. "How severe are Christ's words," wrote the Pope in a letter released last week to America's bishops; "how great must be that evil." After years in which the Vatican downplayed the sex scandals that have plagued the Roman Catholic Church in the U.S., John Paul II publicly acknowledged the enormity of the problem. Indeed, the bishops, who have long petitioned Rome for special disciplinary powers to deal with the crisis, are deeply aware of its dimensions. In June the hierarchy had to elect a new national secretary to replace New Mexico's Robert Sanchez, the Archbishop of Santa Fe, who resigned from the post and his see amid revelations that he had conducted affairs with three young women.

The scandals -- ranging from clandestine liaisons with adult parishioners to clerical pedophilia -- have focused fresh attention on the life of the Catholic priest and turned him into a suspect figure in many eyes. Says Monsignor Edwin O'Brien, rector of the North American Pontifical College in Rome: "A priest would have to be out of his mind now to touch a kid, even if it's just to pat him on the head or tap him on the shoulder." The scandals are forcing the American clergy -- and, ever so reluctantly, the Vatican -- to examine the nature and tradition of the priesthood. But what can be done? And how much reform is the church willing to undertake?

Among young American seminarians in Rome, a sense of siege has set in. "Our eroticized society degrades us, and somehow that eroticism invades our lives no matter how we fight it," says Enrique Lopez, 28, a New Mexico native who knew Archbishop Sanchez and who is training to be a diocesan priest. "If Sanchez had been embezzling money or something like that, it would have been a scandal. But because he was involved in a sex scandal, it touched his dignity. I don't think that's fair." Says Lopez's fellow seminarian John Riccardo, 28, of Detroit: "How can you give up sex? It's such a central value in our society. What we're doing is weird; why deny it? But it's wrong to assume that because I'm doing this weird thing, I must be weird. People figure either I'm not a man because I don't want sex or I'm a superman because I can give it up. Both of these are lies. The temptations are all there, every day, all the time. The key to celibacy is prayer."

For some advocates of change, however, the key to reform is dropping the 870-year-old tradition of priestly celibacy. "If someone really has a true call to a celibate vocation, God bless it," says Eugene Bianchi, an ex-Jesuit priest who currently teaches religion at Emory University. "But I think those kinds of persons are far fewer than the priests we have." Mandatory celibacy, Bianchi contends, encourages sexual immorality, which is symptomatic of larger structural problems in what he calls a "monarchical, absolutist" church: "The celibate clerical system is collapsing, and it is not going to be regenerated."