Vatican comment on paedophiles draws gay groups' anger

[mrstickball]

Mr Khan said:

mrstickball said:
Still doesn't change the fact that the Catholic church has really awful human beings in their organization.

Maybe when you ban your priests from marrying, they develop awful desires like pedophilia?

I find it oh-so strange that we don't have these vast, world-spanning problems in the protestant church which has nearly the same membership as the Catholic church. Yes, there are pastors that do plenty of stupid things, but its rarely something as heinous as pedophilia. Usually, its consensual sex among adults (either adultery or homosexuality).

Marriage doesn't stop molestation. Most molestation happens within families, with married couples and such

Yes, but here is the way I look at it (totally opinionated, not based on empirical evidence. Need to look into it more but..):

Being a leader in a church is a calling by God. However, I would imagine that many of the people going into the preisthood may go in without that asexual desire that Kasz mentioned - they may be perfectly good men that want to be good followers of God. However, I'd imagine that in doing such, and not be allowed to fulfill their sexual desires, they turn to what they can - much like what we see in the US prison population as well. Denial of certain psycophysical characteristics can cause deviancies as they try to satisfy themselves in whatever way they can.

I mean, I am a credentialed minister in a church denomination - fully licensed to be a pastor, and what have you. I could only imagine being torn between what I believe God wants me to do, and being denied my sexuality...It would be a very difficult thing to deal with. Therefore, I can understand why they do what they do. Not that I agree with it. It's absolutely abhorrent. It's also abhorrent the Catholic tradition doesn't allow them to marry. The church created this beast, they have to deal with it in the only way they can - jail the wicked people that did it, and change their dogma to allow them to live happy in marriage like so many other pastors have done, and not weakened their pulpit ministry.

As for molestation issues with families/couples, the statistics I've found don't point to married couples being the perpetratiors of such acts - do you have any statistical data that says that married couples (namely married men) are the ones that exhibit the most dangerous (and/or likely) source of child molestation? The only data I can find is that 66% of all child molesters are or were married. However, the median age of a child molester is 37 years old. Unmarried rates among men at 37 years old in the US is approximately 23%, which would point to a higher likelihood of unmarried/never married men being sex offenders as opposed to being married at one point...Backing my claim up that unmarried men are more likely to be child molesters.