Three boys, 16. Two are white, one is south Asian. They are on their way home from Catholic school.
One says, “Father X really likes me.”
The other two giggle.
“Seriously, I’m totally in there with him.”
The giggles are more pronounced.
The speaker, though, is oblivious. He continues with his tale, having not noticed his friends’ amusement, having not even imagined how what he was saying might sound.
Another witness and I shared knowing smiles. The two giggling boys made explicit their shared amusement to one another. “You know what I was thinking…” said one. “Yeah!” said the other. And the source of it all remained in his own, innocent world, oblivious to the Catholic church’s human and PR disaster.
I’m not Catholic, but I have great hopes for this pope.
I am catholic, and I have too!
And pondering about this post later on, I got to thinking ‘Why would anyone think that frustrating another human being from fulfilling a basic, primal, human need is going to make them better humans, more able to help others?
Why should priests and nuns remain sexless? (Unless it’s their choice, of course).
As a teen (and that shows more about my own sexual longing then already), I remember asking a priest about why they shouldn’t marry. See, I’d been exposed to a few predominantly protestant countries, and it got me thinking.
His answer almost satisfied me at the time : if priests have a family themselves (which seems obvious, since in this religion, a marriage is meant to lead to procreation and there is no sex outside of marriage), they have to deal with their own family problems, and are thus less available to support their community. Unfortunately, this is only true if they are not submerged by their needs.