THE Vatican has denied that its celibacy requirement for priests was the root cause of the clerical sex abuse scandal convulsing the Church in Europe and again defended the Pope’s handling of the crisis.Suggestions that the celibacy rule was somehow responsible for the "deviant behaviour" of a few priests have swirled in recent days.
Much of the furore was spurred by comments from one of the Pope’s closest advisers, Vienna archbishop Cardinal Christoph Schoenborn, who called this week for an honest examination of issues like celibacy and priestly education to root out the origins of abusive priests.
"Part of it is the question of celibacy, as well as the subject of character development. And part of it is a large portion of honesty, in the Church but also in society," he wrote in the online edition of his diocesan newsletter.
His office quickly stressed that Schoenborn wasn’t calling into question priestly celibacy, which just this week Pope Benedict XVI reaffirmed for priests as an "expression of the gift of oneself to God and others".
But Schoenborn has in the past shown himself receptive to arguments that a celibate priesthood is increasingly problematic for the Church, primarily because it limits the number of men who seek ordination.
Last June, Schoenborn personally presented the Vatican with a lay initiative signed by prominent Australian Catholics calling for the celibacy rule to be abolished and for married men to be allowed to become priests.
In the days following Schoenborn’s editorial this week, several prominent prelates — in Germany and at the Vatican — shot down any suggestion that the celibacy rule had anything to do with the scandal, a point echoed by the Vatican newspaper, L’Osservatore Romano.
"It’s been established that there’s no link," said the article by Bishop Giuseppe Versaldi, an emeritus professor of canon law and psychology at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome.
"First off, it’s known that sexual abuse of minors is more widespread among lay people and those who are married than in the celibate priesthood," he wrote.
"Secondly, research has shown that priests guilty of abuse had long before stopped observing celibacy."
The Vatican has been on the defensive ever since the first of some 170 former students from Catholic schools in Benedict’s native Germany came forward with claims of abuse, including at a boys choir once led by the pope’s brother.
The crisis reached the pope himself.
The Munich archdiocese reported when he was Munich Archbishop Joseph Ratzinger, he approved therapy for a priest suspected of abuse in the 1980s, who was then transferred, where he was convicted of abusing minors.
The Vatican stressed Ratzinger didn’t authorise the transfer.
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