In the 50s and 60s of the previous century many acolytes and young boys became confronted with not such a nice site of human nature and his urge to have physical contact. Growing older and not having been able to cope with the old trauma some got up from their quit seat and started to tell tales out of school.
Telling their secret the Roman Catholic Church became once more confronted with the problem of celibacy and sexuality.
These people left disillusioned those churches in which they had faith at first, but those whom they trusted misused their power. They went out from the closed community where their parents at that time had no ears for their unbelievable stories. Though they had already to fight their shame to talk about it with somebody else they did not find an ear at that time to be sympathetic. Many of them a lack of self esteem and also got mental disorders, or after many years having it put away it came up when they got older and started to bother them more. Some dramatic and well-publicized cases involving allegations of childhood sexual abuse have raised very controversial issues, such as the right of children’s testimony and recovered memories of sexual abuse.
As in many other countries it looked as if the church used remote villages to dump their child-molesting priests. Several youngsters took at that time or later in life their own life. In several countries the abusers were specifically sent to certain isolated places “to get them off the grid, where they could do the least amount of damage” to the church’s public image, but in Belgium they still received high places and even got to do important work with youngsters.
At the time of the many boarding schools boys found themselves in the “internaat” its boys dormitory an easy prey, but several were also raped during their private catechism class.
The history of child molestation in the Catholic Church goes back centuries. The first official decree on the subject was written at the Council of Elvira, held around A.D. 305 near Granada, Spain. The precise history is complicated, but the council is traditionally believed to have set down 81 rules for behaviour, the 71st of which is: “Those who sexually abuse boys may not commune even when death approaches.” It was the harshest one-strike policy: If you’re caught abusing a child, you are not only laicized, but permanently excommunicated—damned for all time.*
The problem with sex in the church can be seen by many pops in history who got many wives or many mistresses, until the church found it high time to put some order in the pigsty.
In the history of clerical celibacy conciliar legislation marks the second period during which the law took definite shape both in the East and in the West. The earliest enactment on the subject is that of the Spanish Council of Elvira (between 295 and 302) in canon xxxiii. It imposes celibacy upon the three higher orders of the clergy, bishops, priests, and deacons. If they continue to live with their wives and beget children after their ordination they are to be deposed. This would seem to have been the beginning of the divergence in this matter between East and West.
“As a rule”, remarks Bishop Wordsworth from his anti-celibate standpoint, “the great writers of the fourth and fifth century pressed celibacy as the more excellent way with an unfair and misleading emphasis which led to the gravest and moral mischief and loss of power in the Church.” (The Ministry of Grace, 1902, p. 223).
The Council of Agde in Gaul, in 506, forbade subdeacons to marry, and such synods as those of Orléans in 538 and Tours in 567 prohibited even those already married from continuing to live with their wives.
The synods of the sixth and seventh centuries, while fully recognizing the position of these former wives and according them even the formal designation of female bishops, priestess, deaconess, and subdeaconess (episcopissa, presbytera, diaconissa, subdiaconissa), laid down some very strict rules to guide their relations with their former husbands. The bishopess, as a rule, did not live in the same house with the bishop (see the Council of Tours in 567, can. xiv). For the lower grades actual separation does not seem to have been required, although the Council of Orléans in 541, can. xvii, ordained: “ut sacerdotes sive diacom cum conjugibus suis non habeant commune lectum et cellulam”; while curious regulations were enforced requiring the presence of subordinate clergy in the sleeping apartment of the bishop, archpriest, etc., to prevent all suspicion of scandal (see, e.g., the Council of Tours, in 567), canons xiii and xx).
St. Dunstan, Archbishop of Canterbury from 960 to 988, a period during which the papacy was subjected to oppression and disorder of the worst kind, more than any other character in early English history can be identified with the cause of a celibate clergy . But the seventeenth century, seemingly was not inconsistent with at least ordinary fidelity to their vows of continence.
Before the middle ages it was allowable for Catholic priests to have multiple wives and mistresses (concubines). During the Middle Ages clergy were known to solicit sexual favours from their female penitents and some priests kept concubines. It was also known that Pope Alexander VI had several illegitimate children and that the nuns of Godstow were the ones who spread syphilis to the husbands of the families who lived around their convent (Durant, 1980; Mee, 1972). This type of abuse has continued down through the centuries.
But with concerns for protecting Church property from inheritance Pope Pelagius I made new priests agree offspring could not inherit Church property. Pope Gregory then declared all sons of priests illegitimate (only sons since lowly daughters could not inherit anyway in society).
>> Is this a joke or serious? > “Webster’s dictionary defines catamite as “the youthful lover of an older man derived from the Latin name Catamus.” Catamus was the first Catholic priest, who didn’t even wait until the rock of Lord Jesus‘ tomb was rolled back to get a young boy spread eagle on a altar (a practice that resulted in the early church adopting the name “altar boy.”) The first Pope was so impressed with Catamus’ ability to bugger young altar boys while never losing his place in scripture during service, that he coined the name for the new church “Catholic,” using Catamus’ name and the activity for which Catamus had become notorious. The traditions establish by Catamus have become sacred rites of passage for all Catholic priests, often taking 40-50 years to perfect and master. What once was ostensibly a Christian Church has become little more than a excuse for grown men to wear dresses and bugger young boys – with the so-called “church” offering the vocational perk to its priests of often relocating pedophiles to new parishes so that they may “sample some new flavors.” “(The Landover Baptist Catamite Hotline) <
The other major condemnation of clerical sex abuse was The Book of Gomorrah, completed by radical church reformer Father Peter Damian (a Benedictine monk, as it happens, who became a cardinal) in 1051. He appealed directly to the pope about the abuse of children, as well as consensual sex among clergy—in howling language: “O unheard of crime! O outrage to be mourned with a whole fountain of tears!… What fruitfulness can still be found in the flocks when the shepherd is so deeply sunk in the belly of the devil!”*
In the 15th century there are still 50% of priests married, but at the 1545-63–Council of Trent it was stated that celibacy and virginity are superior to marriage.
Jean Calvin or John Calvin, the influential French theologian and pastor, was likewise free from the obligation of vows, but the severest and most abstemious among the Reformers. He had the air of being so hostile to celibacy but his first engagement did not turn into a marriage. He knew a good reason why it would not be bad to marry: “If I take a wife it will be because, being better freed from numerous worries, I can devote myself to the Lord.”
He married Idelette de Bure, a widow who had two children from her first marriage of an Anabaptist minister John Storder from Liège. whom he had converted to the Paedobaptist faith or Anabaptism. Calvin’s fellow labourer Martin Bucer had known Idelette and recommended her to Calvin in confidence that she would be the woman who was “chaste, obliging, not fastidious, economical, patient, and careful for (his) health”. Idelette busied herself attending to Calvin in his many illnesses, faithfully visiting the sick and afflicted, and making her home a refuge for those who fled for their lives and their faith. Though she survived the plague when it ravaged Geneva, Idelette died after a lengthy illness in 1549. Calvin had lived with her for nearly nine years, had three children who died in infancy, and remained a widower after her death.
In the 1930s, a priest-psychiatrist—and also a Benedictine—named Reverend Thomas Verner Moore researched the higher-than-usual rates of insanity and alcoholism among Catholic clergy. He suggested the church build an asylum for priests. The U.S. Catholic Bishops turned down his request in 1936. Father Moore became a Carthusian hermit.*
In 1947, Father Gerald Fitzgerald founded the Servants of the Paraclete in Jemez, New Mexico—the same institution Father Poole was to visit almost 50 years later.*
In a 1957 letter to the Bishop of Manchester, Father Fitzgerald wrote that predatory priests (who he euphemistically refers to as “schizophrenic”) cannot be effectively treated and should not be allowed to continue in the ministry:
Their repentance and amendment is superficial and, if not formally at least subconsciously, is motivated by a desire to be again in a position where they can continue their wonted activity. A new diocese means only green pastures… We are amazed to find how often a man who would be behind bars if he were not a priest is entrusted with the cura animarum [the cure, or care, of souls].*
By the early 1960s, Father Fitzgerald had seen enough chronic paedophiles that he did not want to treat them and have them re-released into the ministry, but, as he proposed in a letter to Archbishop Davis, to build an “island retreat… but even an island is too good for these vipers.”*
Cardinal Ratzinger in 2001 issued a secret Vatican edict to Catholic bishops all over the world, instructing them to put the Church’s interests ahead of child safety. The document recommended that rather than reporting sexual abuse to the relevant legal authorities, bishops should encourage the victim, witnesses and perpetrator not to talk about it. And, to keep victims quiet, it threatened that if they repeat the allegations they would be excommunicated. Crimen Sollicitationis was enforced for 20 years by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger before he became Pope Benedict XVI. It imposes an oath of secrecy on the child victim, the priest dealing with the allegation and any witnesses.
Breaking that oath means excommunication from the Catholic Church.
This culture of secrecy and fear of scandal that led bishops to place the interests of the Catholic Church ahead of the safety of children was a time bomb ticking and last year in Belgium the alarm shook Belgium awake. The Adriaenssens commission published a 200-page report on 10 September 2010. According to the report, the commission heard testimony from 488 complainants, concerning incidents that took place between 1950 and 1990. The report contained testimony from 124 people. Two-thirds of the complainants were men, now aged in their 50s and 60s. {Caroline Caldier, “Belgique : un rapport analyse les conséquences de la pédophilie dans l’Eglise”, France Info, 10 September 2010.+ Radio Canada, “Rapport accablant de l’Église belge”, 10 September 2010, accessed 22 September 2010.}
In 1998 it was reported that a catechism textbook for Belgian children called Roeach 3, edited by Prof. Jef Bulckens of the Catholic University of Leuven and Prof. Frans Lefevre of the Seminary of Bruges, showed comic-book-style pictures of toddlers asking sexual questions and engaging in sexual play, for example: a drawing which showed a naked baby girl saying: “Stroking my pussy makes me feel groovy,” “I like to take my knickers off with friends,” “I want to be in the room when mum and dad have sex.” The drawing also shows a naked little boy and girl that are “playing doctor” and the little boy says: “Look, my willy is big.”
The drawing also showed three pairs of parents. Those with the “correct” attitude reply: “Yes, feeling and stroking those little places is good fun.” In Belgium religion is a compulsory subject and this “catechism textbook” was used in the catechism lessons in the catholic schools, until one day the Irish-Belgian Alexandra Colen, member of Parliament for the Flemish-secessionist party Vlaams Blok (now Vlaams Belang), discovered it among the schoolbooks of her eldest daughter, then 13 years old. On 3 September 1997 she wrote a letter to Cardinal Danneels, saying: “When I see this drawing and its message, I get the distinct impression that this catechism textbook is designed intentionally to make 13 and 14 year olds believe that toddlers enjoy genital stimulation. In this way one breeds pedophiles that sincerely believe that children actually think that what they are doing to them is ‘groovy’, while the opposite is the case.”
After the wife of Paul Belien, the editor of the conservative-libertarian blog The Brussels Journal, started her campaign against the Roeach textbook, many parents contacted her to voice their concerns. Stories of other practices in the Catholic education system poured in. There were schools where children were taught to put condoms over artificial penises and where they had to watch videos showing techniques of masturbation and copulation.
The Belgian Catholic hierarchy stated that the textbook was intended for adolescents, and that the pictures were meant to convey the idea that young children experience lust, a prevalent theory in contemporary psychology. Nevertheless the textbook was withdrawn after public protests by Catholics, which elicited media coverage as well as support from Church officials around the world.
In 2010 Peter Adriaenssens said cases of abuse, mostly involving minors, had been found in nearly every diocese, and 13 alleged victims had committed suicide.
The child psychiatrist, who has worked with trauma victims for 23 years, said nothing had prepared him for the stories of abuse, which multiplied as former abusers gave testimony.
“We saw how priests, called up by the commission and asked to help seek the truth, were willing to set up the list of 10, 15, 20 victims they abused during boarding school while the commission knew only of one,” he said.
Many alleged victims came forward to testify to the commission after the Bishop of Bruges, Roger Vangheluwe, resigned in 2010, admitting to having sexually abused a boy before and after becoming a bishop.
The commission also stressed that sexual abuse happened within all religions and organisations, but sufficient evidence is provided to suggest that crimes have been consistently covered up. Repeated denial by the church is hardly credible in the face of evidence provided by independent investigations.
Unfortunately, however, the Roman Catholic Church tried to minimise the happenings deny all charges at first but when more and more documents could proof the charges they came up with all different stories to defend their clergymen.
Other situations where clerics have sexually acted out with adult women and men, nuns and seminarians, have not been looked at; nor the effect on any offspring they may have sired in the process. For that matter, the personal cost to victims and their families remains uncounted. How many lives destroyed through alcohol, drugs, unsafe sex or violence have there been? How much abuse has been repeated by its victims? How many suicides and ruined families? How can the total cost ever be calculated?
In any case the Roman Catholic Church lost all her credibility with the many scandals and her trying to cover it up.
The whole story made it that the already very empty churches became even more empty, but also started the debate about celibacy. More voices, even from priests and bishops called to have the possibility for a priest to get married and to have a ‘normal sexual life’.
With the call to end celibacy also came the call to give married people, lay men and women.
Statistically 75% of Belgians are called inscribed by the Roman Catholic Church, because the people let their child be baptised. By doing so they are taken into account to have their clergymen being paid by the Belgian government. As elsewhere in Europe, secularization has hit hard in Belgium and the scandals did not help to stop the decline. Sunday church attendance has dropped well below 5% .
In the year 2010, the number ‘ontdopingen’ or the ‘ending of baptism in the Roman Catholic Church’ (a ‘disposal of the baptism’) became multiplied nearly 10 times in Flanders compared to 2009; the total number was in 2010 , 5115 (2009: ca. 626), but that could be even more1because the dioceses Ghent and Mechelen/Malines-Brussels did not yet have all figures. For sure that went up even more in 2011 were people got every day some more surprising facts on radio and television and people openly declaring they were leaving the catholic Church. The most important reason they gave up, was that they could not find themselves no longer in the Catholic Church through the abuse scandals or in the manner on which the church leadership went around with these ‘paedophile crisis’ .
But, the declining number of new priests was the only thing the cardinal and bishops were concerned of. As of 2010, there are about 1,900 priests in the archdiocese of Malines-Brussels, but most of them are either retired or on the verge of retirement. Only two were ordained in 2007. {Robert Mickens, “Where have all the thinkers gone?” (interview), in The Tablet, May 31, 2008: 6-7.}
Though sexual abuse is the most shaming of all abuse and a misuse of power the church had seemed it to happen and thumbed her nose about it. As long as it happened with priests at odd moments and not publicly it did not seem to matter and the world would not have to know about it.
But honestly believing priest who had the urge to have a sex live but did not want to do wrong against Gods Will got no answers to their questions to find a solution and to break with the celibacy. Now that many priest are put in the corner and others became to old to serve properly, the Catholic Church has a real problem in shortage of priests.
Celibacy for the clergy of the Catholic Church is “the renunciation of marriage implicitly or explicitly made, for the more perfect observance of chastity, by all those who receive the Sacrament of Orders in any of the higher grades”. The character of this renunciation is differently understood in the Eastern and in the Western Church.
This law of celibacy often has repeatedly been made the object of attack, but now it got to the apogee. Those preferring that they could marry found now enough reasons to bring it forth. For them denouncing this unscriptural rule would also take away a lot of prejudices thus created. according the Catholic Church the conviction that virginity possesses a higher sanctity and clearer spiritual intuitions, seems to be an instinct planted deep in the heart of man. But common sense breaks with that. “The more holy and exalted we represent the state of marriage to be, the more we justify the married priest in giving the first place in his thoughts to his wife and family and only the second to his work” according to the New Advent Catholic Encyclopaedia.
With Pope St. Leo IX, St. Gregory VII (Hildebrand), and their successors, a determined and successful stand was made against the further spread of corruption, but today we can see that a hidden form of corruption came into existence which was more delicate, more dangerous, and more damaging.
According to Hans Küng the time has come to challenge that celibacy requirement. Celibacy is not solely responsible for these crimes of child abuse but it is the most important structural expression of the Catholic hierarchy’s inhibitions with regard to sexuality, evident also in its attitude toward birth control and other questions that caused a lot of harm. He writes: “Although there is no question that abuse also occurs in families, schools, and youth organizations, as well as in churches that do not have the rule of celibacy, why are there such an extraordinary number of cases specifically in the Catholic church, whose leaders are celibate?
The rule of celibacy is the main reason for the catastrophic shortage of priests, the serious neglect of the Eucharist, and the widespread breakdown of pastoral care—a problem that has been papered over by merging parishes into “pastoral units” ministered to by badly overworked priests.
In previous times the problem for the church was mainly the financial matter. The clergymen or monks in sacred orders who went through the marriage ceremony with any woman, or in which children were born after his ordination claimed to inherit his property upon his death. The church wanted not only a dowry when the person came to be a servant in the church. After the ‘marriage portion’ everything earned while serving had to come back to the church. Having heirs would bring the treasury of the church in danger as well as the position of certain persons, because before the celibacy people inherited also the degree of their father (bishop, cardinal, etc.)
In 1970, the decline in priesthood vocations persuaded nine leading theologians to sign a memorandum declaring that the Catholic leadership “quite simply has a responsibility to take up certain modifications” to the celibacy rule. Extracts from the document were reprinted in January 2011. Not least because one of the signatories was the then Joseph Ratzinger, now pope Benedict.
With modernization and having to be more open, the time has come that the Roman Catholic Church goes back to the first Christians and to what is written in the Holy Scriptures do find also many Belgian catholic priests and even some bishops.
For them the opposition to the law of celibacy, which frequently took the form of open agitation, both in the earlier Middle Ages and again at the Reformation period, not only calls for notice in modern times of such movements, today time is ripe to turn back to first years of Christianity and to accept priest and people who work in the church-community for the congregation, to be married.
For the Belgian priests in charge today it is clear that ethic is driven by a moral, an idea of what is right and wrong, what should and shouldn’t be, no matter believer or non believer. but for them and for us it is clear that those who want to work for God and proclaim the Good News of the Coming Kingdom, they should even take more care to live according to the Laws of God. In those laws it is not forbidden for men of God to marry, most of the apostles and disciples who worked in the community were married. But it is totally wrong to indulge in sexual acts which or against the normal human condition and which or against the Will of God. Sexual plays with children or people of the own sex or disgusted by the Most High god of gods, who also does not like sluttish attitude.
For the priests the men are normal human beings with their needs. That the Belgian Catholic Church will ask trainee priests to take psychological tests, as it moves to tackle scandals over clerical child abuse, shall not help much.
The church may have here internal laws but they should adapt to the times. Today people have a total different attitude then some centuries ago when there had to be called a halt to the sordid sexual life clergy had. Ethic rules are different today, as well as the attitude about relationships. though on that point we notice the ordinary people gone wild and not so much sticking to healthy regimen. The pattern of living of a lot of young people is not exactly a nice pattern of living to be an example.
But the Belgian clergy do have their point to call for change.
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To be continued: Manifests for believers #2 Changing celibacy requirement
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Related stories:
Child-molesting priests:
On Clerical celibacy:
Adding to / Aanvullend aan:
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The investigation received 1,800 reports of sexual abuse by clergy or volunteers within Dutch Catholic dioceses, congregations and religious orders.
At least 105 of the alleged abusers are still alive.
Children involved in Church organisations were twice as likely as non-Catholics to be exposed to abuse and the “mild, severe or very severe sexual behaviour” was covered up by senior clergy.
Belgian Ecclesia Brussel - Leuven 
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