Y’know, I think we should all sit down & write a letter to Pope Benedict, asking His Holiness to institute a few changes to the Catholic Church. A lot of people have left the Church in light of outmoded restrictions and some rather embarrassing scandals. Tell you what; I’ll only ask for two really major changes right off the bat, and we’ll see how it goes from there. How about that?
1. Allow priests to marry
2. Allow birth control
Pretty much every other Christian religion allows their clergy to marry and have families. Judaism allows rabbis to marry. Islamic clerics can marry. Yet, the Catholic Church forbids it. Catholic priests must be celibate, and therefore pure of thought and deed, which on paper sounds like a very noble sacrifice to a higher calling. However, people are people. Human beings have urges. Without the healthy sexual release of a committed monogamous marriage in holy matrimony, dudes can get a little buggy, especially considering the Church forbids self-gratification too.
So then why is it that hundreds of thousands of kids get molested by Catholic priests? Certainly there are isolated incidents of predation and abuse by clerics of other faiths, but not on the wholesale level that has scandalized the Catholic Church. It's cost the Church millions and millions of dollars in reparations and mass defections of the flock to safer religious outposts. So, lighten up and let priests marry like the rest of the Judeo-Christian (and Muslim) world.
Now, about that birth control issue… Sure, we were told to be fruitful and multiply. But it’s sinful and downright irresponsible, in my humble yet correct opinion, to encourage the world to keep on producing people they can’t afford and that they can’t take care of. Entire corners of the globe are teeming seas of humanity, with rampant poverty and starvation, and yet you keep on encouraging us to breed more little followers for your Church.
That story might have been able to fly in the year 1095, when Pope Urban II sent thousands of soldiers to “liberate” Palestine on the Crusades, and the all-powerful Church needed to keep breeding soldiers to throw away in a fruitless war of conquest, as well as breeding more followers to keep the Church in power as a Force Unto Itself, but them times they be a-changin’.
By 1291 you guys finally stopped beating your heads against the walls on the Crusades, and now 716 years later, maybe it’s time to stop pushing the breeding program so assiduously, unless you’re planning another push to oust the Islamics out of the Middle East again? If so, then good luck.
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