This on top of the $114 million they are already paying to settle lawsuits due to priestly pedophiles. The amounts probably would have been much less had the ethically and morally challenged Cardinal Mahoney not stonewalled, evaded, lied, and fought the victims every step of the way.
Their evasions continue. A church attorney said “Parish assets will not be touched, and the mission of the church will be impacted but not crippled,” while the Cardinal said “the Church would be selling an administrative building and was considering the sale of about 50 other Church properties to raise funds for settlement.” They never could get their stories straight.
This whole situation points out one of the greater ironies of the modern Catholic Church: when priests are required to be celibate, the only applicants will be truly spiritual men (yes, they are all men) or men with repressed sexual drives that cannot stay repressed forever. The number of truly spiritual applicants seems to be somewhat lessened of late, causing a shortage of new priests in the Church.
But do you know when and why the requirement for celibacy was imposed? Until the 12th century, priests were allowed to be married. (That’s over 1,100 years of tradition!) But this caused problems for the Church: when a priest died and a new priest came to the parish, often the late priest’s family would refuse to leave their Church-owned home (mainly because they had nowhere else to go and no source of income). So the Church would be forced to build a new home for the new priest. This burden, combined with the lobbying of certain monastic leaders (who felt that only monks could truly serve God) caused the church to decree that, henceforth, priests must be celibate.
As to why all priests are men, that goes back to the time of Constantine. It is clear in the Letters of Paul and the Book of Acts that there were female apostles, but of course that would have been a problem for the Roman tradition.
And you thought it had something to do with Jesus?
Silly me.
And now we have the Pope saying pointblank that the Roman Catholic Church is the only real religion and all the rest aren’t even religions at all.
It’s hard to get upset about that, when some Protestant sects have been saying the same for centuries– not to mention some Islamists, Buddhists, and even Hindus all saying theirs is the only way.
The Catholic Church broke unusual ground when in 1962 it released “Gaudium et Spes,” which (among other things) accepted that all religions have a piece of the truth, while of course maintaining that only Catholics had the whole truth. (Nevertheless, few other major religions have been so boldly accepting of the beliefs of others.) I find it sad but not surprising that in these days of conflict used as a political tool, we should find the Catholic Church less accepting than it was 40 years ago.