A commenter believes the great majority of priests are genuinely celibate:
I have met and known many priests in my life and i wouldn't say that about any of them. I don't believe you have personally known any priests if you are accusing most of them of not being celibate.It is unlikely that any profession composed of able-bodied men is celibate, never having a consciously induced orgasm. Nor could one expect the occasionally succumbing padre to casually reveal such humiliating (even career-ending) information.
I am not aware of unbiased data on the actual sexual practices of American Catholic priests. To properly research the question, one would have to interview a random sampling, persuasively reassuring every participant of the project's resolute confidentiality.
In the absence of data, we must rely on intuition. While the question feels prurient, priests accrue considerable social prestige in part for their advertised sexual sacrifice.
The stakes are high: Fr. Mike Krenik lost his parish without benefit of discussion when it was revealed he sought a harmless spasm.
The sentient know: In his willingness to depart on one occasion from the celibacy requirement, Fr. Krenik probably isn't unusual at all.
As a believer in evolution (as a skeptic concerning fairy tales, in other words) the orgasm evolved to motivate sexual activity. It is for men both blessing and curse--and thus a useful enigma for religion authorship.
On Nov. 17, 2003, fifty-eight Twin Cities priests met, and by their own report,
...discussed a wide range of related topics, the church international, the priesthood of the laity, the ordination of women, sexual orientation and the priesthood, etc. In the end we returned to the focused question of our brother priests in the above-named dioceses, mandatory/optional celibacy. It is by no means the only answer to this pastoral problem, but it represents another positive initiative toward making the sacraments more accessible. It is also a matter that conceivably could be changed by the stroke of the pen of a willing pope.It is extremely rare for priests to publicly dissent from church doctrine--even of the sheepish variety quoted above.
While at that meeting seven years ago, the clerics settled upon just one issue over which they would go to the mat: Priestly celibacy. Their argument rested entirely upon 'making the priesthood a more attractive profession.'
The confessors' 'anti-hypocrisy' letter, then, embeds its own multiple hypocrisies: Church teachings impose a variety of untenable burdens, many with disparate demographic impact. Some might consider the exclusion and subordination of women to be of vastly greater moral urgency.
The friars acted as a bloc, not as individuals, so as to maximize their political punch and to minimize the individual participant's risk of retaliation. (It's a pity St. Hubert's parishioners haven't learned from their example.)
The divines stated their demand as 'a call for dialog,' though the signatories clearly wanted an immediate end to the celibacy requirement: It...'could be changed by the stroke of the pen of a willing pope,' they wrote.
Expressing their motivation purely in terms of 'the future of the profession' is of course both comical and sad: Even while marching to the barricades, the priests feel required to pay homage to the vileness of their basic instinct.
