Newsgroup: it.politica.internazionale
Titolo: The Trouble with Celibacy

http://www.newsweek.com/id/236002/output/print
The Trouble with Celibacy
In Africa, Catholicism's best growth market, many priests have little
use for Rome's chastity mandate.
By Lisa Miller | Newsweek Web Exclusive
Apr 7, 2010
In 1998 a Roman Catholic nun named Marie McDonald wrote a brief and
painful summary of her concerns to her colleagues and superiors. It was
labeled "strictly confidential." She was worried, she said, about the
sexual abuse of nuns by Roman Catholic priests in Africa.
The memo—titled "The Problem of the Sexual Abuse of African Religious in
Africa and in Rome" was concise. "Sexual harassment and even rape of
sisters by priests and bishops is allegedly common," it said. Sisters,
financially dependent on priests, occasionally have to perform sexual
favors in exchange for money. McDonald analyzed the causes of this
widespread violation of chastity vows and then made this plea: "The time
has come for some concerted action." According to the National Catholic
Reporter, which made McDonald's memo public in 2001, Vatican officials
did take steps to rectify the problem, but publicly, their stance was
chillingly familiar. "The problem is known and is restricted to a
limited geographical area," said Joaquin Navarro-Valls, the Vatican
spokesman at the time. This is an isolated incident, in other words;
we've got it under control.
Even as new cases of child sexual abuse by clergy emerge each day in
Europe and the United States, abuse in the regions where Catholicism is
growing fastest—Latin America, Asia, and, especially, Africa—are still
largely ignored. In the West, the focus has been on the violation of
minors, and on the role of celibacy in engendering this problem. In
Africa, the problem is somewhat more complex. Though many good priests
do adhere to their chastity vows, says the Rev. Peter Schineller, a
Jesuit priest who has spent 20 years in Africa, sex between consenting
or semi-consenting adults is commonplace. Transgression against chastity
vows by priests run the gamut from harassment all the way to fathering
children; it's not criminal necessarily, but it's certainly against
doctrine. "The violations are huge," says Schineller. As the Roman
Catholic hierarchy continues to crow over its success and vitality in
the global south—the growth rate in Africa and Asia has been about 3
percent a year, twice the rate worldwide—the African church may put
mandatory clerical celibacy to its harshest test yet.
Sexual coercion is just part of the story. The 2001 investigation by the
National Catholic Reporter uncovered three separate reports of sexual
abuse of religious sisters by priests. The story described priests
raping religious sisters and then paying for their abortions; sisters
fearing to travel in cars with priests for fear of rape; sisters
appealing to bishops for help only to be told to go away. "Even when
they are listened to sympathetically," wrote McDonald, "nothing seems to
be done."
Much less well documented is a broader problem: priests with unofficial
"wives." In Africa, "there's a tremendous problem with the vow of
chastity in regard to women," says Schineller. "Statistics are hard to
get, but it's a reality. Bishops are sometimes involved with it, but
mostly they simply have not faced it. It's kind of a hidden thing.
Laypeople want priests, so they put up with the priest having a friend."
About four years ago, Schineller worked with the bishops of Nigeria to
produce a pamphlet warning parish priests about the dangers of violating
their chastity vows. "There are consequences for all of this," he said.
Schineller believes that priests all over the world fail to maintain
their celibacy—more, he says, than anyone wants to admit—but that Africa
presents priests with a unique set of problems. In Africa, parents have
a higher social status than childless adults. "To be a man in Africa—it
varies from culture to culture—but it is expected that you will have
children and a family. To be a celibate male is not a high value." Also,
he adds, priests are often very isolated: they get lonely. "Priests are
separated, living out in the bush. Family expectations are high,
temptations are strong." And women, as Marie McDonald put it in her
top-secret document, hold an "inferior position." "It seems," she wrote,
"that a sister finds it impossible to refuse a priest who asks for
sexual favors." (It's easy to imagine that holds true as well for women
who are not nuns.)
Nuns hold a unique place in this sexual landscape. In a universe where
AIDS is widespread, sex with nuns is thought to be safe; some imagine it
might even have positive, healing powers. Priests who might have visited
prostitutes see religious sisters as a healthy alternative. "One of the
most dangerous myths in history," adds Philip Jenkins, professor of
history and religious studies at Penn State, "was this: if you were
suffering from a serious sexual disease, sex with a virgin would cure
it. That had awful consequences."
The Vatican has known about these sins and crimes for some time. When
Benedict XVI traveled to Africa in 2005, for example, he addressed the
question of celibacy explicitly. He urged the bishops there to "open
themselves fully to serving others as Christ did by embracing the gift
of celibacy."
Indeed, Benedict holds celibacy so high that last year he excommunicated
a Zambian priest, the Rev. Luciano Anzanga Mbewe, for being married.
Mbewe now heads a breakaway sect of married Catholic priests in Uganda
called the Catholic Apostolic National Church, according to The New York
Times. "The creation of the splinter church underscored the increasingly
vexing problem of enforcing celibacy for Roman Catholic priests in
Africa, which has the world's fastest-growing Catholic population but
where there have been several cases of priests living openly with women
and fathering children," the Times wrote. One wonders at the priorities
of a man who failed to defrock a priest in Wisconsin who molested
hundreds of children but acted so decisively in the case of one who
married a consenting adult.
Lisa Miller is NEWSWEEK's religion editor and the author of  Heaven: Our
Enduring Fascination With the Afterlife .

 adds Philip Jenkins
Certo che alzarsi la mattina e trovare Z. che cita in un suo post Philip
Jenkins ("The New Anti-Catholicism: The Last Acceptable Prejudice")
mette di buon umore.
Chissà se gli articoli li legge, prima di copiaincollarli :-)

 mette di buon umore.
Logi si accontenta di poco.
Ah, BTW, interessante tutto il paragrafo, compresa la parte che Logi ha 
tagliato.
===
In a universe where AIDS is widespread, sex with nuns is thought to be 
safe; some imagine it might even have positive, healing powers. Priests 
who might have visited prostitutes see religious sisters as a healthy 
alternative.
===
Chissa' se anche questo, per Jenkins, e' anticattolicesimo. Magari ci 
sono delle statitiche falsate.