Word: priesthoods
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Legal strategies aside, what should the church do? University of New Mexico psychiatry professor Jay R. Feierman, who has treated 500 abusive priests over 15 years, concludes that the priesthood inevitably attracts a certain number of potential molesters because of the celibacy rule. He thinks one preventive measure would be to require priests to live in religious communities where there are personal warmth and mutual support. Psychologist Eugene Kennedy of Chicago's Loyola University says that the large number of priests suffering from sexual conflicts "constitutes a pastoral problem of the first magnitude" but that bishops by and large have...
Fish gotta swim. Locusts devour the countryside. Lawyers sue. For all the American plague of overlitigation, lawyers also act as a kind of priesthood in the rituals of American faith. Most religions preach a philosophical endurance of the imperfections of the world. Suffering must be borne. Americans did not come to the New World to live like that. They operate on a pushy, querulous assumption of perfectibility on earth ("the pursuit of happiness" -- their own personal happiness). That expectation, which can make Americans charming and unreasonable and shallow, is part of their formula for success. But it has led Americans...
Aristide's polemical preaching led to his expulsion from the Salesian order in 1988. While he technically remains a priest, Aristide is forbidden to say Mass. He has indicated he will leave the priesthood to serve as Haiti's President...
...influence exacerbated past papal mistrust, especially during the 1970s, when the order appeared to many to take a pronounced leftward tilt. Tensions broke into the open when Pope Paul VI decided that too many of the members were involved in secular matters, including politics, to the detriment of their priesthood. Whenever a papal teaching was questioned, Jesuits always seemed to be in the thick of things, whether the topic was birth control, homosexuality or female priests. Soon after he became Pope, John Paul picked up Paul's refrain, denouncing the order's "regrettable shortcomings...
RELIGION: Crisis in the priesthood...