Word: priestly
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...scandals -- ranging from clandestine liaisons with adult parishioners to clerical pedophilia -- have focused fresh attention on the life of the Catholic priest and turned him into a suspect figure in many eyes. Says Monsignor Edwin O'Brien, rector of the North American Pontifical College in Rome: "A priest would have to be out of his mind now to touch a kid, even if it's just to pat him on the head or tap him on the shoulder." The scandals are forcing the American clergy -- and, ever so reluctantly, the Vatican -- to examine the nature and tradition of the priesthood...
...American seminarians in Rome, a sense of siege has set in. "Our eroticized society degrades us, and somehow that eroticism invades our lives no matter how we fight it," says Enrique Lopez, 28, a New Mexico native who knew Archbishop Sanchez and who is training to be a diocesan priest. "If Sanchez had been embezzling money or something like that, it would have been a scandal. But because he was involved in a sex scandal, it touched his dignity. I don't think that's fair." Says Lopez's fellow seminarian John Riccardo, 28, of Detroit: "How can you give...
...some advocates of change, however, the key to reform is dropping the 870-year-old tradition of priestly celibacy. "If someone really has a true call to a celibate vocation, God bless it," says Eugene Bianchi, an ex-Jesuit priest who currently teaches religion at Emory University. "But I think those kinds of persons are far fewer than the priests we have." Mandatory celibacy, Bianchi contends, encourages sexual immorality, which is symptomatic of larger structural problems in what he calls a "monarchical, absolutist" church: "The celibate clerical system is collapsing, and it is not going to be regenerated...
...fans of Oprah and Geraldo likely to be prepared for Ta-Har, a self- described high priest of the Black Israelites. He too has a talk show, It's Time to Wake Up, which airs every other Friday night in New York's Westchester County. But his tactics are, shall we say, more direct. On one show he wielded a baseball bat and delivered a prophecy: "We're going to be beating the hell out of you white people . . . We're going to take your little children and dash them against the stones...
...expect much to come of such efforts. Rather, attempts to suppress the trade have shifted to the First World nations that supply the clients. "We live in a world of contradictions, lies and cowardice," says Francois Lefort, a French priest and doctor who has fought child prostitution throughout the world. "This problem is not just Bangkok's, Colombo's, Manila's. It's Paris', Brussels', Rome's. It's the nice, respectable white man who goes down there to molest these kids...