CATHOLIC BISHOP: It was just a little intimate game...

As Catholics worldwide celebrate Palm Sunday and the Pope’s birthday, the stain that is the priestly sexual abuse scandal just won’t wash away and in fact, is getting darker and darker every day.

The latest on the scandal involves Bishop Roger Vangheluwe (74) of Bruges, Belgium. He resigned as Bishop of Bruges in 2010 after admitting that he had sexually abused a nephew for 13 years until the boy was 18. He was suspended from performing mass and other public services but by Vatican law, a bishop is bishop for life and cannot be removed from that title, so he enjoys his status in a wooded Catholic retreat in the French countryside.

What brought his story to my attention is the TV interview he gave recently where, it appears to many, he either defended his actions or at least, minimized them as insignificant and he is probably not the only Catholic cleric that thinks…what’s the big deal?...and that is very significant and disturbing in the whole scheme of things.

The bishop denied he is a pedophile saying he was never attracted to children that way and he described his sexual abuse of his two nephews as “a little game” of fondling but no “rough sex” and no “real sexuality”. He called it a little bit of intimacy but “I was never naked” and he later concurred that it (fondling) was probably not quite right.

This is the speech of a sexual adolescent which I believe many priests and bishops are because they join the priesthood at an early age when they are not sexually mature and never really become sexually mature after becoming priests; they remain sexual adolescents even into old age.

This is what I maintain is the problem with the path to priesthood; the priests that emerge are not normal mature men, they remain sexually ignorant but curious boys and that needs to change if this problem is to be tackled realistically and the only way this can be realistically tackled is to allow priests to marry and allow married men to become priests.

It now become obvious why the Vatican and a string of Popes under whose watch these abuses occurred did nothing, remained quiet and swept everything under the rug; they did not think the abuses were a big deal because they were all a bunch of adolescent, sexually immature twits, playing their little sexual games while proclaiming to be vicars of Christ on earth…how twisted is that?

Happy Palm Sunday?