I’ve been planning various details for my upcoming Italy adventure and realized I should probably buy tickets well ahead of time to get into the Vatican Museums. Turns out I’m too early, but while I was on the site, I decided to check out the other stuff the Vatican has to offer. That’s when I found it: the most unfortunate thing I have ever seen in my life.
The home page of the Vatican website has a link called “Abuse of Minors: The Church Response”
Really?!?
Is this such a prevalent issue that there’s a link to a statement on the home page of their website? Let’s get it together dudes. How about you all just STOP MOLESTING KIDS? Seems easy enough!
While I’m on my soapbox I feel the need to throw out there why I believe the Catholic Church has this problem in the first place. Priests aren’t allowed to get married. I feel like that invites pedophiles to join because no one even questions why they’re not in a relationship. It’s unfortunate too, because there are a lot of people who join the priesthood for honest reasons.
Maybe you’re wondering why Catholic priests are required to be celibate in the first place. That’s a bullshit reason too. Turns out that during the Crusades the Church wanted to acquire as much land as they could. Married priests usually had sons, and when they died, all their property was passed to their sons. As a way of gaining land, the church banned priests from marrying and even voided existing marriages. This gave them full inheritance rights!
So here’s my solution: let these priests marry. I think it would improve the overall composition of the priesthood. Namely, there would be less pedophiles.
For more on this topic, please watch South Park s6 e8 “Red Hot Catholic Love” lol
