‘Priests should be trained to cope with celibacy’

Church in Australia says clergy should get psychosexual training

The Catholic Church in Australia has said compulsory celibacy may have contributed to priests abusing children and advised that all clergy should receive psychosexual training.

The findings are contained in a a report by the Truth, Justice and Healing Council, which is co-ordinating the Australian Church’s response to the national Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse announced by the government in 2012.

In a section on culture and clericalism, the report notes how church leaders turned a blind eye to abuse and sought to protect the institution rather than than the victims.

“Obligatory celibacy may also have contributed to abuse in some circumstances,” it added.

Council chief executive Francis Sullivan noted that while the Church was unlikely to change its stance on celibacy, it needed to be up for discussion.

“What our council’s report says is that we recognise that celibacy can be a contributing factor,” he said.

“We do not know the extent of that, we do not know the degree to which it was a dominant factor but we are not putting our head in the sand and ignoring the issue.”

Mr Sullivan also said the manner in which priests are trained for ministry also needed to be examined.

He said the way priests were trained should be addressed.

“When we have a public inquiry into the sex crimes in the Catholic Church, you need to address how sexuality is understood and acted out by members of the clergy,” said Mr O’Sullivan.

“You need a very clear understanding about your own sexuality, your own sexual development, your own way of relating as a person to others. That’s called psychosexual education. Certainly in the past, there was none.”

The report comes in the same month that Archbishop of Dublin and Primate of Ireland Diarmuid Martin acknowledged that the requirement for priests to be celibate was not church dogma and could be reviewed. However, he added that most priests here “live their celibacy very faithfully with all the challenges that are there”.

“I know what is going on with my priests. I know good priests and I know priests who struggle. I support all of them,” he said.

The Association of Catholic Priests has long voiced the opinion that the issue of compulsory celibacy within the Church needs to be examined.

The association has called on the Irish Church to propose to Rome that suitable married men be allowed to become priests, invite priests who left the active ministry to get married to return to ministry, and to ordain women to become deacons.

The group has cited celibacy as one of the key reasons for the “crisis” in vocations, with fewer men deciding to enter the priesthood.

“Expectation of change in the re-imaging of priesthood, not least in the celibacy requirement, is growing... Cardinal Pietro Parolin, the Vatican Secretary of State, on a number of occasions has pointedly indicated that celibacy is not a church dogma and it can be discussed because it is a church tradition.”

A recent study of Irish priests’ views of celibacy, Thirty-Three Good Men: Celibacy, Obedience and Identity, by Dr John Weafer, found that the majority of priests do not favour celibacy — although this view was more strongly held among older priests.