CELIBACY IN THE PRIESTHOOD – Causing More Harm Than Good?

We don’t usually talk about kiddie porn here at WHACK! because, well we hate it. And we like to think that all of our degenerate readership already lost your innocence, long ago, willfully, and enjoyably. But the truth is that sometimes stories come along that involve child porn, and though we hate to think of such atrocious things going on in the world, we must address them for the sake of our peace of mind.

Because, here’s the thing, cock jockeys: we like regular porn because even if it’s all kinds of fucked up and absolutely void of morals and even if the people performing are damaged specimens and the people behind the camera are true-to-life scum of the earth, everyone is having at least some fun, or at the very least they’re making some money. They’re all there because they want to be. You scuzzbuckets watch it because you want to. With adult porn, everyone has a good time and then goes to sleep on their crumb-strewn, cum-stained couches.

But child porn… God, that’s a whole other thing. It’s vile, despicable, wrong on every level. Nobody involved is having a good time, either because they are innocent children who should never be put in such situations, or because they are dirty old men on the viewing end, feeling guilty about their horrible fixation — dirty old men like Catholic bishops in Canada.

If you’ve been living under a rock for the past few weeks — which, being one of our readers, you very well may have been — you might have missed the story of the Canadian bishop of Antigonish, Raymond Lahey, who recently resigned his post “for personal reasons” that turned out to be his formal arrest and charge of smuggling child pornography into Canada when his laptop was searched by customs on his way in from London. This turd is a bishop who recently oversaw a $15 million out-of-court settlement between the Roman Catholic Church and sexually abused orphans who filed suit against an Antigonish priest years ago. This is a guy who pays off sexual abuse victims whose lives have been ruined by dirty old men in clerical vestments, who has his own child porn on his laptop, and who got caught because he has traveled the world extensively, visiting notorious child-porn-producing countries like Indonesia, Thailand, Spain, and Germany.
You know what WHACK! hates more than child porn? Priests and bishops who look at it, smuggle it, and have anything to do with it beyond condemning it for the horror that it is. With all this in mind, you know what else we hate? Celibacy in the priesthood. What a bunch of outdated hooey. Leads to all kinds of problems, like child porn consumption.

You Catholic cock-crankers out there might be going, “Hey, now, hold yer goddamn britches! You don’t know shit about the clergy, so don’t go makin’ wild assumptions!” (Yes, you are all a bunch of old, toothless, Catholic rednecks in my mind. I don’t know why.) But bear with me. Look losers, the truth is that clerical celibacy isn’t some divinely mandated law set down by Jehovah himself in the bygone days of perfect sinlessness. Neither God the Father nor Jesus the Son ever said a word about priests needing to be chaste in order to be holy; that was all invented later, mostly by Church fathers like St. Paul and St. Jerome and St. Augustine, who decided that they hated sex—only after having already had a lot of it. These men have been revered for hundreds of years for their purity, but few people remember that they only went chaste after years of reckless fucking. Then, they suddenly decided that intercourse was “degrading,” “unclean,” and “filthy.” Augustine admitted to praying constantly in his early life, “Give me chastity — but not yet.” (Sex in History, Reay Tannahill.)

But, in an abrupt about-face, Augustine went on to come up with the idea of original sin being passed down to all of us from Adam and Eve in the form of our lust, the inability to have control over one’s genitals, and the subsequent inability to avoid ecstasy during sex. As a result of their fall from grace, he concluded that all sex and thus all humanity is inherently evil. And, well, we can’t have priests going around doing evil things, can we? Of course not! In what was to become the calling card of Catholicism over the years, the Church decided that the best thing to do with the sexuality of priests was to sweep it under the rug, smother it with religious vestments, and pretend it didn’t exist.

So, in the eleventh century, Pope Gregory VII decreed that all ordained men must henceforth be celibate. There was a strong backlash, with the German priesthood declaring they’d rather die than give up their wives, but the papacy won out in the end (as it often does) and Catholic priests were thenceforth to remain celibate.
While in the beginning this may have worked (although in reality, it didn’t — one bishop in the 13th century fathered 65 illegitimate children), by the time Catholicism had made its sexless, somber way into the late 20th and now the early 21st centuries, something had gone amiss. The very evil that priests had been forced to become chaste in order to avoid was being perverted, warped, and expressed in the form of child molestation and degenerate kiddie porn habits.

Just as many priests in earlier years had sought out the Church as a means to higher education they could not have gotten in Medieval Europe, today it appears that many Catholic men become priests in order to try to escape their own sexual appetites. With the shame and guilt imposed upon them by thousands of years of Catholic teachings about the evils of even the most vanilla sexuality weighing on their shoulders, recent statistics are showing that the modern priesthood is like a beacon of hope for sexual deviants. Rather than seek counseling or — even better — an adult sex partner who shares their particular fantasies and is willing to bring them to life, these guys seem to expect that abstaining will make their quirks disappear.

This is hardly a reasonable expectation. Much as St. Augustine and his ilk once deemed things like anal sex and masturbation “unnatural,” the reality of the situation is that chastity is an unnatural state for a human being that’s wired to want, seek, and have sex. Denying this universal and basic urge any outlet, as the ideal of priestly chastity does, leads to festering rather than smothering of weird sexual urges. Suppression of desires often leads to obsession with them until one day they explode outward in an unacceptable form, like the child molestation that has swept through the clergy and made headline news for years now.

In Antigonish, Nova Scotia, those years of molestation brought about a recent and historic $15 million settlement, overseen by none other than bishop Raymond Lahey, child porn collector and traveler to exotic locations where child porn and prostitution are all too common. For Bishop Lahey, it seems that his suppressed sexual tendencies morphed, after years of being kept in darkness, into an obsession with child porn. And just so we’re clear, I’m not talking about 16-year-old, almost-legal performers. I’m talking about pre-pubescent boys as young as eight, at least according to appearances. While I suppose it’s commendable in some miniscule way that during the years of investigation and settlement of the molestation cases, this perverted priest seems to have kept his hands off of the children of his faithful flock, but somewhere between when children first reported seeing child porn in his home back in the 1980s and now, his sick fascination turned itself outward and it seems he not only bought child porn but very likely partook of forbidden fruit. Once again, the Church seems to have used its age old ‘sweep it under the rug’ technique to keep this guy, and thousands of others, in their vestments and a job. Granted, in the 1980s, possession of child pornography was not yet a crime, but it has never been condoned — particularly not by the Church. But rather than deal with an obviously ticking time bomb, the Church let it lie under that old rug of righteousness, made him a bishop, and let him handle a child molestation case bigger than his porn collection, until the sick truth came to light.

It’s disgusting, horrible, wrong — even evil. And I would love to have a sit-down with St. Augustine, Pope Gregory VII, and even our modern holiest of holies, St. Benedict XVII, and have a talk about which is more sinful: having sex with a wife in the bounds of the sacrament of marriage or being driven by suppression of sexual urges to place one’s holy hands upon the body of an innocent? If there’s a choice to be made between the two, I think I know what I’d choose.

At WHACK! we think abstention is creepy, unhealthy, and abominable. We especially think these things when the emotional lives of children are at stake, and even more so when it seems the likeliest answer to the problem would be to just let priests get married. Not that marriage can fix all kinds of perversion — we bet a bunch of you boneheads out there are married, after all — but it could certainly help the Fathers let off some sexual steam. Frankly, we recommend adult porn to them — look up some hardcore anal pounding of the gay or straight variety. WHACK! one out. Enjoy yourself! But for the love of all that’s holy — and priests are supposed to fit into that category — leave the kids alone. — Miss Lagsalot