I do not think a retraction is in order as much as a clarification.

I take it from your post that you are a Protestant. I’d like to say this in a friendly tone: I wish you bloody Protestants would just leave the Catholic church alone. You’ve done enough damage already. The moral decay of the church and all of society has followed. Let me be clear. I have no objection to honest informing and consequences for the sex abuse scandals, but I do have a problem with Protestants influencing pastoral decisions within the Catholic church. I wish that B16 and his ilk would have never met Joachim Jerimias and similar heretics, either openly Protestant or subversively so.

If you don’t like it, don’t convert to Catholicism. Or, if you are like the many cafeteria/Americanized Catholics who are in halfway rebellion today, leave the Catholic church, too. The Catholic church is dying because of its compromises with de facto Protestants.

Here’s what I think the Archbishop meant: Celibacy is not the cause of the sex abuse scandal in the Catholic church. In other words, allowing priests to marry would not diminish the incidence of sex abuse by Catholic clergy. Indeed, the vast majority of men who commit sexual abuse have not taken a vow of celibacy.

Here’s what he probably didn’t say: There was a trend in the 50s and 60s to allow homosexual men into the priesthood. Previously, homosexuality was an exclusionary criterion, something freakish that could have brought scorn upon the church. But the modern way of thinking beginning to emerge was the homosexuality was a proclivity that seemed innate, and would then be a call to abstain from marriage and therefore sex. Well, so the thinking went, as long as these homosexual men were abstinent anyways, they might as well become priests. Some time later, the church had something euphemistically called the lavender mafia. The vast majority of sexual abuse that has since occurred in the modern Catholic church has been homosexual acts on post-adolescent boys, 90% of Catholic clergy sexual abuse has been this type of behavior.

So, allowing priests to marry is not going to limit this type of behavior, unless maybe you allow for homosexual marriage, which can’t happen. Even then, considering the overwhelming sexual practices of homosexuals, it wouldn’t change anything. What really does need to happen is for the modern, post-Vatican II, Catholic church to screen its applicants prior to the seminary for homosexuality. But given the drastic shortage of priests and given that the lavender mafia now runs many of the seminaries–LA and Miami are notoriously the worst–and given the current p.c. climate in America, then it’s highly unlikely that Archbishop Nolan–who by the way has no real authority over anything but his diocese–will do anything about the real problem.

On many other points, however, you were exactly right. Good statistics. I’d be most curious if you have the estimated number of priests who have sexually abused versus the number of public school teachers, especially coaches. If we really wanted to do something about sex offenders in this country, we would strengthen marriage laws and scrutinize our public schools.