Seeking Jesus’s guidance on priestly paedophilia

TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 04, 2018
Seeking Jesus’s guidance on priestly paedophilia

Readers wondering what the Roman Catholic Church should do about priests who sexually abuse children may be interested in what Jesus (remember him?) had to say about the subject.

My own feeling is that religion ought to get out of the business of policing sexual conduct and let the secular authorities handle it. But so long as religion is involved, Jesus’s strictures are relevant.
Jesus, of course, didn’t address the issue directly, because Roman Catholic priests hadn’t been invented in his day. But a few of his sayings hint at a solution. In Matthew 19:12, he says, “There are eunuchs who have been so from birth, and there are eunuchs who have been made eunuchs by men, and there are eunuchs who have made themselves eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven. He who is able to receive this, let him receive it.” He seems to be recommending self-castration here, and if so let’s hope he’s speaking metaphorically.
Earlier, in Matthew 18:8, he says, “If your hand or foot causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away; it is better for you to enter life maimed or lame than with two hands or two feet to be thrown into the eternal fire.” This is pretty extreme. Since the naughty little organ between men’s legs often causes them to sin, let’s hope again that Jesus is speaking metaphorically. A literal interpretation would leave an awful lot of men hobbling around wincing in pain and clutching the location of their former manly endowments. 
It’s pretty clear that Jesus would have no truck with anybody who hurts children. In Matthew 18:6 he says, “Whoever causes one of these little ones who believe in me to sin, it would be better for him to have a great millstone fastened about his neck and be drowned in the depth of the sea.” This gives offending priests a choice between castration and drowning if we take Jesus literally.
A humane but fair solution would be to interpret these teachings metaphorically and expel proven offenders from the priesthood. This might leave the Church with a decimated priesthood, but we are all familiar with the proverb that a few rotten apples can spoil the whole barrel, and it’s better to have a few good shepherds than to have many corrupt ones. Priests of any faith are supposed to be holy. They can’t be holy if their deeds are evil. If the hand that dispenses Eucharistic wafers is the same hand that violates children, Jesus’s command to cut off offending hands, interpreted metaphorically, has striking contemporary relevance. 
Ye Olde Theologian