Celibacy Is a Fiction and Church Must Change Its Rules

By Suzanne Breen
Belfast Telegraph
March 27, 2015

http://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/debateni/blogs/celibacy-is-a-fiction-and-church-must-change-its-rules-31097835.html

Parishioners show support outside St Peter’s Church earlier this week for Fr Ciaran Dallat

A woman whose only crime was to fall for the wrong man is heartbroken and humiliated. The man she loved has had the most intimate details of his life plastered all over the Press, his reputation now in ruins. The parishioners who adored him are left abandoned and confused. Behold the trail of human wreckage from the Catholic Church's cruel and callous code of compulsory priestly celibacy.

Fr Ciaran Dallat isn't the first - and won't be the last - priest to have lived a lie. The former Bishop of Galway, Eamon Casey, had a fling with an American divorcee and fathered a son.

Singing priest Fr Michael Cleary had two kids with his Dublin "housekeeper" Phyllis. Septuagenarian curate Fr Mossie Dillon fathered a child with his 31-year-old girlfriend, Madonna. Irish priests could win awards for preaching celibacy while not practising it.

Bishop Pat Buckley, the rebel cleric excommunicated by the Church after his Episcopal ordination outside its regulations, isn't shy in pointing out this hot-blooded history. "Just look at Irish surnames: McEntaggart, the son of the priest; MacAnespie, the son of the bishop; McNabb, the son of the abbot. Priests having sex is no new phenomenon."

But there is even greater duplicity involved than that of ordinary clerics. The head honchos in Rome know all about it, and always have done. They just choose not to let on.

Priests having sex is tolerated so long as it's kept quiet. The 11th and most important commandment is: Thou Shalt Not Get Caught.

Anyone who does is ruthlessly removed. Bishop Casey, once the star turn of the Church in Ireland, was shipped off to Ecuador like a convict. Now an old and broken man in his 80s, he lives out his last days in a Co Clare nursing home.

Yet still the punishment goes on. He can appear on the edge of the altar with another priest, but he's forbidden from ever saying Mass himself. One wonders what far-flung hellhole the men of God may be planning for Fr Dallat.

Rome showcases celibacy as the Church's "brilliant jewel". In reality, it's a tawdry little fake. The inhumane insistence on clinging to the charade forces priests to live double lives. And what misery that entails for those caught up in the web of deceit.

For priests so tormented by betraying their vows that some even contemplate suicide. For their lovers, forever kept a dirty secret. But most of all for the children of such unions.