TOLEDO, Ohio (WKRC) - A Catholic priest in Ohio was sentenced to life in prison for grooming and sex trafficking children and adults.
56-year-old Rev. Michael Jude Zacharias was convicted on one count of sex trafficking of a minor, two counts of sex trafficking of a minor by force, fraud, or coercion, and two counts of sex trafficking an adult by force, fraud, or coercion.
It’s all about accumulation of power and wealth. Catholic priests used to be allowed to be married but the Vatican wants the property to be kept to themselves, rather than passed on to the offsprings of priests. Since then, it has become source of controversies and psychological problems for Catholics for millenia.
Having been raised Catholic (now I’m agnostic), I remember growing up when people make a big deal of priests falling in love and getting married (nevermind their sexual proclivities due to sexual repression). It is a huge source of gossips and a taboo. It is unthinkable. It is though as if they committed a sin to god. And then you have other Christian denominations whose priests allow to be married and it is non-issue. The Orthodox Christian is as old as the Catholic church but they allow marriage among clergies and you hear little to no abuse, unlike the Catholics. As with most religious, Catholic laymen and women are stuck in their own bubble and do not think that clerical marriages should not be an issue.
That makes sense even though the reason is strange. Why would working somewhere imply the priest owns the place?
I meant that the priest still has private property. Of course, if the priest has his own family and passed away, all his possessions will go to the family. The Catholic church wouldn’t want that.
But the Catholic Church is it’s own business entity. If the priest owned property, the church would have to buy it?
Not sure to be honest. But the Catholic requirement for celibacy for priests definitely stems from owning poroperty:
"…But the early Christian church had no hard and fast rule against clergy marrying and having children. Peter, a Galilee fisherman, whom the Catholic Church considers the first Pope, was married. Some Popes were the sons of Popes.
The first written mandate requiring priests to be chaste came in AD 304. Canon 33 of the Council of Elvira stated that all"bishops, presbyters, and deacons and all other clerics" were to"abstain completely from their wives and not to have children." A short time later, in 325, the Council of Nicea, convened by Constantine, rejected a ban on priests marrying requested by Spanish clerics.
The practice of priestly celibacy began to spread in the Western Church in the early Middle Ages. In the early 11th century Pope Benedict VIII responded to the decline in priestly morality by issuing a rule prohibiting the children of priests from inheriting property. A few decades later Pope Gregory VII issued a decree against clerical marriages."
https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/696
To be fair, there is theological argument to ban marriage of Catholic priests if you read the entirety of the link, but who are we kidding that it’s about morality.