Credibility Requires Accountability: Monitoring Priests’ Cellphones | Hacker News Reader

Credibility Requires Accountability: Monitoring Priests’ Cellphones

thepublicdiscourse.com

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"Celibacy is thus a highly credible signal about the priest’s own beliefs, because giving up sex—whether straight or gay—is sufficiently difficult that only those who honestly believe in the prospect of salvation or damnation will do so."

I don't follow the logic of this sentence. Celibacy is not required for salvation.

The sentence might be a bit hard to parse but that's not what it's saying.

It's saying that someone who takes the vow of celibacy has strong religious beliefs, which is a statement that could be argued separately.

Thank you.

wat? It might be possible to take this article seriously if it were written 20 years ago. In 2021, knowing that priests are having sex with other consenting adults is actually beneficial for the Church's image.

Everyone's got their own path and intellectual needs, but there are serious reasons why religiousness is at an all time low. I'm sure Christianity and Catholicism were fantastically positive revolutionary movements when they first came about. But over time, every structure ossifies and ends up attracting those who focus on the power and prescriptivism rather than the enlightenment.

At this point bodycams might be more appropriate.

If they are worried about their priests having children, why don't they use technology? Separate the fertility problem from sexual desire and the need for intimacy. A young priest could have a vasectomy before taking over his own church. Then he could establish a healthy relationship without having to hide his needs.

> A young priest could have a vasectomy before taking over his own church

The article, at least at the beginning since I haven't finished reading it yet, is referring to Catholic priests. The Catholic Church teaches that contraception is immoral as it frustrates our natural sexual powers, thus your position would never be able to be adopted in the Catholic Church.

> Then he could establish a healthy relationship without having to hide his needs.

In the western rites a priest takes a vow of celibacy, unless this discipline was reverted this wouldn't offer a solution because it would be an illicit relationship, thus not a "healthy" one. And even if the discipline in the western church changes to allow married men to become ordained to the priesthood my aforementioned point would still prevent what you've proposed.

“The Catholic Church teaches that contraception is immoral as it frustrates our natural sexual powers, thus your position would never be able to be adopted in the Catholic Church.”

I never get this stance. They are against abortion, but at the same time against sex ed or contraception.

It makes no sense. They are setting people up for failure.

> They are against abortion, but at the same time against sex ed or contraception.

I assume you believe either contraception or abortion are moral (or both, I suppose)? I think that if you look at it from their point of view for a moment it makes more sense, setting aside biases. Abortion is believed to be wrong because it's the unjust killing of an innocent human being. Contraception is wrong because it frustrates our natural sexual faculties which are ordered towards the marital act (procreation). These don't appear to be contradictory stances. If abortion and contraception are both immoral then you'd logically have to be against both. You appear to be looking at it from a utilitarian point of view, not assessing the actual moral claims. If something is immoral you should oppose it even if some bad consequences may occur.

Similarly, I'd say that the Catholic Church isn't opposed to "sex ed" unless "sex ed" means "educating people how to sin". If you believe that contraception is immoral its perfectly logical to oppose teaching people how to sin with it, same way anyone would oppose classes teaching kids how to lie to their parents well.

> They are setting people up for failure

I'd like your input on this since it is probably the main issue I can sense: is a hard moral standard "setting someone up for failure" inherently? Back to the subject of lying I used as an illustration earlier, I'd say it's very hard to go through life without saying occasional lies but I'd never say it's setting people up for failure by telling them to not lie.

What are your thoughts? Do you think your main concern is with standards not making sense or is the issue rather that you simply don't agree with one or more of the standards themselves? I'm interested to hear your response!

I can see how one can be against abortion, contraception and sex ed. But I think this is just not a realistic stance. Teenagers that don’t know about how things work, still have sex and then children.

The Catholic Church has even major problems keeping their own priests celibate as the number of pregnancies and child abuse cases show. That should tell them something.

The whole thing reminds me of the war on drugs or prohibition before. It’s a moral stance that makes sense but it’s just not realistic and has shown repeatedly to not work and do great harm to society.

Considering all alternatives it seems to me that contraception is the least harmful and easy to implement measure. It has shown to be successful and is way better than abortion or teenage moms. I think it’s it irresponsible by the church to be against contraception.

There are a lot of other moral issues they should strict on first. For example they should examine their long time support of dictators like the nazis. They had a great opportunity to speak up back then but chose not to.

Kinda off topic but... "sex ed" used to be more "this is the biological process that occurs" (re sperm and egg and subsequent fetal growth) with sometimes vague descriptions of how the sperm got there, and sometimes including fetal development through birth. It could feasibly be renamed, since it was far less focused on sex itself and more on what might happen if the sex was "successful" (from a procreation standpoint).

Today it's literal cartoonish drawings of men fellating other men, written depictions of anal fisting, affirmations of acceptable lust, and vague warnings about how to prevent disease or "success" (see above).

Yeah, sure, I'm highlighting the extremes. However, it is undeniable that the ["Western"] strategy has shifted away from "what sex results in" to "ways to use sex for pleasure without consequence".

Failure is the goal. If you are constantly producing children you're producing workers for your fields to increase yields and even more important you're increasing the human resources that can be used, taxed, and tithed.

Outlawing most drugs makes sex one of the few legal pleasurable activities, especially before modern technological entertainment.

Making sure sex is limited to married families has an effect of keeping both parents invested in the children so they are raised to adulthood. Having your life tied to children at a young age has you focusing on providing a good life for your children so you don't want to risk your life revolting against those in power.

Those in power just pretended to follow the same rules as others.

Yes, it's true, but they can change their own rules. I'm sure there have always been sexual transgressions, my family left their church two generations ago because of a pedophile priest (Father Butch in Dauphin Manitoba). Search is cheap and getting cheaper, and their institution is being damaged by a policy that wants to defy gravity. The Catholic church is ancient, and no doubt resilient, but it has never had to contend with anything like the Internet.

> but they can change their own rules

In terms of the morality of contraception, they can't change their "rules" on it any more than they could change the "rule" against murder.

Priestly celibacy could be changed though I don't know how it would solve problems. Do you believe that a someone being able to become ordained after getting married would stop pedophiles? Maybe I don't understand what you're saying because I don't see how that would be the case. It could possibly lower the chance of them committing other sexual sins but on the topic of homosexual activity it wouldn't change a thing since there always condemned no matter who does it.

Any thoughts on that?

My concern is for the long-term survival of their institution. I see them as a critical, slow-moving part of our civilization. I don't understand how it works; I'm an individual, and they are an ancient religious institution.

Here is an example, the Catholics resisted eugenics when it was considered scientific and rational. If I had been involved in the debate at that time, I probably would have been on the eugenicists' side because that was the popular point of view. I would have been wrong. The Catholics provide a slow moral feedback loop.

My point about the pedophile is that they can't hide them now. The internet has changed the game. The Church worked even with its warts in the past because the Church hid them from view. But they don't have this power anymore. More and more families will leave as the warts are exposed. They will lose members and relevance.

So remove the pressure, remove the temptation before it happens. I believe the Catholics call this "an occasion of sin": Don't go into the hotel room drunk and horny with the prostitute so that you don't have a moral struggle while sitting on the bed beside her. A challenging problem is turned into an easy problem by avoiding it in the first place. If they are worried about the corruption that can happen from priests having families, make it so they can't have families but can still find a remedy for their basic needs. Make it easier for a priest to be a priest. The early Christian Church did not have the celibacy rule.

What's worse is other religious-like systems are antagonistic to the Catholic perspective. The Chinese Communist Party effectively owned Grindr for a time, and they could have built a social network map of the transgressing priests using their app. Then they could have leveraged these guys to do their bidding. It's hard to lead a flock while being blackmailed by another Sheppard.

> The Catholic Church teaches that contraception is immoral as it frustrates our natural sexual powers, thus your position would never be able to be adopted in the Catholic Church.

Technically, yes. The official stance of the Catholic Church is that contraception is immoral - solidified by Pope Paul VI's "Humanae Vitae" in 1968[0]. However, that part of the doctrine is extremely contentious (even at the time it was written) and ignored by most Catholics. The church held a commission on it a few years earlier and they reportedly voted 64 to 5 in favor on allowing artificial birth control[1].

Catholic pastors often get around it by framing contraception purely as a means of preventing STDs, so it technically isn't violating Paul VI's rules against interrupting procreation. Some find more creative ways to justify it and go so far as to promote its use in responsible family planning. Pope Francis seems to tacitly endorse those creative interpretations.

I doubt it would be too much of a stretch for pastors - especially those who are already breaking their vows of celibacy - to use creative interpretations to endorse the use of contraception for themselves and each other.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humanae_vitae

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pontifical_Commission_on_Birth...

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