I’m referring to the accusations being made that you allowed a priest, Fr. Peter Hullermann, who had been identified as a pedophile in the diocese of Essen back in 1980, to come to your diocese in Munich, and after a brief period of therapy, he was permitted to take up his ministry without any enforced restrictions about staying away from kids.

And now the New York Times has made known that Dr. Werner Huth, the psychiatrist who treated (or tried to treat) Fr. Hullermann, reported to the Munich diocesan authorities at the time that Fr. Hullermann had refused to engage in one-on-one therapy and that he was “neither invested nor motivated” in his therapy.  Dr. Huth recommended to your diocese that Fr. Hullermann could be readmitted to priestly ministry only under the strictest conditions – namely, “that he stay away from children, not drink alcohol, and be accompanied and supervised at all times by another priest.”

Well, Fr. Hullerman was soon assigned a parish post, and Dr. Huth has stated that these conditions were “enforced only intermittently.”  It must have been very intermittently, since Hullermann was convicted in 1986 of sexually abusing minors and distributing pornographic materials.

The Vicar General for your diocese at the time has covered for you and said that you did not know that Hullermann was assigned to a parish. Also, Dr. Huth cannot prove that his stern warnings that “For God’s sake, he desperately has to be kept away from working with children,” were ever communicated to you.

Even if you can prove that you knew nothing about the reports of the psychiatrist or of the assignment of Fr. Hullermann, you cannot avoid the question that comes thundering into the mind and onto the lips of anyone reading about this:  WHY DIDN’T YOU?!  HOW COULD YOU NOT HAVE?

Your Holiness, excuse my bluntness: You are sailing down that well-known creek without a paddle.  You need to do something to clear your name and to reinstate the confidence of the Catholic church (that is, the Catholic people) in your leadership.

The legal, perhaps moral, solution would be for you to resign, as it would have been for the bishops mentioned by the Massachusetts Attorney General’s 2003 “Report on the Sexual Abuse of Children in the Boston Archdiocese.”  These were the bishops who cooperated with Cardinal Law in the cover up of pedophile priests.  All of them went on to be promoted to head other dioceses, while Law himself was removed and promoted to a plush post in the Vatican. (The Boston Bishops I’m talking about are: Thomas  Daily, Robert Banks, Alfred Hughes, William Murphy, and John McCormack.)  None of these men were really held responsible by Pope John Paul II or by you.  So we can’t really expect you to hold yourself responsible.

Therefore I’m suggesting that you can all keep your jobs and still show the Catholic people that you are serious about reforming the church and the all-male clerical caste-system that, according to many and most recently Hans Küng, is at the root of the deception and the sexual abuse.

All you have to do is drop obligatory celibacy for the priesthood and admit women to the priesthood!

Both of these moves are theologically possible, as the majority of your Roman Catholic theologians and scripture scholars will explain to you.  And, the move would enable you to have a sufficient number of priests around the world to enable the Catholic people to keep their “Sunday obligation” of going to Mass. (Right now, because you make celibacy more important than the Eucharist, there aren’t enough priests.)

So that’s the deal:  You and the offending bishops can keep your jobs, and regain the respect of your people – simply by admitting men and women to the priesthood without requiring them to deprive themselves of the intimacy of sexual love.

As easy as that!  How about it?

I have a definitely biased reaction to that statement.  I’m a former priest, who had to leave the clerical club because I wanted to also find God in human love (which means I didn’t want to sleep alone).  If I could have stayed, there would have been one less reason to rent a priest from abroad.

That’s what the Catholic Church in the US is presently doing — it’s renting — really, stealing — priests from other countries who need priests even more than the US RC Church does, especially Africa and Asia.  In the US (and Europe), the ratio of priest to Catholic laity is 1 to 1,300. In  Sub-Saharan Africa, it’s  1-4,786; in Southeast Asia: 1-5,322.

Many of this foreign sacerdotal acquisitions are doing a fine job of shepherding a flock whose customs they often don’t understand and whose language they often speak with heavy, hard-to-follow accents.  Many of them aren’t.  Whether they are or aren’t, it’s a shame that they cannot stay at home and tend their own flocks.  It’s a shame that so many parish-flocks throughout America are without shepherds.

It doesn’t have to be this way.  There’s a simple solution, and it’s staring the Vatican and American bishops right in the face:  Ordain married men and women.  As any Catholic theologian who doesn’t work for the Vatican or the Bishops’ Conference will tell you, there’s no theological reason why that can’t happen.  The only obstacle right now is, literally, “a man-made law” — that is, men huddled around one of the the last surviving real monarchies in the world — a monarchy that wants to hang on to its patriarchal power.

I say all this not from outside the Catholic Church, but from inside.  I love this church.  And it’s killing me to see how man-made rules are killing it.