I WAS GOING TO COMMENT on Mary Eberstadt’s piece on the Catholic Church’s sex-abuse scandasl in The Weekly Standard but I notice that Amy Welborn has said what I was going to say already:

She reflexively dismisses any critiques of mandatory celibacy as having any import, when it does on a number of levels: mandatory celibacy discouraging heterosexual men from entering the priesthood, thereby narrowing the pool of candidates, shaping the identity of the priesthood in a certain direction, which then works to discourage even more men from entering because they feel uncomfortable. Save your breathe – I know it shouldn’t have this effect, but do you know what? In reality It does. Dispense with mandatory celibacy and sure, you’d have a whole set of new problems which others have exhaustively documented, but you would also have a priesthood that looked and felt very different from what it does now.

Read the rest of her post. It’s very thoughtful, and better than I would have done anyway.