Since taking on the job Pope Francis has question many rules about the way His church conducts business and the focus of the church. Now, the reports circulating claim that the new pope is thinking about changing the "priests should abstain from sex" rule.
Ibtimes.co.uk reported that "[Pope] Francis's views on celibacy may be based on his own personal experiences. He has spoken about his early years in a seminary when he was 'dazzled by a girl I met at an uncle's wedding.'"
"I was surprised by her beauty, her intellectual brilliance ... and, well, I was bowled over for quite a while. I kept thinking and thinking about her. When I returned to the seminary after the wedding, I could not pray for over a week because when I tried to do so, the girl appeared in my head. I had to rethink what I was doing," was the Pope's direct quote in the Spanish language book entitled "Sobre el Cielo y la Tierra" (On the Heavens and the Earth), according to intimes.co.uk.
The most shocking part about all of this is Pope Francis's openness to talk about this subject, considering is predecessors were pretty clear in their belief that celibacy was the only way to go.
However, some religious critics, according to medicaldaily.com blame "the monastic celibacy rule for enforcing an unrealistic purity, suggesting that priests and nuns inevitably suffer psychologically from trying to remain abstinent," reported medicaldaily.com
Frank Bruni of the New York Times called the celibacy rule "a bad idea with painful consequences," which contributes to a priest shortage by excluding many potential candidates, and "falsely [promises] some men a refuge from sexual desires that worry them."
Whichever way this ends up going, Pope Francis has said that "when something like this happens to a seminarian, I help him go in peace to be a good Christian and not a bad pries ... In the Western Church to which I belong, priests cannot be married as in the Byzantine, Ukrainian, Russian or Greek Catholic Churches. In those Churches, the priests can be married, but the bishops have to be celibate. They are very good priests," according to Inquisitr.
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