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Priests and other religious leaders who are pedophiles choose the job for the access it provides. They are goal orientated and the goal is children who are vulnerable and malleable, usable.

[smh.com.au]

mzbehavin 8 Mar 6
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Parasites go where the food is and they deserve the same fate.

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I would agree that simplistically speaking, sexual frustration leads to furtively seeking relief and that would involve typically the desires you have ... if those are ordinary heterosexual desires then we'd expect to see lots of grown women seduced by these priests, and some of those relationships would be non-consensual.

So I don't know if it's just that those sorts of assignations are not being exposed, or if the pedophilia is just way more common.

My working theory is that the priesthood attracts pedophiles both because of the supply of victims it promises but also often because initially the person taking those vows is running from their impulses. After all, Catholicism famously is all about self-loathing and guilt, right? So in a misguided attempt to take themselves out of the game, they seek the cloistered life that's immersed in holy and approved thoughts. And all it ends up doing is leaving them alone with the thoughts they already have and can't escape.

From there, they find themselves in a dysfunctional organization that's systemically evolved to allow priests to victimize children (and possibly other groups that we just don't know about yet). This provides them with opportunity and rationalization for same. Some subset of them are sociopaths and get off on the violence and the power trip, some of them just can't stop for other reasons but hate themselves for it, but the system tells them it's normal, and okay.

I would guess we see more victimization of children because non-pedophiles tend to take themselves out of the game by not taking vows in the first place, or renouncing them for some consensual love interest they have found. Pedophilia alone is inherently non-consensual and in that situation alone the priesthood is the solution to the desire, not the impediment to it.

Whichever is true in a particular case, of course, it's always an appalling harm that's inexcusable. I just would not assume that 100% of pedophile priests are remorseless sociopaths who calculatedly enter the priesthood solely because it's a sexual playground for them, and I agree that celibacy in and of itself doesn't turn people into pedophiles. It just selects indirectly for them.

@PalacinkyPDX Perhaps there are literally as many and the press attention has just been disproportionately on the Catholic Church. If so, then it likely has more to do with the position of power, the willingness of people to surrender their agency to the deity and its representatives, and the resulting abuse of power, than with celibacy. Still, it seems intuitive that celibacy can't help matters. Nor can the generally larger, wealthier and more arrogant Catholic hierarchy help matters.

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