Talking celibacy

The Future of Catholic Celibacy May Be in Doubt - Newsweek.com

This article on the cultural unpopularity of clerical celibacy in Africa was of interest.

There have also been some recent articles (including one at Newsweek) arguing that if you look at child abuse overall, you can't really say that celibacy is at the heart of the Catholic Church's problem. The suggestion that, as a lot of abuse cases involve teenage boys, it is really a "homosexual problem" has also been raised. I can't find his source, but CL at Catallaxy claims:

Speaking clinically, 75+ percent of abuse cases are not paedophilia but crimes of a homosexual nature involving clerics and boys in upper adolescence.

[UPDATE: I see a Cardinal is copping a lot of criticism for making the homosexual link too.]

Yet surely the issue of who the victims are is heavily influenced by availability and (I guess) an older male having an expectation that teenage boys are more likely to enjoy a sexual experience of any kind than a teenage girl (and hence be more likely to keep it a secret). To suggest it's all about gay clergy seems somewhat akin to arguing that opportunistic sex in prisons is a homosexual problem.

[UPDATE: on the other hand, it would seem logical that the priesthood could have attracted young men who were embarrassed about homosexual attraction and hoped to avoid it by promising celibacy. So it would not be surprising if the priesthood had proportionally more than your average number of homosexually inclined men in it, and no doubt some of them have been caught up in sex abuse cases. On the third hand, given that a gay priest who had personally reconciled himself to only ever wanting occasional flings is almost certainly going to find it easier to find a sexual outlet anonymously than a heterosexual priest, maybe such gay priests are less likely to resort to abuse of power for sexual release! But overall, maybe it's all swings and roundabouts (sorry but that probably counts as an unintended poor taste pun) and the rate of approaches to male teens may be the same between self identifying gay and straight priests.]

There is some value, however, in keeping in mind the actual rates of sexual abuse compared to society in general. On the other hand, it is also undeniably the case that it is very scandalous when purported moral leaders fail in this way.

I still consider as a matter of common sense that an adult male with his one and only wife (bearing in mind that a very high proportion of sexual abuse cases are within families by stepfathers) is more likely to have a normalised attitude towards sex which would make sexual abuse much less likely.

As I have argued before, the Eastern Churches position as to celibacy would seem to be a very sensible reform of the Catholic Church. Your average local priest can have his family and give up career progress, so to speak. Those priests for whom celibacy works can keep it and gain the advantage of career progression too.