Catholic Bishops Slam HBO 'Celibacy' Documentary

A new documentary to be broadcast on HBO on June 28 raises provocative questions about the role of clerical celibacy in the Catholic sexual abuse crisis. It is drawing fire from outraged Catholic bishops who say the film uses a "stacked-deck approach" to "assault" the church's sexual ethos.

In an interview from his home in England, the filmmaker, Antony Thomas, said his interest in celibacy was spurred by a desire to go beyond the daily media coverage of the church's abuse scandal.

"Like a lot of people, I was seeing the reports of priest abuse," he said. "But no one was asking the `why' questions. It seemed to me there was a connection between celibacy and the reports we were seeing, and yet no one was asking `Why celibacy?' `Why practice it?' `Who benefits from it?"'

The film, "Celibacy," opens with a comparative look at the practice outside the Roman Catholic Church. Interviews with Hindu priests, laymen and Buddhists who slough off worldly desires show how the renunciation of sexual activity is a potent force in many religious traditions.

However, the film's narrator says, abstinence is not specifically mandated for the holy men and women of these traditions.

"No other religious denomination imposes these demands on its priesthood. And today, the Catholic Church is in crisis," the film intones.

Citing the number of priests and nuns who have left their vocations since the 1960s and the "apparent epidemic of child abuse by the clergy" as evidence of that crisis, the film turns to psychiatrists and sexual therapists for an explanation of its roots.

"The drive or the propensity to reproduce is the most powerful biological process that ever existed on this planet. Sexuality, the sex drive, actually has more representations in the brain than even consumption of food," says Michael Persinger, a professor of psychology at Canada's Laurentian University, in the film.

Why, then, would the Catholic Church mandate a policy that denied this drive?

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