Vatican City — The Vatican issued new psychological screening guidelines for seminarians Thursday - the latest effort by the Roman Catholic Church to be more selective about its priesthood candidates following a series of pedophile scandals.
The church said it issued the new guidelines to help church leaders weed out candidates with "psychopathic disturbances." Sex abuse scandals by pedophile priests have rocked the church, triggering lawsuits that cost hundreds of millions of dollars in settlements.
"(The guidelines) became ever more urgent because of the sexual scandals," Monsignor Jean-Louis Brugues told reporters. He stressed, however, that psychological testing was used in some seminaries as far back as the 1960s - or at least a decade before the pedophile scandals exploded in public.
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cthulhu_4_president 9 years, 5 months ago
This is as hilarious as it is ridiculous. So the church is only hiring eunichs now? Did the church ever bother to find out if these "psychopathic disturbances" emerged in their priests after years of sexual frustration and repression of natural human instincts, and so a screening process at the hiring stage may not be exactly accurate? It's easy to see where this prudishness comes from. Barely half a century ago if you didn't want kids, then you simply had to not have sex, and without protection like condoms recreational sex was a risky, disease ridden, activity in the Victorian era. The priests were indeed a model of how to live a clean, childless, life and people who followed their example were also clean and childless. It's a miracle! But then toward the end of the 20th century, sex became alot safer as long as the right steps were taken. Now, everyone is doing it EXCEPT the priests. It's easy to see how they could go nuts surrounded by everybody getting it on! It's equally easy to see why this dogmatic belief and the accompanying vow of chastity is not needed, and is in fact harmful to the mental health of the priest, and the safety of the child.
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