“I always felt he picked religion over me.”
NATHAN HALBACH,

on his father, a Roman Catholic priest.

This shouldn’t even be an issue in religion. It’s not one that ever plagued polytheistic cultures. Religion should unite people, not tear them apart, bring happiness and joy, not jealousy and sorrow and a sense of abandonment.

I’ll never understand the justification for this when you consider the fact that Jesus’ followers were married (1 Cor 9:5). I have to say, going back to S.M. Stirling’s Emberverse here for a moment, I am tickled at Rudi’s thoughts on Father Ignatius’ priestly vows and attitudes towards sex, and Christian attitudes in general. He has a proper Pagan attitude here, one probably shared by all our ancestors. The Hellenes, for example, understood that virginity was a phase, not a permanent state. I doubt they were alone in this.

When you consider all the ill that comes out of the priestly vows – the deprivation of sex and the molestation of young boys, the illicit affairs spoken of in this New York Times article, A Mother, a Sick Son and His Father, the Priest, and the efforts the Church goes to in order to cover up such infelicities, you have to wonder about its efficacy.

And personally, I don’t want somebody who doesn’t have a wife, or children, or a family, counseling me on problems with my own. I don’t know if anyone saw Clint Eastwood’s Gran Torino (2008), but his response to the young priest was hilarious. Here is this grizzled old veteran who has seen and been through so much, and this young, inexperienced priest trying to counsel him on the basis of what? No experience at all. He’s probably in worse standing than a young second lieutenant fresh out of West Point.

I’m not saying the Icelandic model is better, where the chief assumes the roles and responsibilities of the old Norwegian chieftains on top of their religious responsibilities, but let’s at the very least let priests live a normal life, with family and children and all the things a man should naturally yearn for. Living as an ascetic, I think, requires seclusion, a hilltop in the desert away from all the temptations of life …there is a reason, I think, that ascetics went off into the wilderness (in the old Jewish or Christian tradition since we’re talking about Catholics here). Maybe that’s a lesson that can be learned from.

I feel sorry for Nathan Halbach. His father did choose “God” over him. And he shouldn’t have had to make that choice.