President Rodrigo Duterte on Sunday said Catholic priests should be allowed to marry, even with the same sex, as a way to stop sexual abuse of children by members of the clergy.
In a profanity-laden statement, the President said the Vatican summit on clerical sexual abuse just proved that there was truth to his attacks against priests and bishops.
“There are thousands of abuses that were not corrected by the Church,” he said in a speech in Cebu City on Sunday evening.
“For me, it would be better to allow priests to marry,” the President said.
Retaliation
“If the priest is gay, then he should still be allowed to engage in same-sex marriage. That’s the solution to the problem,” he said.
In a Mass to end the Vatican summit on Sunday, Pope Francis challenged bishops to an “all-out battle” against clerical sexual abuse, saying the Church needed to take “every necessary measure” to end the problem.
The President said he would have remained mum about the problem, especially since he was in Cebu — the biggest archdiocese in the country and the cradle of Christianity in the Far East — but he wanted to get back at priests who kept on criticizing his bloody war on drugs.
“I’m sorry. I don’t want to fight with them. But they were the first to attack me,” he said.
But allowing priests to marry is not the solution to the problem of sexual misconduct in the Church, according to the public affairs committee the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines (CBCP).
Deviant behavior
“It’s, unfortunately, not the solution. The issue is not merely about homosexuality,” said Fr. Jerome Secillano, executive secretary of the CBCP’s public affairs committee.
“It is about having sexual deviant personality that cannot be cured simply by allowing the perpetrators to marry,” Secillano said.
“Even if we speak of ‘macho’ priests who are engaged in ‘consensual affairs,’ marriage may not even guarantee faithfulness in the relationship,” he said.
Secillano said the solution offered by the President merely trivialized what was an otherwise complex problem. —With a report from Ador Vincent Mayol