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DOES CHINA NEED THIS?

The rumblings from India and (especially) Africa, where the Catholic Church is seeing its greatest growth, are growing louder. The news from these places exacerbates our shock and concern: The sexual abuse of children by clergy is now coupled with widespread reports of rapes of nuns -- young women recruited from India's and Africa's poorest families.

Sex crimes against women by Catholic clergy may give more credence to ongoing arguments against the celibate priesthood. Daniel Maguire, a now-married former priest and a professor of religious ethics at Marquette University, has wisely observed that "enforced celibacy that is not job-related is such an invitation to pathology."

In Africa, however, where Catholic priests often have open heterosexual contact, the church's ranks are hefty with converts only a few generations removed from the illiterate, poor, uneducated innocents that missionaries first discovered living in tribal communities. Totally unaware of concepts like gender equity or criminal punishment for sexual assault, many of those locals came to a church that offered food, medical care and education in exchange for religious conversion. If there were crimes also committed around them, congregants paid for their survival with their silence.

The crisis of religious abuse in Africa and India was brought to Rome's attention in 1998 when a four-page paper titled "The Problem of the Sexual Abuse of African Religious in Africa and Rome" was presented by Sister Marie McDonald, mother superior of the Missionaries of Our Lady of Africa. A March 2001 National Catholic Reporter article detailed McDonald's claims, which included accounts of sexual abuse by priests and bishops.

McDonald quoted a vicar general in one African diocese who talked "quite openly" in Rome in 1996 about celibacy in Africa, saying, "Celibacy in the African context means a priest does not get married, but does not mean he does not have children."