Parenting & Family Quote by Hans Kung

Kung aims a scalpel at an institution that prefers managing scandal to revising policy. The conditional stacking - "if priests were allowed", "if this would be an optional thing", "if he could have wife and children" - reads like a legal brief, but the target is cultural: mandatory celibacy as a system that creates secrecy, loneliness, and a warped erotic economy inside a closed male hierarchy. The sentence is structured to feel painfully reasonable, almost boring, which is precisely the point. He’s trying to make a reformist argument sound like common sense, not revolution.

The subtext, though, is more combustible. Kung isn’t claiming celibacy causes pedophilia in some direct mechanistic way; he’s rejecting the Church’s preferred framing that abuse is merely the product of a few "bad apples". By invoking "temptation" and "sexual impulses", he uses the Church’s own moral vocabulary, but he redirects it from individual sin to institutional design. The phrase "with minors" lands like a moral cliff edge, forcing readers to confront how catastrophic the stakes are when policy meets human psychology.

Context matters: Kung spent decades as Catholicism’s most famous insider-critic, arguing that authority without accountability corrodes the Church’s credibility. Spoken against the backdrop of abuse revelations and episcopal cover-ups, the quote functions as a pressure point: it suggests celibacy isn’t only a spiritual discipline but also a governance tool - one that can help produce a culture of repression and, by extension, concealment. It’s provocation with a pastoral aim: not to excuse perpetrators, but to indict the conditions that make predation easier to hide.