With the admission of a Florida bishop that he had sexually abused five boys earlier in his career, the persistent clergy sex abuse scandal has broken into the ranks of U.S. bishops, prompting a prominent expert on celibacy to say it is only a matter of time before Catholics demand reform in the clerical system.
A.W. Richard Sipe, author of Sex, Priests and Power: Anatomy of a Crisis, called the June 2 resignation of Bishop J. Keith Symons of Palm Beach, Fla., after an accuser came forward, "another crack in the Vatican wall."
Sipe, a psychiatrist, has written that the problem of pedophilia is found not only among priests, who have been the principal targets of ...