Those Rotten Apples

A weekly commentary by CBS News Correspondent Andy Rooney:

I hope I can say this without getting Catholics mad at me. You don't have to be Catholic to feel bad about what's happening in the Catholic Church. I don't think Baptists, Presbyterians, Episcopalians - or even atheists - are taking any pleasure from it. No one's gloating.

At first the story seemed to be about just one bad apple in Boston who had sexually abused a lot of young boys. Then, it slowly became clear, one story after another, that the problem was bigger than that, that it exists almost everywhere there are Catholic Churches. Church choirs were a hunting ground for pedophile priests.

Catholics are going to continue to be loyal Catholics but surveys show that what they can't forgive is that their Church officials knew and covered it up - sometimes with payments of millions of dollars. Those were dollars given the church one at a time on Sunday collection plates.

The pledge of celibacy demanded of priests assumes that sexual desire can be suppressed by resolve. The fact is, sex isn't something a person can decide not to have or promise not to have and then never have it. They might as well have ordered church bells not to ring when struck.

Religions have always been concerned with sex in strange ways. Circumcision is an arcane rite in some religions that I never understood.

We're all sinners according to the Catholic Church. Jesus and the woman known as "the Virgin Mary" are the only two people considered to be free of Original Sin. I don't know whether original sin had anything to do with sex or not.

One of the biggest changes that ever took place affecting our lives was when people found ways to have sex without having babies. The Catholic Church has never accepted artificial birth control, never accepted the idea that sex was okay to have just for pleasure. Good Catholics either have to ignore their church or have a lot of babies.

The saddest result of this sad episode in Catholic Church history is what it does to all the good Catholic priests. That's most of them. No one is going to look at a priest again for a long while without thinking to himself: "Does he do it?" I read that many of them have stopped wearing their collars for this reason.

There are so many Catholic priests doing good work that this is the real tragedy. The church was already having trouble getting them. Who's going to want to be a priest now? It isn't a job they can inherit.

A lot of doctors have fathers and sons who are doctors. The Pope can never have a son who gets to be Pope.

It seems as though the Catholic Church should change its rules - let priests marry and let women be priests. There's talk about it but it probably won't happen because if it did, the Church would be admitting it's been wrong for hundreds of years and if it’s been wrong about that, it might be wrong about some other things.