Is it not difficult to imagine that relations between a layperson and a priest might be consensual, given the priest's ontological superiority and privilege within this particular religious world?
Scholar of religion Mark Jordan refers to Catholicism as an “empire of closets.” Priests have been sexually active throughout the modern era (and before), with children and adolescents, with nuns, with seminarians, and with each other, depending on the nature of individual priests' needs and inclinations; these sexual activities have taken place in churches, rectories, convents, and schools, in the missions, in orphanages, in mother and baby homes, and in private residences, often owned by priests’ families basically everywhere.
Scholar of religion Mark Jordan refers to Catholicism as an “empire of closets.” Priests have been sexually active throughout the modern era (and before), with children and adolescents, with nuns, with seminarians, and with each other, depending on the nature of individual priests' needs and inclinations; these sexual activities have taken place in churches, rectories, convents, and schools, in the missions, in orphanages, in mother and baby homes, and in private residences, often owned by priests’ families basically everywhere.
teachings of the Bible are so muddled and self-contradictory that it was possible for Christians to happily burn heretics alive for five long centuries. It was even possible for the most venerated patriarchs of the Church, like St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, to conclude that heretics should be tortured (Augustine) or killed outright (Aquinas). Martin Luther and John Calvin advocated the wholesale murder of heretics, apostates, Jews, and witches. - Sam Harris, "Letter To A Christian Nation"
