The movie Chocolat has one of the most poignant images from the war between desire and denial.

God save celibacy

The movie Chocolat has one of the most poignant images from the war between desire and denial. Towards the end, the deeply religious and fiercely celibate mayor is caught rolling in Juliette Binoche's hand-rolled chocolates, having lost his stubborn battle against dark, sweet seduction; giving up celibacy in a midnight orgy of the taste buds.

Every contract sucks. Bigger it is, the worse. And celibacy is far too big a contract to be hushed up and sold as a beautiful thing.

From immaculate seminaries in Dublin to stony chapels of Frankfurt, as scores of children come out to accuse priests of groping them, Vatican's massive public relations factory is meekly uttering, "Don't blame celibacy, it is a gift to god."

Meanwhile, thousands of devout Hindus are discovering to their horror that they have been merrily lending voice to the hymen-al hymns of Delhi's Sex Baba and Bangalore's Swami Nityananda -- two notable signatories of the celibacy contract.

In the Islamic world, cover-ups are easier to organise since religion is very often not separated from the state or judiciary. But sometimes, one in many thousand victims shows extraordinary courage to come out and complain. We hear about an acid attack on a 14-year-old who refused to have sex with a Karachi madrassa teacher, a Bosnian Imam groping an underage girl in a remote and poor mountain village, or a Bangladeshi imam in New York who gave teenage boys practical lessons on shaving off pubic hair.

Nevertheless, in public denial of holding a warm, loving human body on to one's own, our religions show a rare, enthusiastic unity. Love god, you don't need a condom.

Brahmacharya for priests exists in different forms in every organised religion, if not in doctrine but as discipline.
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Implicit is the notion that god is outside oneself; that sexual love is small, limiting, distracting. Radical spiritual thinkers have cautioned us against denial. Osho had challenged it by teaching people to look at lovemaking as meditation. And Jiddu Krishnamurthy sounds fatidic in the context of church scandals and sex swamis: "What happens when you deal with it by suppressing it completely -- the ideal of Brahmacharya, and so on? It is still there. You resent anybody who talks about a woman, and you think that you can succeed in completely suppressing the sexual urge in yourself and solve your problem that way; but you are haunted by it."

A priest builds his career, derives power from this dangerous oath of denial. It is like being feared and respected about town for carrying a boa constrictor in your pocket.

Will the boa stay there? When do you let it out?
Obviously, when nobody is watching. Or when the witness is unlikely to tell. Or even understand. And who is most unlikely to understand or tell, or most likely to be bullied into not telling?

A child, of course.
More than paedophilia, children are perhaps plain victims of the boa constrictor slithering out of the priest's pocket -- an otherwise gorgeous animal hungry and putrid from depravation in the closet.
It is time religions allow its ambassadors to love humans and make love. A cop looks real bad stealing.

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