Well, for most of my life, I have been disgusted with the administration of the Catholic Church. John XXIII (1958-1963) is the only recent pope I can think of, who was truly exemplary. Most of the time, I have thought of the upper structure of the Catholic Church as a "necessary evil," but certainly not what it should be. My Sacramento diocese had a wonderful bishop from 1979-1993, and an excellent auxiliary bishop 1997-2006, so we've had it pretty good.

The neighboring diocese, Santa Rosa, had a bishop who was horribly mismanaging church money while having an affair with a priest and covering up sexual abuse. You can imagine that the experience of Catholics in that diocese was quite different from mine, although even that diocese had parishes that were healthy.

As I've said before, local parishes are quite autonomous. If a group of lay people get together and insist on having a healthy parish, they can usually accomplish it - even though the diocesan structure may be corrupt, and even though Rome has often been just as corrupt.
Religious faith rests within individuals, never within structures. The structure can codify and publish things, but it never be the home of faith.

Yes, I've known a few priests who have unrealistic ideas about sex, but most are far more realistic than a lot of lay men (religious and nonreligious) that I've met. If they're halfway decent people and halfway decent priests, they've heard it all; and they've come to a broader understanding that a lot of lay men have [personally, I think that most women have a far more realistic view of sex than most men have, but that's a matter for another thread].

I can't say I've ever known a priest who'd think that sex with a woman would be a worse sin than sex with a man or with a child. There is much written in official Catholic Church documents about the holiness of sex between a man and wife - and nothing approving any sort of sex outside of marriage. Catholic taboos against sex between men are strong enough that the Catholic Church can rightly be called "homophobic" as an institution. And yes, there are strong Catholic taboos against sex with children. Yeah, I'm sure that molesting priests have all sorts of strange thinking that rationalizes their conduct, and I'm sure that some may think they're not breaking their vows of celibacy - but you have to realize that child molesters are sexual perverts, and it follows that their thinking is going to be perverted.

We humans are very good at rationalizing whatever it is that we want to do. I think that most people who do wrong, are very convinced that they're doing right. Sometimes I think we're less sure of ourselves when what we're doing actually is the right thing to do. Maybe that's when we rationalize something, we really work hard at constructing that rationalization and destroying our self-doubt. Maybe that's why the worst of the bishops are so sure of themselves. Religion can be the ultimate tool of rationalization - if we believe we have God on our side, how can we be wrong? And when that rationalization is institutionalized, the results can be deadly - as we have seen, time and time again. And that's why I have little respect for the institutional structure of the Catholic Church.

-Joe-