HOLY CRAP!
Sombrero tip to Sabina (News of the Restless) who mentioned this in an unrelated story on a Venezuelan bishop of dubious spiritual reputation.
… [Saturday], in the Mexican daily, La Jornada, there appeared declarations from Leopoldo González González the Secretary-General of the Conference of Mexican Bishops, defending the parish priest of [X]alapa [Veracruz State], Rafael Muñiz López, who is accused of being part of a distribution network for kiddie porn on the Internet. So, what did Mr. Leopoldo González González say to the journalists? Nothing less than this: He assured that such cases “make priests seem more human” to their parishes, causing us to “appreciate” them more, and he very firmly reiterated, “On the contrary, the more human they seem, the more we appreciate them.”
The Xalapa cleric, and his brother, were two of the eight men arrested earlier this week on charges of distributing child pornography over the internet, a crime that had been not well defined in the Mexican legal code. Congress has sent to the President a bill that includes tougher penalties for pedophilia, the only controversial provision being a clause that would prohibit convicted pedophiles of working as clergy.
The Mex Files 
…thereby robbing them of one avenue of access to their prey.
I’m just amazed that there could be any “controversy” about that. Where could it come from, other than the fact that the “cloth” has for centuries served to cover a multitude of sins against one’s fellow man (and woman, and especially, child)?
Or, to put it another way: Are they afraid that if they close the clergy to pedophiles and other sexual miscreants, they will lose their most reliable source of priests?
Attempts by the state to dictate the Church’s internal regulations have been controversial in Mexico since the 1750s. During the height of official anti-clericalism in the 1920s (which led to a guerrilla war and killed 80,000 people), one state passed a law that bachelors couldn’t be clergymen.