Pope Benedict XVI has been accused of covering up a priest who may have molested hundreds of school children. While many have a good idea of how to punish the perpetrators of these acts, few are providing a coherent explanation for their continued occurrence.

When sex-abuse scandals reach ascendancy in media, people all over the world clamor for justice, accountability, and punishment. Certainly, these goals ought to be sought to the full extent of the law. Furthermore, those allowing for or encouraging the cover-up of such abuses should be tried for obstruction of justice. However, this clamor often includes essentially ad hoc explanations for such disturbing behavior.

In order to be ordained as a Catholic priest, one must take a vow of celibacy, pledging full and unwavering commitment to Jesus Christ and avoiding sexual relations of any kind. This, as it was often explained to me throughout my childhood, represents a sort of marriage between the priest and Jesus.

If priests were simply allowed to marry, so the argument goes, then the Church wouldn’t have this pedophile problem. Humans, after all, are sexual beings, and men in particular are thought to have especially strong sexual desires. And because this problem is not at all prevalent among nuns, who likewise must take a vow of celibacy, it seems to bear some amount evidence.

However, this argument assumes two things about the nature of male sexuality. First, it assumes that men are more sexual than women. It is often backed up with some sort of biological claim that men are inherently more sexual than women, but many also bring in the role of social norms of masculine aggression and sexual dominance.

Second, it assumes that these functional needs for sexual pleasure are so powerful that they drive many priests to rape and molest children. These are not primarily children of both sexes, but mainly boys.

Logically, this stretch is too much. It would be remiss of us to accept these claims. They abdicate the priest of responsibility, instead attributing blame to the psychologically uncontrollable drives of men forced into asexuality. They do not explain why many celibate men do not molest boys, nor do they explain why men would choose same-sex children to molest.

More importantly, such claims are counterproductive for the execution of both justice and accountability. If priests are somehow less responsible for their actions because of innate natural or sociological forces, then they are acting less rationally and are therefore less accountable.

These actions do not originate in a psychologically fractured consciousness or innate human nature. If we wish to sufficiently address what is clearly a structural and individual problem within the Church, we have to cast our net elsewhere.

In the Catholic church, a priest has enormous power over his community – particularly over the impressionable minds of children. He distinguishes between good and evil. He alone is capable of communicating your sins to God. Likewise, he alone has the power to grant God’s forgiveness. He tells you how to get to heaven and how to avoid hell. At mass, he performs the miracle of transubstantiation – when the bread and wine literally become the body and blood of Christ. In the classrooms of many dioceses, he or his subordinates teach you everything except sex education.

Priests understand the power they have over their “flock” very well, and so they act on it. They act deliberately and premeditatedly, and need to be held personally accountable. But until the Church examines the particular contexts in which these crimes are committed and the structurally encouraged disparities between priests and students, the Church will likely continue to be plagued by scandals.