Many Protestants don't understand the Catholic priest's vow of celibacy. Those whose lives are destroyed by it are silent, unable to speak of their suffering, former priest L.H. Lehmann reveals. In these excerpts from OUT OF THE LABYRINTH, Lehmann shows the diabolical purpose of this, as well as other pagan doctrines of Catholicism. The following is from the chapter titled, The Tyranny of Priestly Celibacy.

Hitler, in his MEIN KAMPF, (ghost-written by a Roman Catholic priest), was uncannily accurate. "This particular significance of celibacy," he says, "is not recognized by most people." Holding up the Roman Catholic Church as a model example for his Nazi followers, he goes on to say:

"Here the Catholic Church can be looked upon as a model example. In the celibacy of its priests roots the compulsion to draw the future generations of the clergy, instead of from its own ranks, again and again from the broad masses of the people...

"It is the origin of the incredibly vigorous power that inhabits this age-old institution...From this results the astounding youthfulness of this giant organism, its spiritual pliability and its steel-like will power."

The real shame and tyranny of priestly celibacy, as Pere Hyacinthe (converted priest) rightly remarks, is the necessity to which its victims are forced of hiding the real facts of it from the public. It is unnecessary for me to say many priests fail to live up to the harsh requirements of the unnatural law.

Similar to so many other man-made regulations of the Roman Catholic Church, priestly celibacy entails many contradictions, much deceit, and often leads to complete spiritual shipwreck of its victims.

In the first place, there is the convenient confusion between the words celibacy and chastity. To the ordinary people these are made to appear identical, and both Catholics and Protestants are led to believe that every Roman Catholic priest must take "vows of chastity" before ordination.

This is pure fiction. Only the very small percentage of priests who belong to the religious orders take an explicit vow of chastity...80% are "secular" priests who serve in parishes and who do not take any vow of chastity at ordination.

At ordination these secular priests merely signify that they...will not get legally married. They take no vow of chastity, that is, they make no explicit promise to refrain from sexual relations.

In other words, one can continue to be celibate without necessarily being chaste. A Roman Catholic priest ceases to be celibate in the eyes of his Church only by contracting marriage by permission of the Church. No amount of sexual relations will affect his celibacy...

Pardon for sexual irregularities of priests outside marriage, whether adultery or fornication, can easily be had at any time by confession to any ordinary fellow-priest.

I have told of the sad spectacles I met, in all parts of the world in which I traveled as a priest, of the ruined lives of so many fine young priests who though no fault of their own were unable to bear up against this harsh law of celibacy.

It has been well said that marriage cleanses a man, and these young priests would have been cleansed of the annoyance and flustration of sex by normal marriage relations. A loving wife and the joy of legitimate children in a happy home life would have filled them with vigor and spiritual zeal.

Even more important, this would have saved them from the inevitable indulgence in alcoholic liquor to which many priests are driven as a poor substitute for their God-given, natural rights in marriage.

The bishops know this well. So does the pope and his Roman counselors. But they prefer to wreck the souls and bodies of the priests in order to sustain the "giant organism"and "steel-like will power" of its organization that Hitler so greatly admired and imitated.

They take the fresh young man, the rough, uncut diamond, use him for the ends of their organization and then cast him aside when his usefulness is gone, and then begin again on others.

The "particular significance of celibacy" in their regimented, Nazi-like organization, which Hitler discovered as "not recognized by most people," lies in the fact that the second and third generation of priests' children would threaten its totalitarian structure, as well as its enormous wealth and secrets. To preserve these the individual souls of its priests are cruelly sacrificed.