It seems like in every newscast, in every newspaper, there’s a report of some new development in the Catholic priest sex scandal. Just this week, Bishop Thomas J. O’Brien of the diocese of Phoenix admitted to covering up sexual abuse of children by priests in his diocese, allowing them to continue working with children even after he discovered the abuse.

O’Brien admitted to the cover-up to avoid prosecution for obstruction of justice. A source close to the grand jury investigation of O’Brien told The Washington Post the bishop allegedly forced out of the church a priest who refused to persuade a Catholic family not to go to the police with a report of molestation.

This problem is not going to just go away, regardless of whether higher-ups in the church disclose it or not. The time has come for the church to make a change.

The public has been proposing this solution almost since the scandal first came to light, and the church should listen: Priests should be allowed to marry.

The church has long held out against allowing the clergy to marry, the reason being that priests are supposed to be wedded to God. But priests are only human. Despite their calling to serve God, they still have human urges and instincts – and sex is one of the most basic of human instincts. If that instinct is not fulfilled through a loving, healthy and consensual relationship such as marriage, then it may well turn to gratification through some twisted means, as in the abuse of children. Allowing priests to marry could help to solve this problem – or at least be a start – and there are few logical arguments against it.

To suggest a priest is too holy to marry not only belies the current scandal but also implies that marriage is somehow unholy. In fact, several Bible verses praise marriage as the most sacred of institutions. And to argue that a clergyman has no time for a family and a parish is an injustice to the thousands of clergy of other religions who manage to juggle both. Both roles rely on love for family members or parishioners, and love is not something which needs to be divided into portions. There should be enough to go around.

The church has changed long-standing traditions before – the Second Vatican Council, for example, rescinded the Catholic ban on eating meat on Fridays and allowed priests to say mass in languages other than Latin. Today, most Catholics probably could not imagine having to learn another language to fully comprehend their mass, but it was the law only a little more than 50 years ago.

The law of celibacy for priests has outlived any usefulness it may have once had. The Catholic church should overturn it before any more young lives are ruined because of this outmoded tradition.