One positive thing about recent developments is that it has provoked an international conversation about the virtue of chastity. Up to now it had been ignored or ridiculed. But the devastating consequences of not living it have become evident to everyone. However, the media is not quite sure how to handle it. The clearest illustration of this came in a Reuters report a few days ago:

A prominent Roman Catholic bishop in Mexico blamed eroticism on television and Internet pornography for child abuse by priests, in the latest incendiary comments on sex scandals in the church. "With so much invasion of eroticism, sometimes it's not easy to stay celibate or to respect children," Bishop Felipe Arizmendi said during an annual meeting of Mexican bishops near Mexico City on Thursday.

"If on television and on the Internet and in so many media outlets there is pornography, it is very difficult to stay pure and chaste," said Arizmendi, an influential bishop from the colonial town of San Cristobal de las Casas in southern Mexico. "Obviously when there is generalized sexual freedom it's more likely there could be cases of pedophilia," he added.

These are “incendiary” remarks? This is controversial? What exactly is the correct strategy for dealing with eroticism and pornography in the media? To consume as much as possible?

That’s more or less what happened in the Securities and Exchange Commission apparently during the meltdown of 2008. According to a report to the US Congress, senior employees of the SEC spent more time visiting internet porn sites than they did chasing after Bernie Madoff.

One senior attorney at SEC headquarters in Washington spent up to eight hours a day accessing Internet porn. When he filled all the space on his government computer with pornographic images, he downloaded more to CDs and DVDs that accumulated in boxes in his offices. An SEC accountant attempted to access porn websites 1,800 times in a two-week period and had 600 pornographic images on her computer hard drive. Another SEC accountant attempted to access porn sites 16,000 times in a single month.

Rather than ridicule Bishop Arizmendi, perhaps the SEC could hire  him as a consultant on how to raise the productivity of its employees. Chastity isn’t just for monks.