A Catholic to Admire

Abbe Pierre was born in 1912, ordained in 1938, and spent his life helping the downtrodden and championing human rights. During WWII he aided those being persecuted and hunted by the Germans, both Jew and Gentile alike.
After the war he was elected to the French Parliament, where he continued to champion human rights, fighting against both poverty and homelessness.
He was regarded by many as a living saint, leading by example. In recognition of his life’s work, Abbé Pierre was awarded a higher order of the Legion of Honor (Grand Officier de la Legion d’Honneur) by President Jacques Chirac on 19 April 2001.
As with all humans however his "road was not always an easy one to follow.
In his recent book "My God ... Why?" he confesses to "sins of the flesh" in which he periodically succumbed to his sexual desire. He's also an advocate married priests, and women priests; and further states that noone "has ever put forth a decisive theological argument showing that ordaining women priests would be against the faith."
He also says it is a possibililty that Jesus and Mary Magdelene may have been married, but that it hasn't been proven and would not affect the fundementals of the christian faith even if it were.
Abbe Pierre knew of "good" priests who lived with common-law wives and predicted that
Pope Benedict would surprise Catholics by eventually allowing older married men to become priests and remarried divorced people to receive communion.
He stood up for his long-time friend Roger Garaudy, who wrote a book questioning the extent of Jewish extermination during the war, basically saying that Jews suffered massacres but that they did not amount to genocide. Garaudy put the figure at considerably less than what the Jews would have you believe.