Your statement needs to be modified a little to be accurate.
Declining attendence in some mainstream protestant churches is no doubt due to the liberal ecclessiology they espouse.
Comnservative protestant churches, like conservative parishes in the RCC, are growing. Assemblies of God, COGIC, Southern Baptists, most Pentecostal churches etc are growing. Conservative anglican churches (Anglican Mission in America?) are growing. Only the liberal churches are dying (and good riddance to them)
As I have said to fellow Catholics we need holy men to be Priests just as we ourselves are to lead holy lives. But our priests are to be the visiable man of Christ. Yep that's right folks I said man, and I being a woman have no problem with that. The Pope has come out and said he himself cannot change what Jesus started for the priesthood in choosing the apostles as men. If Jesus was truly divine,he could have chosen a woman to be one of the apostles. I mean for goodness sakes God is not about what time period it is or antiwoman for petes sake. For only reasons God knows he wanted men to have the postion of priests. But I also know there were good men who wanted to go into the priesthood but the seminaries wouldn't take them because they were too orthodox in the teachings of the church. We bear no good fruit in the shortage of priests for good reason. As much as I liked John Paul 2 he did not take strong hold of the bishops here. We can only pray Pope Benedict will. I just heard on Fox we also have a shortage in police officers across the nations and they are going to great lengths to recruit people into the academy all over. And I know friends and have relatives who tell me about how hard it is being nurses because of the shortage of nurses. They are asked and taught more and more thngs they are not suppose to be doing becaue of the shortages of nurses. Remember when priests, nurses, and police were highly respected and were the dreams of people to obtain.