Thank you, also, for confirming that married priests are the exception and not the rule for the Latin rite. Do you personally see a cross benefit that, in allowing married clergy, the Catholic Church could be more selective in whom they ordain into the priesthood and could afford to weed out the homosexually inclined applicants because of that? I know that there is an acknowledged dearth of men applying for the priesthood and that this scarcity may explain why many men, that would have been weeded out in the past, were permitted to continue to ordination in spite of suspected homosexual leanings. I just think that the Catholic Church could afford to be more choosy if married men were welcomed into the priesthood. But, that's just my opinion, FWIW.
I think the real reason for the dearth of priestly vocations comes from the clergy and laity's cowardly de-facto surrender to the corrupt Spirit of the Age on the question of contraception. In other words, although the official teaching of the Church against contraception has not changed, and cannot change, on most Catholics' Top 25 Moral Priorities list, it's somewhere between 26 and infinity.
As a result, Catholic childbearing patterns and just like American childbearing patterns in general: 1.7 - 2.0 kids per completed family size.
With only 1.7 - 2.0 kids to provide you with grandchildren, very few Catholic parents are going to encourage their kids to be vowed celibates. And with no parental example of doing even a tiny bit of sexual abstinence (like NFP), kids don't grow up believing that sexual abstinence is possible or plausible for adults.
It's the root of so many problems. And not only for Catholics.
For instance, if you don't expect any heterosexual adults to abstain, ever, how could you demand that homosexuals abstain, ever?
Contraception has changed our expectations of adult behavior; it has deeply weakened any lifetime vocation based on anything other than self-serving and personal satisfaction.