**Your experience is completely the opposite of mine. From what I can see the clergy is increasingly lavender. A friend of mine from Madison sent me a picture of the new seminarian class last year. Just looking at the picture it was clear they were all a tad light in the loafers. No, the RCC has a serious personnel policy problem. This isn’t the Middle Ages where an ambitious young man would rise in the world in the military, the Royal bureaucracy, or the Church. **
I can send you my complete set of links that proves that Pope Benedict sent emissaries to all the seminaries to clean them out.
Applicants for the seminary must now go through a strenuous two-day psyche exam, his parents are questioned, the parish priest is questioned, input from friends is sought that all point to his sound foundation in morals. Then he undergoes even more questioning at the monastery — and it goes on and on until he is accepted.
Do you want the links or not? Your premise is false.
The premise is this. Annalex seems to think that the RCC's insistence on the clerical celibacy rule is part and parcel of the RCC's powerful witness to the world of the godly, sexually chaste life.
But that is clearly delusional. "By their fruits you shall know them." In judging reality as Christians we are to look at actions much more than words.
And by its well publicized actions, the RCC's witness to the world is anything but that of godly sexual morality, as Annalex would have. Quite to the contrary. The RCC's witness to the world is one of the most vile sexual license without consequence. The RCC's witness to the world - as my friend and my nephew and thousands of others can readily attest - is one of unpunished perversion of the most destructive kind.
You can blink your eyes real hard, put your pinkies in both your ears and scream "la-la-la-la" at the top of your lungs all you want. Reality is what it is. Denying it doesn't change it. And clearly the reality here is that the RCC's witness to the world - by its many actions and inactions, including especially its clinging to the clerical celibacy rule - is nothing other than Sodomy Enthroned.
I can have nothing to do with it. You seem a good person, and I wish you well. But it hurts me that good people like you and Annalex fail to see the unspeakable spiritual carnage your refusal to embrace the reality of the situation - including especially the clerical celibacy rule - has wreaked on the RCC. The RCC just lost Catholic Ireland. It probably lost Catholic Poland. It certainly lost me, many of my family and friends who were among its most ardent believers. What will it take for your to look reality in the eye?
We are getting a new priest in our diocese from our parish. There is NO WAY he is not heterosexual, as he was married and the father of two, grandfather of two. He is older and ready for celibacy and the priesthood. We are all excited about his journey.