[Oldcath-l] The Malingerer Makes CNN

[Sam'l B]

	Excommunicated ex-Archbishop Milingo has made CNN news:

javascript:cnnVideo('play','/video/us/2006/12/10/seavers.nj.married.priest.news12','2006/12/17');

	This is yet another sally in his crusade to try to get Rome to 
legitimize his liaison with his Moonie honey.  It is simply not going to 
happen.

	I suspect that Rome will one day loosen up on the issue of celibacy -- 
but my guess is that it will be in the next Papacy at the earliest. 
Papa Ratzi does not seem much interested in the matter.

	As I keep repeating constantly, the real issue with celibacy is 
financial -- the need to provide a living wage and benefits to the 
missus and the kiddies.  Until that issue is straightened out internally 
  -- i.e. the Curial Bureaucracy comes to an agreement -- no amount of 
fussing and whining is going to have any effect.

	You don't make changes in the Roman Catholic Church by whining and 
sniping from the outside.  They have well over 500 years experience with 
dealing with this from various heretics and Protestants.  Changes will 
be made by the guys who stay inside, stick to the rules, and get 
promoted to a Dicastery in Rome.

	The issue of lack of priests is completely separate.  Almost everyone 
who was going to levae to get married has already left.  There will, I 
expect, be some small number every year who will leave, but by & large, 
the serving priests are content with the rule.  They would perhaps like 
to be married --for the companionship, if nothing esle -- but they have 
vocations, and are satisfied with their jobs.

	I am less than impressed with the whiner in a toupee in the film clip, 
who goes on and on about how much it hurt him to leave.  Very evidently, 
he wanted to be married more than he wanted to be a priest.  One would 
think that the consolations of the marriage bed would offset the 
discomfort of leaving the priesthood.

	If a guy really has a burning desire to bea priest, and yet leaves 
Rome, the thing he should be doing is getting out there and developing a 
community/parish.  Our own +Jim Balija is an ex-Roman priest who has 
done just that -- and I have never heard him whine about having to leave 
Rome.  He has gone out and done.  Bravo, Jim!

	There are two basic reasons that there is a shortage of Roman priests:

	1)	And most important -- they have not been preaching vocations.  If 
you don't ask and invite, boys are going to go off and chase music and 
girls (not necessarily in that order).

	2)	Entirely too many seminaries (and Chanceries) have been captured by 
doctrinaire liberals, who select very rigorously for young men of 
Politically Correct outlook.  Most young men of that persuasion are out 
making money, not signing up to run parishes.  Pious conservative young 
men need not apply.  Conservative dioceses, like +Bruskewitz' Lincoln, 
NE, on the other hand, have no dearth of seminarians.

	So celibacy is a straw man argument in the "priest shortage" problem. 
It is a reasonably good thing, in itself -- Protestant, and to a lesser 
degree, Orthodox churches have made it work for lots of centuries.  Rome 
should return to the Western practice that existed before 1000 A.D. -- 
but it is not going to happen quickly, and puerile demonstrations like 
the Malingerer's will just delay things.

+Samuel B. Bassett