Whiskey, you're last sentence there reminded me of The Young Pope (did you catch that on HBO)? I'm not saying they need to get with the times, but they do need to let go of some archaic practices. But to my point about injecting hetero family oriented men.... It's more common sense. One could say the clergy has become a haven for gay men and pederast. Why is that? The Church likes to add weight to the word "masculinity". One could argue that they church has created their own problem by it's limitations which might promote it's current state. From a pure math perspective, if you add obvious hetero men, you change the makeup and impact the culture.
I did see The Young Pope, and I loved it. But getting to your substantive point, you seem to think that pederasty has plagued the Church since its beginning, which doesn't seem to be the case. Priests are fallible humans, and some of them struggle with sexual continence more than others (just like the laity does); but the recent rash of abuse scandals are a distinctly modern phenomenon. To my mind, that means that cause is likely found in changes made within the last couple hundred years, and not in a practice that is explicitly endorsed by Jesus and St. Paul.
The church is growing most in LA and Asian cultures IIRC. Could the geographical/cultural ideologies have more to do with generating vocation than the issue or non-issue of celibacy. And even if you remove celibacy as a topic, why does the clergy attract so many gay men and pederast?
The Catholic Church is not doing well in Latin America currently. It's growing most strongly in Africa and southeast Asia. It's obvious that local culture impacts how receptive various peoples are to the Gospel, but that's always been true. But again, I think you're coming at this from the wrong angle. Culture requires a
cultus, a sense of sacred order, around which to form; in other words, culture is downstream from theology. So I think the better question is-- what went wrong with Western theology/ culture that allowed for this to happen?
While celibacy to some might be easy for some, historically it has been very hard for priests, cardinals, and popes alike.
This sort of assertion needs a citation to back it up. On one hand, celibacy can obviously be challenging because it means foregoing something that is very good (marriage); just as fasting, by refraining from eating, confirms the goodness of food. But fasting and celibacy have a long and well-documented pedigree as important Christian spiritual practices (and to the extent that Protestants no longer engage in them, one should ask why and whether that's a good thing). Fasting and celibacy are ways of disconnecting oneself from worldly goods so that a Christian can better focus on heavenly ones. Why you wouldn't want your priest or pastor to be as Godly as possible is beyond me.
Also, and this gets back to my statement about needing a citation, I think you'd be hard pressed to find evidence that the vow of celibacy is
uniquely challenging compared to the other vows that Catholic religious have to take, like poverty and obedience. "This is hard, so we should stop doing it" is pretty terrible advice.
This could be Papa Frank's wake up call.
Just saw an encouraging update on that situation, as
Pope Francis just defrocked him.
There are dark times in the Church's history that would suggest that Popes are very fallible.
We've certainly had some very bad popes before, but none of them, not even Alexander VI, ever made a solemn
ex cathedra pronouncement in error. To reiterate, Papal Infallibility is an extension of the dogma that the Holy Spirit protects the Church from teaching error. So when a Pope invokes his authority and issues a solemn decree relating to faith and morals, Catholics can rest assured that it reliable. But that doesn't extend to remarks made off the cuff to reporters on an airplane, or homilies given in the Casa Santa Marta, etc.
... means you shall not
murder, which obviously turns on justification. And while this is one subject upon which well-catechized Catholics can disagree, the weight of the Tradition (Augustine, Aquinas, Bellarmine, Liguori, and many popes) have argued that a temporal authority can justly impose capital punishment as long as certain conditions are met.
Per my post above, adding masculine hetero men might change the culture.
As I mentioned above, your assumption that there are lots of "masculine hetero men" who would join the priesthood but for the vow of celibacy isn't very reasonable; not to mention an offensive stereotype about priests--the parochial vicar at my parish is an avid outdoorsman, and is no one's idea of effeminate. Vocations have gone and up down through the ages for a lot of different reasons, but clerical celibacy has always been preferred from the Church's earliest days, and was codified into a general discipline later. What other vows should we toss? Perhaps there are wealthy young men who would become priests but for the vow of poverty? Or maybe we should go full Prot and ditch the vow of obedience, so if your Bishop pisses you off, you just head down to the local stripmall and "plant" a new church?
Not buying this. If I even tried to buy it, I'd ask, is all that land and art really necessary? Certainly nothing about that in the bible. Thou shall collect art? Half joking, but seriously?
And who says priest shouldn't get a little more money if they have a family. How much cash and property does the Vatican have? And have you seen how the folks live in the Vatican. It sure in the hell aint for the poors.
If the Vatican sold off its holdings, it would receive a temporary windfall, but nowhere near enough money to permanently end poverty. And then those pieces-- including the greatest artwork humanity has ever produced-- would disappear into private collections, never to be seen by a poor person again. Much of that was gifted to the Church by European aristocrats during Christendom, and its much better to leave the Church as its conservator for the benefit of humanity than the alternative.
If you'll recall, Judas made a similar argument in John 12:5 against Mary's use of expensive perfume to anoint Jesus' feet... Never a good idea to be echoing Judas.
Regardless, the Catholic Church's wealth is commonly exaggerated. Disregard the priceless works of art and architecture that it holds as conservator for the benefit of humanity, and it's just as cash-strapped as most other charitable organizations.
To be clear, if I believed that Jesus had commanded the celibacy rule I would not support lifting simply in order to attempt to increase vocations. If the Church had had celibacy as a rule since its inception I would feel differently. I'd be comfortable lifting the rule even if it were established that it would have no effect on vocations.
If Jesus had
commanded that priests be celibate, it would be dogma and not a mere discipline. But there has always been a clear
preference for a celibate over a married episcopate since the
earliest days of the Church, which was later codified into a general discipline imposed on all priests.
These arguments in favor of dropping the vow of celibacy strike me as similar to many of the misguided applications of Vatican II-- modern "solutions" to problems ultimately rooted in modernism which will only make things worse.
