The Catholic Church is looking for (more than) a few good men

[MineralMan]

What if you had a nice Catholic church, but couldn't find a priest to conduct services in it? That's a problem facing the RCC these days, and there doesn't seem to be a solution on the horizon.

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/catholic-church-looking-more-few-good-men-n903041

The Catholic Church is looking for (more than) a few good men
The numbers of U.S. priests and seminarians have been plummeting for decades, and it's not just because of the church's sexual abuse scandals.

{snip}
In the last 50 years, the number of U.S. priests who serve as day-to-day leaders of parishes — known as diocesan priests, as opposed to those who join religious orders — has dropped by almost a third, from about 37,300 in 1970 to about 25,800 last year, according to the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate (CARA) at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C.

{snip}
More worrying for the church is that enrollment in seminaries began falling even earlier, as soon as it reached its modern height in 1968, when more than 8,000 men were on track for ordination.

By 1974, the number of seminarians had fallen to about 5,000. It plateaued at about 3,100 in the mid-1990s, and since then, enrollment has remained stable.

More at link...

[Liberty Belle]

1. They need to start ordaining women and married men.

No doubt many decent men no longer wish to be associated with the church due to the stain of pedophilia and even the pedophiles are dissuaded from enrolling due to many of them being exposed and prosecuted. That graph should be a giant wakeup call for the church to change its ways.

[MineralMan]

2. No doubt. However, the aging patriarchal leadership of the RCC

has no intention of EVER ordaining women, and probably not married men, either, except in rare cases where they become priests after serving as priests in other denominations.

The problem is called "tradition." Every last member of Catholic leadership is supposed to be a celibate, abstinent male. Every one of them. And so it has been for centuries. The power of such longstanding traditions makes it almost impossible to change such traditions. It's a self-defeating organization.

Do not look for such changes. They almost certainly will not occur.

[Voltaire2]

3. Can't. Gods said so. Metaphorically of course.

[Major Nikon]

4. More like...