[nickcarraway]

I don't know. It is hard for me to see how a Church who's heirachy is all men could be "alienating" to men.

Well, your assumption is that whether members of the hierarchy are the same sex as one is either alienating or comforting. That may be the case for you, but it's not something that occurs to me. There are any number of all-male groups that are alienating to me. For example, the Democrat party's hierarchy is almost exclusively male, but it alienates me.

[Lorianne]

Well that's a good point. But being a priest is usually a well regarded vocation among Catholics. So by extension, the fact that only men can be priests would tend to make men feel validated, at least in a heirarchal sense, whether or not they wanted to be priests themselves.

But this still leaves the question ... why are more women active in the Catholic church than men?