If so many young men hadn't been sodomized as altar boys and seminarians, I suspect there would be more vocations today. Here's a pertinent recent traditio.com commentary which relates...
Just another proof of the Newchurch of Hypocrisy. JPII in 2002 supposedly told American cardinals in secret not to permit their presbyters to violate the young. Now, an investigative report by the Dallas Morning News shows that the pope's words were hollow. Rome is harboring the criminal perverts in Rome!
The News found that seven presbyters accused of sexual crimes, some of them runaways from law enforcement in the United States, are living in Rome around the Vatican. These priests are ministering with the full knowledge and consent of church officials.
The News found that the heads of religious orders who transferred sex criminals to the Rome office didn't bother to notify the Diocese of Rome about the alleged abusers' presence. Here's your quiz for today: who is the bishop of Rome? Why, JPII, of course! Does nobody who works for him take seriously his secret words on sex crimes? Apparently not.
If we accept JPII as head of the Church, we have to hold him personally responsible for allowing Novus Ordo bishops and presbyters to violate young Catholics. He has been publicly silent on the most vile crimes of his officials, like Abp. Rembert Weakland, of Milwaukee, who for years had an "affair" with a young catamite. The catamite attempted to blackmail the archbishop, who then stole some half a million dollars from the poor box, as it were, to pay off the blackmail. The archbishop, appointed by JPII, confessed his crime to the police a day before he was to be service an indictment.
The pope's comment: silence. Do we have a functioning pope? Or is he so spaced out that he is non compos mentis and can perform no valid action? Or is he so immoral that he would let his own officials violate young people and seminarians without so much as word of public chastisement? Whichever of the answers you choose, the JPII has to be the Bad Pope with the longest pontificate in the history of the Church.
The number of young men abused, though too large by ANY standards, is too small to be the only cause of the lack of vocations. The prevalance of liberal and dissent filled thought at seminaries, coupled with the tendency to allow feminist nuns to sit on Seminary boards and pronounce 'fitness' on the young men trying to attend was the worst thing for the Church. These Seminary boards have routinely, for the last 20 years at least, kept young men who are orthodox in their Catholic practice and thinking out of the Seminaries and allowed homosexuals and those who would undermine the solid teachings of the Church IN.
Many faithful young men were discouraged, and gave up on the thought of ever becoming priests. Many other young men, seeing the state of the Church in their own parishes, with inadequate catechesis and lackluster preaching from the pulpit, probably made the decision NOT to devote their lives to such a mess. If these young men had been in active, faithful parishes, they may not have abandoned the idea of a vocation.