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To: Goodgirlinred
No!

The job of the Roman Catholic Church is to confront and fight the world and not to conform to it.

Why the matter of the celibacy of the Roman rite of the Roman catholic Church is such an endless source of fascination to those who do not even belong to the Church is beyond me.

Whatever the church to which you may belong may do what it pleases. This is, after all, America. OTOH, whatever the Roman Catholic Church does in self-governance is Roman Catholic business and not yours. You are also wrong in saying that Catholics all offer criticism of other religions here. I hold my tongue and so do many other Catholics.

Many of us reserve our fire for those who CLAIM to be Catholic while being one or another form of schismatic or attack the Roman Catholic Church and its disciplines and its teachings from within, while making alliance with its secularist enemies on the outside like homosexuals, abortion and birth control supporters.

Any Catholic candidate for the priesthood who feels he simply CANNOT LIVE without being married AND being a priest simultaneously can seek the priesthood in several other rites of the Roman Catholic Church which allow exactly that.

Protestants can feel free to regard their respective individual flavors of Christianity to be the wave of the future. As always, Catholics will disagree with that and Catholics always will disagree with that. We are not Protestants. We are not reformed Christians. We are not Sola Fide. We are not Sola Scriptura. We are not Sola Gratia. In all three of those, may we never be. We do allow marriage of clergy without much regulation as other faiths may do.

Just because we insist on being Catholic, don't take it personally. Many of us also recognize the many fine qualities displayed by those who are reformed Christians, their faiths, their dedication to the word and Word of the Lord, the manifest morality of their judgments and their lives, their awesome contributions to such common goals as pro-life, pro-family, evangelization of non-Christians, and so much more.

What we want and what is part of our tradition in the Roman rite, is young men burning with a zeal for sacrificing much to serve God, such a zeal as to turn their backs on worldly things (many of them great goods in themselves like marriage and family) to be the heroes we expect them to be. Watering down the priesthood anmd its requirements is compromising with the world. We intend to conquer that world and not compromise with it. With Jesus Christ, all things are possible, as I suspect you would agree. Our ways are not your ways in this simple matter of ecclesiastical discipline.

God bless you and yours!

42 posted on 04/11/2005 10:41:59 AM PDT by BlackElk (Dean of Discipline of the Tomas de Torquemada Gentlemen's Club)
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To: BlackElk
Thank you. Please understand, I was not criticizing. I just don't understand. Also, as I said to the other gentleman to whom I have yet to get back to, I have family members who are Catholic and we have discussed this topic. We have discussed Catholicism vs Protestantism as well. Not a heated debate. Just for informational purposes. I just want to know and understand, that is all. We are all children of God as far as I am concerned. To me, it doesn't matter which church we go to, as long as we are Christians. God bless you and your family as well.
57 posted on 04/11/2005 3:23:21 PM PDT by Goodgirlinred ( GoodGirlInRed Four More Years!!!!!)
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