Your reply can be seen is reasonable as regards Protestants in general, but I presumed that you were referring to my statistics on evangelicals, and as Catholics themselves are quite liberal when it comes to contraceptive use, and as surveys testify to evangelicals overall being more conservative in most things, my point was that it was unlikely that Catholics overall would convert to evangelicalism because it was more liberal.
And I do think that most Catholics who leave for a Protestant churches go to evangelical ones, and which the top stat on post 345 shows.
As for celibacy, I disagree that 1Cor 7 provides sufficient warrant for the clerical restriction, especially as it is not all the Scripture says on the matter. To mandate clerical celibacy after what Paul says in 1 Tim 3 and Titus 1 is a problem which required enforcing celibacy within marriage sometime after Christ, as some of the church fathers showed, but which kind of marriage is unknown in Scripture among those who could leave and cleave, which marriages is described as being.
And here again, we have two Tradition-based churches disagreeing somewhat. But that’s all for now.
Enforcement of clerical celibacy is a reasonable disagreement. It’s an argument we have within ourselves. It’s something that may change, without touching the doctrine of the church.
If a church has married men as pastors, I have no qualms with that whatsoever. Christ permits us that freedom, but that is a two way street.
“and as Catholics themselves are quite liberal when it comes to contraceptive use, and as surveys testify to evangelicals overall being more conservative in most things, my point was that it was unlikely that Catholics overall would convert to evangelicalism because it was more liberal.”
It’s not so much that it is liberal, it is slack where they wish it to be slack. Again, I was an evangelical. There was nothing barring use of contraception except as an abortifacient. Someone going the other way would likely see that as attractive, which makes sense to me.
The same is true of the Catholic church, btw. In folks going the other way, you’ll see desire for a formalized liturgy, but a big one is the eucharist. Belief in the real presence, was for me, the stepping stone over. I became convinced that the Lord was truly present in the bread and wine.
That is something the Catholic church does well, in their focus on the eucharist and on Christ in the liturgy. The rest took time. It took me about two years before I was ready to join the Catholic church. I didn’t join until I was ready to say that I understood and believed in everything that the Church teaches.
The other for me, was the whole structure. A big concern for me was what was happening to the Episcopalians, in blessing homosexuality. I didn’t believe, as my friends did, that the solution was to pack up and leave and form another church. I didn’t want that.
I believed, then as now, that if I was to join a church, that I would be a part of that Church for the rest of my life. So there is that search for assurance.