[polemikos]

To come to my brother's defence to the extent of confirming that what he is suggesting is not totally off the wall: I assisted at a funeral two weeks ago for a former priest who had been laicised precisely because he had been ordained against his

The example is not apt. The problem of someone "forced' into the priesthood will not be solved by a change in the discipline of celibacy. Put another way, everyone properly in the priesthood properly accepted celibacy.

A liberal vicar-general recently confided to me that the real objective is to get women into the priesthood and that is what they are working on with several people in the Vatican.

Good luck to them:

RE: Women priests

In 1994 Pope John Paul II formally declared that the Church does not have the power to ordain women. He stated, "Although the teaching that priestly ordination is to be reserved to men alone has been preserved by the constant and universal tradition of the Church and firmly taught by the magisterium in its more recent documents, at the present time in some places it is nonetheless considered still open to debate, or the Church’s judgment that women are not to be admitted to ordination is considered to have a merely disciplinary force. Wherefore, in order that all doubt may be removed regarding a matter of great importance, a matter which pertains to the Church’s divine constitution itself, in virtue of my ministry of confirming the brethren (cf. Luke 22:32) I declare that the Church has no authority whatsoever to confer priestly ordination on women and that this judgment is to be definitively held by all the Church’s faithful"
(Ordinatio Sacerdotalis 4).

And in 1995 the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, in conjunction with the pope, ruled that this teaching "requires definitive assent, since, founded on the written Word of God, and from the beginning constantly preserved and applied in the tradition of the Church, it has been set forth infallibly by the ordinary and universal magisterium (cf. Second Vatican Council, Dogmatic Constitution on the Church,
Lumen Gentium 25:2)" (Response of Oct. 25, 1995).

This is something that is never going to change.

[Tantumergo]

"Put another way, everyone properly in the priesthood properly accepted celibacy."

Sure - absolutely! Its just scary how many probably aren't properly in the priesthood.

"This is something that is never going to change."

Don't you know that we stopped using language like that at Vatican II? The idea that anything in the Church can never change is just plain rigid intransigence - your kind of Catholicism is a thing of the past! (sarcasm off)

[Campion]

This is something that is never going to change.

If it ever did, it would demonstrate that the Church is not who and what she says she is. It would be the end of Catholicism, and the only place for the orthodox to go would be a sedevacantist traditionalist sect (because, well, they would have been right all along), or the conservative wing of Eastern Orthodoxy (likewise).