altar girls, anyone?

By Diogenes ( articles ) | Mar 19, 2006

Heedless of Church teaching that women can't be ordained, liberals continue to instruct us that if women could be priests, the clergy shortage would be solved immediately. Really? Let's learn from our Episcopalian neighbors in America.

According Alan F. Blanchard, in Clergy Wellness and the Stewardship of Abundance, recently released by the Church Pension Fund:

• The number of young men being ordained has plummeted more than 90%-- from an average of 278 a year in the 1960s to 25 a year since 2000, while the number of older men is fairly steady.
• Younger women represent a small fraction of ordinations, and their number has dropped substantially since the 1980s.
• Women over 35 filled the ranks in substantial numbers after ordination for women was approved in 1976, averting a critical shortfall in qualified clergy.

So if the Church could ordain women, maybe in a generation we'd have a clergy made up mostly of old ladies. (We have more than a enough of that type already.) What we wouldn't have is an increase in the number of young men entering the seminaries.

You doubt that would happen in the Catholic Church? Look around, and notice what's happened to the number of altar boys, since girls began donning surplices.