De Omnibus Dubitandum Est.

I read an interesting article this morning from Germany in which a retired German priest asks   "are German bishops leading the church into a "priestless desert"?" Indeed he is correct; they are. The number of Catholic priests in the country is rapidly plummeting as older priests die or leave ministry and they aren’t replaced by newly ordained ones. Since 1990, the number of priests in Germany has dropped from 20,000 to 14,000. On 18 March, Cardinal Reinhard Marx — Archbishop of the Archdiocese of Munich-Freising and President of the German Bishops’ Conference — spoke at a diocesan meeting and revealed a stunning fact. In the year of 2016, only one new seminarian entered the diocesan seminary of Munich. According to the Austrian Catholic website Kath.net . Although Fr. Fleiner has correctly identified the vocational crisis in Germany, his solutions seems old, tired, liberal and extremely short sighted: Priests should be allowed to marry. I have a dea...

Let them, as fathers in Christ, take care of the faithful whom they have begotten by baptism and their teaching.(186) Becoming from the heart a pattern to the flock,(187) let them so lead and serve their local community that it may worthily be called by that name, by which the one and entire people of God is signed, namely, the Church of God.(188) Let them remember that by their daily life and interests they are showing the face of a truly sacerdotal and pastoral ministry to the faithful and the infidel, to Catholics and non-Catholics, and that to all they bear witness to the truth and life, and as good shepherds go after those also,(189) who though baptized in the Catholic Church have fallen away from the use of the sacraments, or even from the faith. ~ Lumen Gentium 28. OK I defended Cardinal O'Brien, I pleaded that we didn't know the circumstances, I thought we should have held off until we knew what was going on. But if this report in the Herald Scotland is at all ac...