There are several publications which I don't tend to read unless either I'm very bored or I've been sent a link. There's the ostensibly Catholic paper The Tablet (Britain's "Bitter Pill" as it's known around the orthodox Catholic regions of the Blogosphere), the ecumenical Sojourners' magazine, the Jesuit-run America magazine, and, of course, there is the National Catholic Reporter (excluding Mr John Allen, whose articles are often quite enlightening, to say the least). Yet, on occasion I find myself reading a linked article here, a facebook-shared article there. Occasionally, I am delightfully surprised, but more often I am reminded as to why I tend not to read these publications in the first place.

Thus, when a friend posted a link on facebook to an article about the "vocation crisis" in the National Catholic Reporter, I didn't hold my breath. I was expecting the article to be the amalgamation of several groups with perceived grievances against the Church, and I wasn't disappointed. That the article was written by Miss Jamie Manson, who happens to be a member of the national board of the Women's Ordination Conference is par for the course.

"Cardinal Rodé, like a majority of his counterparts in the clergy, would have us believe that young Catholics have contributed to the crisis of religious life by adopting a secularist mentality and embracing a culture of death. Having spent seven years at a divinity school (three years as a student, four years as an administrator) and five years in non-profit work, Rodé's comments demonstrate for me, once again, how sadly out of touch Vatican officials are with the hearts and minds of many young adults."

In other words, Cardinal Rode', being a member of the clergy (and worse yet, being a part of the "hierarchy" or "the Vatican"), is inherently out of touch with young Catholics. And people wonder why Mr Mark Shea refers to this generation as "Generation Narcissus." On the other hand, if the Vatican really is so "out of touch" with young Catholics, one wonders why so many of them make the World Youth Day pilgrimages. One is also left to wonder just how spending seven years studying theology at an Ivy-league university helps to put Miss Manson in-touch "with the hearts and minds of young adults."

"But the church's failure to turn its compassion and justice inward -- especially toward women and LGBT people -- forced these seminarians to turn away from committing to Catholicism....It is the church [sic.] that [sic.] has told them that...if they are openly gay or desire the possibility of marriage and children, they are not welcome to religious life."

Yet, the Church has such fine organizations as COURAGE International, whose sole purpose is to minister to people of the LGBT community. The complaint held by Miss McPherson on behalf of the LGBT community is several-fold. First, the complaint that the Church does not extend the sacrament of marriage to a homosexual couple. The Church has been given all spiritual authority on earth, and yet this is not enough authority to contravene the natural law, for that was written by a Higher Author than she. Since she has taught on the meaning of marriage, the Church has always taught two of three things about its purposes: procreation, intimacy (specifically, between opposite sexes, since it is this form of intimacy which until very recently was not broadly found in society), and to fight concupiscence. The first is not naturally possible for any but a heterosexual couple, and since homosexual relationships are based on concupiscence the third purpose is also defeated in such a marriage. Intimacy is a bit more complicated, but it includes some things which are more than sexual intimacy which only make sense in the presence of both the masculine and the feminine.

Then there is her complaint against the Church's stance on ordaining openly gay people to ministry. Of course, the fact that the vast majority of the cases in the sex abuse scandal involved homosexual relations has nothing to do with this. The Church does not hate homosexuals, but neither can she change the nature of the sin; and to be openly homosexual is to be openly and unrepentantly engaged in a serious sin--every bit as much as to openly revel in pornography, or to be an open womanizer, or an open fornicator. To be openly and unrepentantly engaged in a grave sin gives scandal--true scandal, in that it truly leads people astray spiritually--and to do so as the pastor of a congregation is worse yet.

Thus, it is for the spiritual good of the Church that this policy is in place, but even more so is it for the spiritual good of those who are open homosexuals. As the LORD warns us, "But he that shall scandalize one of these little ones that believe in me, it were better for him that a millstone should be hanged about his neck, and that he should be drowned in the depth of the sea" (Matthew 18:6).

Speaking of ordination, Miss Manson surely could not write an article lamenting the dearth of ordinations for those who are openly sexually deviant without also including her own special form of dissent: womyn priests (an oxymoron is ever there was one). "It is the church that has told them that if they are women they are not allowed to pursue ordained ministry." I have written on this issue several times already. And Professor Peter Kreeft has an excellent talk about this issue as well. Never in the Church's history has she had women as priests, because she must be faithful first and foremost to Christ. Christ called men to this role, but not women; He established the rule, and the Church has been faithful to it. As our late and great pope, John Paul II, has stated, the Church does not have the authority to change this rule. Strides have been made everywhere that possible to include women in the Church's ordinary ministry; our current pope has even appointed women to high-level curial posts.

For good measure, Miss Manson referred to one last "pelvic issue". While some in the secular world are beginning to see that maybe condoms are not the answer to all of the world's problems, Miss Manson writes:

"Many young Catholics were raised during the height of the AIDS crisis in our country, and they have learned about the pandemic in sub-Saharan Africa. The disease has killed over 25 million people since 1981 and orphaned more than 14 million children in Africa. The institutional church has largely remained silent about the crisis, and refused to consider distributing life-saving condoms to poor countries that have been devastated by HIV and AIDS."

The Church hasn't been silent, she just haven't given the answer that the world would like to hear. Any time that there are rules laid out, people will find some complaint against those rules. Yet, the rules are often there to protect and aid; they are not perfect, but they are the most practical thing we have. No less is this true about moral and theological rules.

In reading through Miss Manson's article--and others like it--I see less a sense of a crisis in vocation as a crisis in identity. We live in a society that is currently awash in relativism, and this is no less so regarding how we view ourselves and the Church. Vocation is meant to ask "How can i best serve God and His Church?" but is so often being re-phrased as "How can God and His Church best be made to serve me?"

Our culture is and has been slowly losing its grasp on the true sense of masculinity and feminity--the truly masculine as opposed to machoism, the truly feminine as opposed to "girly." At the same time, it has blurred the distinctions between these, and especially blurred the relatedness of gender and sexuality (masculine goes with men, feminine with women). It has through away the permanent, the things rooted in eternity, in favor of the modern, the current, and the fashionable. It is small wonder, then, that there is so much confusion in discernment. It is small wonder that there are so many women who think they are called to become priestettes--and so few men hear the call to be priests; or that there is confusion as regards sexuality, and that this confusion spills over into discernment to priestly vocations.

In all of the testimonies I have heard from those who are barred from the ordained priesthood which I have read or heard, I have not heard one which sounds authentically like the person in question was called to become a priest. Every one of them sounds more motivated by "pelvic politics" than by genuine spiritual interest. No woman has ever truly been called to become a priest, no matter what her desires; nor are those with deep-seated sexual deviancies, for God has another plan for them, and it starts with fighting those tendencies. In the end, Cardinal Rode' is right to note that discernment and commitment are more difficult when one lives in a superficial culture awash in vapidity, violence, and darkness.