All Anglican and Episcopal priests who apply for Catholic ordination must undergo the same criminal background checks and psychological evaluations required of all other candidates for Catholic priesthood, Cardinal Wuerl said. He asked the bishops of dioceses where these priests are located to supply those checks and tests as they do for their own seminarians.
Ultimately the inquirers will be sorted into three categories: Those who can he ordained as Catholic priests after a specially-developed nine-month intensive seminary course; those who require more intensive seminary education and “those whose formation histories would not recommend them for either of these options.”
Among those who will not be accepted as Catholic priests are those who were originally Catholic priests and left the Catholic priesthood for the Episcopal or Anglican churches, Cardinal Wuerl said.
There is plenty of room for disaffected Anglicans and others in the (Roman) Catholic Church. One poll showed the RCC has lost 1/3 of its US members over a decade or so. There are also considerable losses globally.
Right now, many have been hurt by the clergy abuse and coverup and have lost trust in the hierarchy. There is also a large group of revisionist dissidents among the clergy and laity who support unbiblical cause like abortion, LBGT sexuality, same-sex marriage, and women priests, etc. The Church has not changed its doctrines, but has not censured or sanctioned the revisionist priests, bishops and universities, but has held to several tacit truces according to George Weigel and William Donohue.
Sexuality is as devisive and destructive an issue in the RCC as in all the rest of the churches. It’s just not as noisy or open as in TEC. That may be because the governance and doctrine of TEC has been partially given over to a laity vote and the bishops are unable or unwilling to hold to and defend the Truth of the Gospel – or they are not fully converted.
Fully converted — I would like to meet someone “fully” converted.
>”the RCC has lost 1/3 of its US members over a decade or so. There are also considerable losses globally.”
Umm… don’t believe this is anywhere close to correct as regards reality. The Catholic Church at Rome conducts parish censuses at regular intervals. Catholics in the US have been increasing at a steady pace of over 100,000 per year and worldwide at a rate of 15-17 million (11%) per year. There’s also been a resurgence of Catholic evangelism in the US led by former Southern Baptist converts. If you haven’t listened to Catholic Answers on radio or via RSS, you should listen to one hour of their daily Catholic apologetics.
“The number of [Catholic] bishops in the world went up from 4,541 in 2000 to 5,002 in 2008, an increase of 10.15%.
The number of [Catholic] priests also increased slightly over this nine-year period, passing from 405,178 in 2000 to 409,166 in 2008, an overall rise of 0.98%.”
Sources: 2010 Statistical Yearbook of the Church, http://www.catholic.org/international/international_story.php?id=36311
Regarding the Baptist decline, I see this everyday at the office where my younger baptist co-workers have each married and had one and only desire one child. The laws of math dictate this is an automatic 50% decrease in the baptist population. Its hard to overcome a 50% cut in denominational population with little or no evangelism.
As a result my bible-belt Southern state which was 5% Catholic decades ago is now 10% Catholic and increasing each year as the number of Baptists decline and Catholics increase due to births and Hispanic migration. A quarter of our diocesan seminarians are now Hispanic with a few Asians in the mix.
God bless…