Deluded "Catholics" and "Rent-a-Priests"

The headline reads:
Desperate Catholics find "rent-a-priests" online

But the headline is all wrong. While some might profess to be Catholic, they have abandoned the Church which Christ established in order to concoct something of their own making. Yes, they might have done this in "desperation" but that is likely due to ignorance.

ALBANY, New York (Reuters) - Some are Catholics who see their church as stuck in the past. Others are believers who happen to be divorced, pregnant before marriage or gay. A few just can't find a priest when they need one.

Roman Catholics shunned by the official church are "renting" married priests in times of crisis and celebration.

It borders on the absurd to state that some of these people are "believers", if that means "believers" in the Catholic sense. It's also ludicrous to think that those who are divorced, homosexual, or pregnant outside of marriage are "shunned" by the Church. The Church, in following the example of our Lord, has the utmost empathy for sinners and calls them to repentance and conversion. But the Church, just like Christ, cannot condone sinful behavior as a good, as something which is not sinful.

They turn to http://www.rentapriest.com, a Web site with 2,500 Catholic priests in a national database known as "God's Yellow Pages." Virtually all the priests in the database have left their official clerical ministries due to the Roman Catholic Church's mandatory celibacy rule, but they continue to conduct weddings, usually for a fee, while performing baptisms, last rites and funerals for free, in keeping with the practice of officially recognized priests.

These "rental priests", having abandoned the Church, have no faculties and are depriving Catholics of licit and valid sacraments.

We are doing Jesus' work and apparently the church isn't," said Louise Haggett, director of Celibacy Is The Issue (CITI) ministries, which runs the site and helped arrange 3,000 weddings last year.

Here we witness more delusional thinking - the bold assertion that they are doing the will of God, that they are doing the "work or our Lord." This is a clear manifestation of the vice of pride. They have decided to make themselves "popes" and to set themselves above Christ and His Church.

Richard Hasselbach, who married after he was a priest for 13 years, defends the organization because many people are turned off by what he calls the inflexibility and rigidity of "the corporate Catholic Church."
. . .
Faith is a relationship with Christ and not about rules and dogma, Hasselbach said. "Once you're a priest, you're always a priest," he said. "If I fail to respond to the call to minister, I do at my own peril."

Vows or solemn promises made before God and the bishops of the Church have, for some, become meaningless.

And again, we see, even from priests, an utter failure to understand (or a complete rejection of) the theological virtue of faith. It is clear that one is not doing God's will when he has rejected the authority of Christ as given to the Apostles and their successors.

It's a shame that so many have rejected the Church yet wish to reshape the Church according to their own wants and desires. Many of these, no doubt, have entered into heresy or schism, while presuming to have been given the knowledge of what is best for the Church and for those who remain within the Church. Some have chosen the wide and comfortable path rather the the narrow and difficult one. Sadly, many of those who were once Catholic have been deceived into thinking that they can still be Catholic, while rejecting that which makes one Catholic.