Does the catholic church have authority to stop you from becoming a catholic priest if you want to be?
Define ‘catholic’. 
That’s not quite the joke it sounds like. The Roman Catholic Church obviously has the ability to stop someone from being ordained a Roman Catholic priest.
But there have been for nearly a thousand years churches who do not give a whit for the Pope’s authority: over 300,000,000 Eastern Orthodox, 90,000,000 Anglicans, several million Oriental Orthodox (Copts, Jacobite Syrians, and Armenians), well over a million Old Catholics in communion with the See of Utrecht, Neth., and 170,000 Nestorians, all of whom have priests – and the majority of those priests don’t abide by RCC standards for becoming and remaining a priest.
I don’t understand the question. Being or becoming a priest requires training, study, and supervision under the Catholic Church. It’s not ,like you walk into a Church and say “Yo, Father Bob, I think I’ll join the flock”, and he replies “righto, here’s your robe”. It’s like asking if a company can stop someone from becoming an employee. Please clarify your question.
Say Paddy the Paedophile wants to become a priest, and he does all the stuff the church ask of him - can they still reject him?
Or maybe more prozaically - can a Bishop refuse to ordain you because he doesn’t like you.
Becoming a priest is a rite, not a right.
One becomes a priest through the Sacrament of Ordination, which can only be administered by a bishop. If the bishop doesn’t administer the sacrament, you’re not a priest.
It’s not a mechanical, automatic thing. If it becomes KNOWN there is some disqualifying issue about you, the authorities may indeed decide to blackball you, however far along in training you got.
Not a priest, but two of my aunts entered the convent with the intention of becoming nuns. One of them left of her own volition, but the other was asked to leave. (Probably not because she did anything wrong, but more because they decided she wasn’t cut out for it. I don’t know the details.) Ironically, she’s the only person in the family who’s still a practicing Catholic.
Is this a trick question? In theory yes they could reject. In practice, they would embrace such an individual unless they thought he offered too much competition.
They have the authority to stop you being ordained licitly. However, you can still be validly ordained, albeit illicitly, by a renegade bishop acting against the will of the church. Such an ordination would make you a real priest in the eyes of the church; you could still perform all the priestly sacraments, such as communion, marriage, confession, etc. However, your use of these magical powers would be formally condemned by the church.
Plus of course many of these churches also call themselves catholic. The preamble to the Thirty-Nine Articles (the basis of Anglicanism) is headed ‘The Catholic Faith’, and all Christian churches worth their salt style themselves ‘Catholic and Apostolic’, ie their creed is universal and established by the apostles.
Why should anyone be denied ordination merely because they are a paedophile? Last I checked it wasn’t a crime, either in canon law or any secular legal system I’m aware of. And even if it were—or if the candidate in question had been found guilty of some other secular crimes—I doubt the church would automatically block the ordination on that basis. The Catholic Church teaches that all people, including priests, are inherently sinful, and regularly commit sin; if it denied ordination to all sinners there wouldn’t be any priests.
If an admitted paedophile requested ordination and met all the requirements, then the church would probably do what any other large employing institution would (or should) do in this day and age: give him the necessary accreditation and make sure that he is assigned to a position that doesn’t bring him in unsupervised contact with children. (You are aware, I hope, that not everyone who is ordianed works as a parish priest or as a teacher in Catholic schools. Some of them are missionaries, some of them are monks, some of them teach at universities, some of them oversee abbeys or monasteries, some of them work in church administration, etc.)
There’s also the complication that the Holy Roman Church doesn’t in fact allow/recognize people becoming “non-catholics”, so once you’re officially Catholic (like me, welcome to the club) you can basically start your own religion and claim to be a priest, while still being technically catholic.
See this brochure (pdf) from the US Conference of Catholic Bishops. Admittedly it doesn’t say paedophiles can’t be ordained, but at least it seems they do check backgrounds.
[Moderator Note]
Religious jabs like this are out of place in GQ. No warning issued, but don’t do this again.
Colibri
General Questions Moderator
Doesn’t any club have the right to pick their officers as they choose? And their member for that matter. So I’d say the RC’s could stop anyone they didn’t care for.
As far as Polycarp’s comments on other religious club’s the same would go for them in their own club realm.
Just my $.02 worth.
The Catholic church does not consider priesthood to be a job, and it does not consider ordaining someone to be analagous to offer him employment. Being ordained is much more akin to getting married than to being hired.
However well-qualified academically and professionally you may be, a bishop won’t ordain you if he doesn’t think you’re suitable. So, can the Catholic church stop you from becoming a priest? Well, it can certainly stop you from becoming a Catholic priest.
“Catholic” has a separate meaning from the RCC, something between “universal” and “eclectic.” In this sense, the accent is on the second syllable and it’s not generally capitalized. A lot of sects glom onto it.
You have the question phrased backwards. No one has the right to become a priest. The church has to permit you to become a priest. As has been said, you have to be admitted to an extensive course of training, and then must be ordained by a bishop. If the church decides at any point that you do not have a proper vocation to be a priest, then they won’t admit or ordain you, and there is nothing you can do about it.