Parse a Soap Response in an Oracle 11g Function

[theoverstock09ArtimeAmarrob]

I have a function in Oracle 11g which uses UTL_HTTP to consume a web service. I am storing the SOAP response in a CLOB. After researching for hours, I still have not found a way to directly parse XML fields in the clob. The SOAP response in the clob looks something like this:\[code\](CLOB) <?xml version="1.0" ?><soap:Envelope xmlns:soap="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/envelope/"> <soap:Body> <GET_PERMITOutput xmlns="http://xmlns.oracle.com/orawsv/DBUSER/MYSERV"> <RETURN> <STATUS_CODES> <stat>REC</stat> </STATUS_CODES> </RETURN> </GET_PERMITOutput> </soap:Body></soap:Envelope>\[/code\]I want to be able to parse that value "REC" out (in other cases there will be multiple status codes) and do something with it in my function.