njlauren
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ORIGINAL: FrostedFlake
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ORIGINAL: dcnovice
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There is an old joke. A priest confronts a woman who is outspoken against the church, it is apparent she hates it, and he starts speaking to her and she goes off on a tirade about all the ills in the church, the corruption, forgetting who they are, women's roles, etc....and he sits and listens, and after hearing her, tells her "madam, while I understand your anger, your one woman crusade to destroy the church won't work. After all,the leadership has been trying to destroy it for nearly 2000 years, and have failed, what makes you think you can?"
I love it! Totally adding it to my repertoire; my devout but critical Catholic aunts will howl with laughter.
I wonder very seriously, do your devout but critical Aunts suppose they NEED to go to church and specifically go to the Catholic church in order to have a relationship with the deity? I wonder if they have ever even momentarily considered the obvious alternative of doing without the spiritual guidance of men in whom they have no faith. Do you suppose, now that the Pope has handed out to everyone the PRIZE the church has always offered only to those who BELIEVE, do you suppose that they might?
When the church says in as many words, you don't need it, shouldn't they? After all, rejecting church is not the same as rejecting God.
Perhaps you might ask them.
The answer to your question is there are in effect many Catholic Churches or at least 2. There is the local church that people belong to, where they like the priest, where people know each other, they have programs like CYO, charities and so forth, and where the hard line attitudes are not really to be found. There are a lot of liberal Catholic Churches out there,that duck under the radar, that aren't so doctrinally pure. 80% of Catholics in the US are cafeteria Catholics, who disagree with the church about many things, and they see their local church as their church, rather than the Vatican.
People belong to churches through generations and it is a sense of family and continuity, and I understand how important that is (never found it in a church myself, but was looking for it). In some ways, I guess, it is kind of like congress, only about 18% of people approve of congress, yet 90% of people surveyed rate their local rep highly..yet they are part of the confederacy of dunces...
Then we have The Church, i.e the Vatican and the Bishops they appoint. in the US, Pete the Polish Prince and Ratzinger appointed these hard ideologues, who toe the vatican line, and clamped down and forced out more liberal ones, and in the US there is a major disconnect between the Bishops and hierarchy with the people. They pretend not to notice, so you don't exactly see Bishops threatening people with ex communication for using birth control (which 90% of Catholics do at one time or another, not too many families with 5,6 or more kids, other then Hispanic immigrants), the way they make the full court press with gays and abortion..
The thing is, in their daily lives most Catholics don't know or care about the Bishops or vatican their local church is it. Yes, their church is not in isolation, and when they give money to support the church, some it flows to the Bishops and Vaticans, but it doesn't touch their lives, because their church is local.
I can understand that, but what I personally have told friends of mine, very liberal but Catholic, that their money is going to help support the people and policies they are mad about, that if Catholics in the US, for example, had made it clear any money they give stays with their own church, that none flows to the Vatican or the Bishops, you would have seen real action...but how many people really have time or energy to do that kind of thing?
Belonging to a church is a lot more then theology, it is about trying to find community, it is about trying to do good things, be a better person, and I respect that. That said, I think at some point people also have to realize that pretending that what the broader church does has nothing to do with them, but I also understand that it is hard to even think about what to do. It is why so many young people are voting with their feet, the RC in the US within a generation, leaving out immigration, is going to be facing strongly declining membership, or at the very least, have mostly Christmas and Easter type of Catholics.
Several years ago Ann Rice, the author, made a very public return to the church, arguing much that the church is about helping the poor, about the local church, comfort, etc......and then about a year or two ago basically called it quits, saying that as much as she loved it, she couldn't stand what the men running it were doing or saying (among other things, her son is gay), that a church that bases membership on political posturing rather than doing good works, and who could so blatantly ignore the horrible acts being done in its name and not punishing those who did it, and she could no longer accept that or rationalize it away in the name of the good the church often does.
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RE: Yes, even Atheists... - 
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