This thread is not to derail the current thread on Pope Francis's comments, and focus on a conservative finding their way in today's Catholic Church.

If you just want to bash religion or the Catholic Church, please take it to your own thread.

It bothers me when I hear some one pipe up that they are leaving the Church because of XXX, and in today's climate, it is because of Francis's politics. I have a number of thoughts and questions maybe some of the membership would join me in discussing. There have been a number of heartening responses by unwavering Catholics, but I wonder, is there a "silent majority" out there.

For the record, I cannot claim I am actually a Catholic, though I am on my way, thanks to private conversations with a couple of members here. Born a Protestant, becoming an Anglican my journey has led to Rome. Through this path, I have been in churches with horrible individuals that behave anything Christ-like and faced administrations that were either indifferent, or complicit. So, when I hear others mutter things that remind me of points in my life, with apologies to Simon&Garfunkel, "Hello disillusionment, my old friend..." comes to mind. While I am un-qualified, perhaps opening up the thoughts of a neophyte might help or engage others.

1) Jesus and St. Paul warned us about false prophets and the dangers of those who claim to be Christian when they are not. So, to me, there is no surprise in present events. Why is anyone else? Disappointed, yes. If we always had a John Paul II, it would be too easy, and we would have no challenge to our faith. An easy faith is, ultimately, an empty one. Maybe Jesus sent us Francis, so we would be challenged to prepare ourselves for the next John Paul.

2) For me, to get to the point of coming to the Church, took a lot of thought. I had many of the common mis-perceptions, prejudices and criticisms I see echoed on this board. But, those are all failings of men, not of the Church. Men have been failing the Church from the very beginning. When they fail the most, is when good Christians are needed the most to step forward and help redirect the earthly institutions back to their intended course.

3) In the end, the Church is the local parish, and your faith should be driven by the Bible, not what people far removed from your life do or say. Christianity starts at home, and grows from there. The business of Bishops, Cardinals and the Pope will not separate me from Jesus.

I am not sure I fully conveyed what I was thinking, but I'll leave it, for now.

I'm not.

I'm a cradle Catholic that isn't leaving. We have been let down by people but not by God. The sex abuse scandals involving children and young adults is humiliating and has probably accounted for many of the people who have left. I've attended services at other churches and really haven't found anything better. All of this is my humble opinion

I grew up attending the catholic church, left decades ago due to hypocrisy, bullying by priests, abuse of power by priests, and the entire homosexual magnet that the Catholic church is.

I found priests to be no different than anyone else, but they professed to be. Power corrupts and as far as I could tell, the head priest learned to hide that part of his personality but did not try to improve his treatment of others nor his ethics. In our church there was the main priest who was a super power abuser and hypocritical liar. Also there was the homosexual deacon, who I stayed far away from. However there was an alcoholic priest who was the only one who treated people fairly and did not abuse his position.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: c1steve,

quote:

...failings of men, not of the Church. Men have been failing the Church from the very beginning. When they fail the most, is when good Christians are needed the most to step forward and help redirect the earthly institutions back to their intended course.

Right you are.

Congratulations. Welcome. Stay the course. Enjoy the journey. It's long, but the destination is worth it. We have obligations, to those who came before us and taught us the way, and to those who will come after us.

I was born into a Catholic family too.
My grandparents were Catholic and their parents were too.
I am not technically leaving the church. I just right now am not going and most importantly, not contributing. If enough of us quit contributing, they might get the message and boot this Che wannabe out.
It was bad enough when our Parish Pastor was a raving liberal. He would get up during Homily and spew the senseless liberal garbage that does not match facts or make sense and then would not talk to you about it afterwards..he was a coward.
I guess the main goals of the church today is to stop Global Warming and stop Trump from building a wall and slowing immigration in this country.
Forget about abortion...just no longer matters.

The Catholic Church is not the only church one can attend to worship God. And I'm not saying any of the others are better than the Catholic Church. For me, I'm leaving because of the pedophile priests and the lack of accountability or punishment to them for what they did. Tack on what the current Pope has been saying and I realized it's time to go. I wish the church luck but it will have to be without me. There are a couple of other reasons but these are the two main ones.

When Trump won, he's threatened the Bishops' funding stream.

https://www.lewrockwell.com/20...-funding-threatened/

Trump Policies Threaten Catholic Bishops’ Funding

Christopher ManionApril 21, 2017
“No no no, not God bless America, God damn America!”

Obama’s Pastor Reverend Jeremiah Wright, on racist Americans

“Nativists” “Racists” “Xenophobes” “Bigots” “Irrational”

US Catholic Bishops describing opponents of amnesty

Last fall, America’s Catholic bishops needed a victory. Their credibility and their bank accounts had been battered as the clerical abuse and cover-up scandals endlessly dragged on. Donations from the faithful had tanked. Thirty million had simply left the church, now identifying themselves as “ex-Catholics.” So many had left, in fact, that Hispanics were now the largest population of Catholics under 35.

For years the bishops had set moral teaching aside and placed all their bets on the passage of legislation conferring amnesty on “undocumented immigrants.” It was a financially rewarding campaign, since the Obama Administration had been giving them hundreds of millions of dollars a year to harbor illegal aliens and Muslim “refugees.” Bishops undoubtedly expected that funding to grow under President Hillary Clinton, and they needed it desperately. So they decided that Hillary Clinton was the horse they were going to ride. She was going to win.

Granted, Clinton and her fellow Democrats were the bedrock of support for abortion “rights,” which the Church considers to be support of murder of the most innocent. But there’s no federal funding for the bishops in fighting abortion, or in calling out those Catholic politicians who support it. Moreover, those same pro-abortion Democrats were also the bedrock supporters of amnesty, and, like any other federal grantee, bishops don’t like to bite the hand that feeds them. So they put abortion on the shelf.

But while Bishops held their moral fire regarding Catholic abortion supporters (e.g., Vice President Joe Biden, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, Senate Democrat Whip Dick Durbin), they lit into supporters of the rule of law, including millions of Catholics, with a public vengeance that they had seldom displayed regarding the abortion issue. Focusing on Donald Trump, they laced their rhetoric with countless epithets, many of them vile (see links above). With a wink, bishops supplied Clinton Democrats with some of their best campaign lines. Democrats, in turn, appreciated the bishops’ moralism, often citing it in their talking points supporting amnesty and opposing Donald Trump.

No doubt the bishops harbored a certain personal distaste for Mrs. Clinton ­– but they didn’t like Trump either. Moreover, a Clinton victory would seal not only their financial survival, but their moral rehabilitation.

Hillary’s victory would mean that the bishops’ long march for amnesty had finally succeeded. For years amnesty had been their prime moral mandate.

So a Clinton victory would be their victory – both financially and morally. Their long national nightmare of immorality, reflected in the endless abuse and cover-up scandals, would finally be over; after all those years in the moral wasteland, they could declare victory.

And then Trump won.

Like the rest of the establishment, Catholic bishops were shocked. They were simply and totally unprepared. Their feckless welfare agency bureaucracies, loaded with third-rate “experts” largely funded by the taxpayer, were as surprised and horrified as their colleagues in the opposition media. They had no “Plan B.” Countless bishops had spent the past year and more lambasting Trump and vilifying his supporters. After all, their “expert” staffs had assured them that Trump was a loser, period: so joining the anti-Trump hysteria was cost-free, while it could gain valuable support from a friendly media and the new Clinton administration for their taxpayer funding.

When the curtain came slamming down on their federal funding dream on election day, frantic bishops turned to the faithful – with less than promising results. New York’s Cardinal Timothy Dolan, America’s most visible Catholic prelate, had already confronted widespread outrage from his flock because of Pope Francis’ ongoing condemnations of capitalism, his Global Warming fixation, and his thinly-disguised disdain for the United States. His Trump-bashing didn’t help either. Just two weeks after the election, Dolan sent a blistering letter to every priest in his archdiocese, hectoring them to turn up the pressure on the people in the pews and raise more money. “The Evangelicals sure demand stewardship,” he blared. ”The Mormons sure do! Our Jewish Synagogues do! Planned Parenthood sure pushes its donors!”

Apparently, it didn’t work. Four months later, bereft of sufficient funds from those parishes, Dolan was forced to mortgage valuable church property on Madison Avenue to pay $100 million in settlements for victims in the clerical sex abuse and cover-up scandals. Federal tax dollars can’t be used to settle those cases, or to pay off those mortgages – and the Cardinal had to get the money from somewhere. In his desperation, he even threatened to sell his chancery in midtown Manhattan.

Cardinal Dolan’s problems are only the tip of the iceberg. Catholic dioceses all over the country are facing drastic reductions in the hundreds of millions in federal aid they have received in recent years. While bishops have been stentorian in their ongoing campaign for amnesty, they are universally mute when asked about their federal funding. The national Catholic bishops’ headquarters does not respond to repeated requests for details regarding the funding the bishops receive through countless federal agencies and programs. Independent researchers have found that under Obama the amount for the limited number of Catholic programs they have been able to identify surpassed $100 million a year, but that may be a small part of the total.

After the election, many Catholics hoped that their bishops would welcome Trump’s reversal of Obama’s pro-abortion policies regarding the U.N., Planned Parenthood, the federal courts, and so much more. After all, Catholic teaching considers abortion to be an objective evil, while Catholic teaching encourages lay Catholics to take the lead, and even disagree, on political issues like immigration. Nonetheless, while there’s no money in opposing abortion, the bishops’ welfare agencies have received billions in taxpayer funding. So the bishops are going for broke. They continue to vilify President Trump’s immigration policies, while they remain silent all the while regarding the federal dollars at stake.

Is there a connection? Draw your own conclusions.

I've been anywhere from 80-86% of Catholic faith ever since the Church abandoned the Latin Mass. By that time, I had already become initiated in Rosicrucian(AMORC) teachings.

Today I hover around 81-82%. It varies, almost on a daily basis.

I left the Church right after Vatican II. Came back 9 years ago. I was close to leaving again due to Pope, our Bishop & politics but then I remember I am a child of Jesus Christ. I cannot leave the Church He founded.

I just make up my own rules, no confessions, that's between me & Christ, not a man. I only care to look at Christ on the Cross, I almost cry when doing the Stations of the Cross, when I look at Mary & what we did to her Son, our Lord.

Sometimes I think the Church died with Christ on that cross, man got ahold of it & destroyed it.
I will always believe in the Holy Trinity & look forward to the day He calls me home.

Not leaving. I'm a cradle Catholic/ public school raised. We invested in Catholic schools for our boys and it's great to see their dedication and love of Jesus, attending Mass away at college and being involved with campus ministry. I would suggest a retreat, reading the Bible or small group discussion for anyone feeling pulled away. I feel the lack of religion affiliation is a major detriment for our society.

My family and I aren't leaving either. My oldest just started Kindergarten at the same Catholic school I started Kindergarten at 35 years ago. My wife even told me she's looking forward to spending more time at the church now that we'll have a lot of kid events to attend. There are things I don't agree with, that mostly start in Rome; but my beliefs and faith run way deeper than the ability of humans to fuck that up.

quote:

Originally posted by weekendshooter:
I'm a cradle Catholic that isn't leaving. We have been let down by people but not by God. The sex abuse scandals involving children and young adults is humiliating and has probably accounted for many of the people who have left. I've attended services at other churches and really haven't found anything better. All of this is my humble opinion

My thoughts are the same; your words are more eloquent than mine.

there is a lot of good that is accomplished in my parish and diocese. It might take some time before we see the likes near John Paul II, but I continue to have faith in God and his will.

I'm not.

I cannot tell you where to go.

I left the Episcopal church about a month ago.
I have found another denomination and am very happy.

Wherever you go, celebration and fellowship in Jesus Christ with like minded folks is a good thing, wherever you end up.

Catholic here, not leaving.

One thing to remember is the pope can say any damn thing he pleases, and as a practicing Catholic you are free to ignore everything he says.

With one exception, and that is when the pope speaks on a matter of faith and morals, on behalf of the ENTIRE church. That's only happened 3 times in 2000 years, so Pope Francis can say what he pleases and I will ignore it.

Remember, men are imperfect. The church (little c) is imperfect - but the Church (big C) is perfection itself.

quote:

Originally posted by reloader-1:
Catholic here, not leaving.

Same, same.

I am a "fallen away" catholic for many years.

As a Church, run by humans, it has all the same foibles as any organization run by humans. So I don't feel it is evil or corrupt or have any ill-will at all. In fact, I really appreciate the moral guidance provided in my earlier years.

But it is an organization run by humans. Not really "necessary" for salvation. But I think it does provide a valuable help for those who need that level of guidance.

Not leaving. My local Parish is good, and I don't deal with the Vatican. My priests are good men, and I have never seen or heard otherwise.

I was non-denom and hated it. They'd call out other Christian faiths and say "Not doing it right", bag on other faiths "They are going to hell", and the Southern Baptists....I won't even get started. The judgemental behavior was sickening. When I left I left for good. When I did become Catholic and it came time in class to tell them what I didn't agree with them on, I told them. I also told them I'm not changing my mind about those things, ever. They accepted me anyway. A wise non-denom Pastor named Hutch, in Seattle, told us often, if you're looking for the "perfect" church you will never find it.

My current Pastor did tell us all that for every one person that joins the church, 7 leave currently. He mentioned this a few months ago. I don't get worked up over the Pope and my Pastor does not harp on that or repeat. He is just trying to get us sinners to the promise land. I do wish the Priests who've sexually molested children would be locked up under the jail, made to room with the most violent criminals in existence. But God will judge them in the end.

Born into Catholic Family but left the church a good while ago due to changes made by the Catholic church.

Abandoning the Latin Mass, AMORC teachings, abandoning the Old Testament, cover ups of the sex scandals, Current Pope, just to state a few of reasons.