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I know a multitude of catholics and people who just say theyre catholic but have done no study of the faith since their tenth year in school - high school

The latter just come up with ideas and rules and stories about how someone told them something

The level of discourse on FR invariably drops to imbecilic when the Church is cited in some anticatholic msm outlet. And the outlet is suddenly treated with honor and respect when it treports on the Church

The catholic church is over two thousand years old. It does not survive and thrive by throwing its dogma around like some stupid country who disregards its founding principles at the whim of a bunch of adolescent thinking men wanting the right to have inconsequential relations with women and pushes an allowance for them to kill the resultant babies

The Church simply does not act like that

Further it does not make up things like purgatory and tell its members what the new thinking on it is. Purgatory is either there pr it is not

Great theologians through the two thousand year history have determined that God has purgatory which purges souls of impurity before inevitably goes to heaven

This stupid CBS report is not intended to inform young people to prayerfully attend. World youth day via the internet

It is meant to get people to make fun of purgatory and the church and to remind people that there was a time of corruption when gullible uninformed lazy wealthy people gave evil men acting like clergy money to get them into heaven

http://www.catholic.net/index.php?option=dedestaca&id=5691

“An indulgence is simply a favor granted by the Church – to which, remember, Christ gave the “keys of the Kingdom” and the “power to bind and loose on earth and in heaven” (see Matthew 16).

By means of this favor, the Church applies the merits won by Christ and the saints to repair the damage that sins cause to our soul. We don’t obtain God’s forgiveness through an indulgence, rather we obtain the remission of what is traditionally called “temporal punishment” for sin. This is an important concept to consider. It connects both to the doctrine of indulgences, and also to that of purgatory.”