[Mo1]

Do you worry there will not be a Catholic Church at some point?

NOPE ... as long as there is one person left that believes .. there will always be a Catholic Church ..

The Vatican is a Holy Site and should always be sacred .. but in the end it is just a building ... what builds the church is belief that comes from the soul and no one can take that away

[sweetliberty]

The papacy and the Catholic church are not strangers to scandal. Historically, those who were not born into positions of power or for those males who were not first-born sons, becoming a cleric or a monastic were often the only "acceptable" avenues to pursue. It mattered little the desires of the individual so the element of "high calling" was in many cases, if not most, completely lacking. The Church was a road to power which was co-equal with the government. It was the flagrant and well-known abuses of that power that set off initially apostasy within the church and later fueled the protestant reformation as well as laying the ground work for our own prohibition on a state church, the idea being to prevent the same enmeshed power structure between the church and state which had so utterly corrupted the church and diluted the state under the European hierarchy.