I think American RC's like to use this fraudulent little statistic to overcome their minority status here in the States.
Actually, I was being quite generous when I allowed for even two hundred million faithful. Why don't you tell me, sinkspur, just what percentage of American RC's are actually obedient to church law and doctrine. Let's just use birth control and abortion statistics alone and leave aside the many other indicators which show how obedient American RC's are to Rome and your pope.
Personally, I doubt that even 1 in 10 American RC's is obedient in even this matter let alone many others. Care to correct me?
The fact GWB is that actually a very small percentage of the "baptized"are "faithful"
In my immediate family tree..out of 26 adult baptized Catholics only 4 are "practicing Catholics".......one is unchurched (for 20 years,but would still call herself a Catholic) a couple unchuched that would never call themselves Catholics.We have a few Presbyterians,a couple Charasmatics,a few Baptists..and some Wesleyans
I do not believe that Rome has any clue just how many Catholics there are in the world......
There are lots of "social" Catholics..and lots that have left and will NEVER return..
So to give those numbers to impress is actually to mislead!
The parish rolls are amended on (I believe) a biennial basis.
Apostates like yourself are not "kept on the books" as you would like to imagine.
This does not mean that every communicant is a devout or obedient Catholic, but it does mean that they do participate in the life of the Church to a significant extent.
The fact which sinkspur was attempting to drive home was that the Pope has a number of concerns, as a pastor of an enormous and widespread flock, which smaller groups and localized sects are not aware of.
For example, there are 30,000 Catholics living in and around Baghdad - constituting roughly half of the (repressed, discriminated against and frightened) Christian population of Iraq. Pastor Jenkins of the local independent Baptist congregation in Terre Haute may shout for the carpet bombing of Baghdad because he is ignorant of the fact that there are any Christians in Baghdad or because they do not adhere to his particular sect's theological principles.
But the Pope knows that there are Catholic, Orthodox, Monophysite and Evangelical communities trapped inside Iraq, that they are already oppressed by the Muslim majority there, that they have no say in how their country is run. He feels for them as members of his flock as surely as he feels for the thousands of Catholics (including members of my parish) who were murdered at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
If there were a mission of the Church of the Nazarene in Kabul with hundreds or thousands of your coreligionists trapped in the clutches of the Taliban, you might not be eager to see them indiscriminately killed along with their oppressors. One is reminded of Abraham's plea for the righteous living in Sodom.
In any event, our President and the Pope are of one voice - that justice requires the rooting out of the terrorists and their destruction, not the Clintonian expedient of randomly bombing targets in order to get cheap applause. The Pope firmly endorses our President's just resolve in this matter. Both George W. Bush and the Pope know that raining death on the Christians of Cairo, Baghdad, Damascus, Beirut and the West Bank is not the answer.