They divorce, use birth control and have abortions, although their church forbids the practices, and they clamor for a greater role for women in church leadership or support of gay marriage.
This lie is typical of the garbage put forward by the likes of Frances Kissling and 'Catholics for Choice' crowd. The average Catholic in the pews reject these practices and take their Faith and the teaching of the Church seriously.
Agreed. The Church is there to provide precepts for the ideal life. It is not there to legitimise when we fall short of the ideal.
Regards, Ivan
On the issue of contraception, even weekly communicants do not follow the Church's teaching. Just look at the size of the families.
The genie's out of the bottle on birth control.
The average Catholic that I know doesn't know much about what their church believes, nor does he care. He goes because it is his family's custom to go. Half of the average Catholics that I know don't go to church at all. And don't say they are CINO's. That's just a cop out.
I'm afraid you're right, from a "Latino" standpoint (BTW, you can always tell when an article is liberally slanted by its use of the word "Latino" rather than the more conservative word "Hispanic"), although there are several very young Hispanic couples I know who are returning to their Catholic Faith with a capital C and then some. Most of these couples are younger than me (I'm mid 30's), and their parents are boomers who left the church altogether or did "buffet-style" Catholicism. Several of these couples have had the marriage sacrament performed in the church after having first married a few years ago in Vegas, etc., and LOTS of them are doing natural family planning.
Is it time for me to return to the Catholic Church? I don't know, but I have this feeling that I just can't shake about it. I've posted my experience before, but I'll post again both so that maybe I can get some guidance and advice and also for anyone's information.
Mr. HR and I met and married in a non-Catholic church, although I was raised Catholic. I wish my Catholic experience had been different, and that I could have been better educated on the "whys" of Catholicism and the actual "meaning" of what I was practicing as a child/youth. We were never taught anything about the Pope or Catholicism on a greater scale than our local Parish.
I felt like questions were discouraged and frowned upon. When I was older and in High School, I also was disallusioned by the openly homosexual deacon at my church and why he was even allowed to be one. He's still openly homosexual and still a deacon at a Catholic church elsewhere today, by the way.
I went to a predominately hispanic Catholic Church, and there were lots of single teenage moms, welfare dependency, etc., that I felt like our priest could have/should have addressed strongly if at all.
When I was really impressionable (I was very small so this would have been the early to mid '70s) the CYO kids did this barefoot "expressive dance" thing up the aisle while singing "All we are saying, is give peace a chance...." It sounds really bizarre now that I know more about Catholicism and have come to know the good conservative Catholics on FR, but back then it just seemed like my Catholic Church was a haven for liberals, hippies and welfare queens. I think the priest might even have been "liberal," if that's possible.
When I went to college, I started tagging along with my roommate to her church (Protestant), and I finally felt like I was actually being taught and finally hearing messages that were actually healing my soul and pointing out the "rights" and "wrongs", rather than just hearing readings during a Mass that weren't put into any context of what that meant to my soul and my life. It was the first time that I saw a church as a "hospital for ailing souls" or a "gym to keep my healthy soul in shape". I learned finally how to connect the teachings of Jesus Christ with life's everyday spiritual challenges and drudgery. I met Mr. HR at this church, and we were married there. However, worship at that particular church (and most Protestant churches in this town) has since become a Contemporary Worship, with "praise music" including drums, electric guitars, etc., and we're more the traditional worship types. It just "feels" like the conservative values Mr. HR and I believe in are more present among the Catholics we know today.