My husband is one of those hard-headed Americans -- like Dickens's beefsteak, 'he has to be humored, not drove'. But he was the one who announced that if GenCon 2003 went the way it looked like it would go, we were heading over to Rome. Could have knocked me down with a feather -- but even though he was raised Methodist, his mom was raised Irish Catholic, so that was there all along. But he had to figure it out for himself, trying to push him anywhere is fatal.
We were very "high church" Episcopalians though -- lots of 'smells and bells', what some people call "more Roman than Rome." And once we investigated we discovered that there was very little theological difference when you got right down to it. What Catholics actually believe, and what you hear from a vantage point outside the Church that Catholics believe, are two very different things.
There is a lot of not particularly subtle anti-Catholicism in the Episcopal Church. Along the lines of "we have it right as an inheritance from the ancient pre-Council of Whitby Celtic Catholics -- the Romans have it all wrong."
Of course they've tossed all that tradition with this latest series of stunts . . . and of course if you go and actually read up on the Council of Whitby you find out they are wrong about that too and have been all along.
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Quite right. It's unfortunate. That's one reason these threads are so important, and also why they can be so difficult.