Dear AMorePerfectUnion: The teachings of the Catholic Church are to be evaluated according to their truth, and not their popularity.
Obliviously in the Catholic Church were a democracy, she would be teaching whatever is being taught by the ruling elites who control the law, the schools, and the mass media.
Nobody can plausibly conclude that the Catholic community is flawless. On the contrary, it is full of infidelity to its own teachings, darkened with dissent and loaded with sin. What the Church does have, though, is sound moral doctrine: which is precisely why it faces daily these relentless assaults from without and within.
We are in a situation --- predicted by Our Lord --- where the tares are growing thick in the field with the wheat; or, to use a different analogy, where the dragnet pulls in all kinds of fish, some of them pretty ugly. The Lord says the tares will not be gathered and burnt, nor the fish sorted, til the Day of Judgment. Until then, we cling to the truth which Christ teaches us through the Church.
I will be grateful--- grateful forever--- for this truth, which, battered and embattled on all sides, still stands.
Here's a thought experiment: As the others give way on one contested point after another --- civil divorce/remarriage, contraception, sterilization, indiscriminate WMD's, total lethal assaults on the conceived child, artificial reproductive technologies, the radical deconstruction of sex, gender, marriage and family --- 20 years from now, which Church, do you think, will still have the the same, sound, unchanged moral doctrines that Christianity preached 80 years ago, 150 years ago, 500 years ago?
Well?
“Well?”
Well, you missed the whole point of my post.
I still like you and all that... :-)
This is another 'proof positive' that the real church is an invisible church...The tares will not be identified by anyone other than God...Same with the wheat...