However, to an outsider, the Catholics have also have built what looks like a formidable bureaucracy around their take on spiritual things, complete with pageantry, ritual and formal rules of behavior, and have maintained them with seemingly as much zeal as with their faith in God.
To the uninitiated outsider, this bureaucracy and its rules and rituals are difficult to understand and they get between the seeker and what I believe is their more completely balanced soul food the seeker hungers for.
My guess is that this bureaucracy also makes it hard for the Protest-ants to come back, since it seems to be why they left in the first place.
Your description of the Catholic church is identical to a description of the Pharisees.
Jesus wasn’t kind to the Pharisees.