Thanks for your support.
I was raised in WNY, which I have been assured by other FRoman Catholics on this board, is a notriously liberal, corrupt Catholic diocese.
Taking a look at Buffalo politics and those who are Catholic in it, reinforce that view.
I live in a much more conservative area now and am still amazed at the liberal attitude by Catholics here, both in conversation personally and by observing the bumper stickers on the cars outside the local RCC Saturday evening and Sunday morning.
My observations are not simply parroting “anti-Catholic” talking points but from real life experience. with actual interactions with Catholics I meet and talk to.
I’m sorry that that displeases so many here, but denying it doesn’t change anything.
FWIW, I HAVE met Catholics who are conservative and vote that way, and I can count them on one hand.
There is a whole lot of corruption these days (decades). That quote from Catherine of Siena pertains horribly today. I'm sure you've read the oft-quoted passage from Our Lady of Akita as well. Same thing.
Here's one that was stated by Cardinal Ratzinger back in 1970:
Let us go a step farther. From the crisis of today the Church of tomorrow will emerge—a Church that has lost much. She will become small and will have to start afresh more or less from the beginning. She will no longer be able to inhabit many of the edifices she built in prosperity. As the number of her adherents diminishes, so will she lose many of her social privileges. In contrast to an earlier age, she will be seen much more as a voluntary society, entered only by free decision. As a small society, she will make much bigger demands on the initiative of her individual members. Undoubtedly she will discover new forms of ministry and will ordain to the priesthood approved Christians who pursue some profession. In many smaller congregations or in self-contained social groups, pastoral care will normally be provided in this fashion. Alongside this, the full-time ministry of the priesthood will be indispensable as formerly. But in all of the changes at which one might guess, the Church will find her essence afresh and with full conviction in that which was always at her center: faith in the triune God, in Jesus Christ, the Son of God made man, in the presence of the Spirit until the end of the world. In faith and prayer she will again recognize her true center and experience the sacraments again as the worship of God and not as a subject for liturgical scholarship.
The Church will be a more spiritual Church, not presuming upon a political mandate, flirting as little with the Left as with the Right. It will be hard going for the Church, for the process of crystalization and clarification will cost her much valuable energy. It will make her poor and cause her to become the Church of the meek. The process will be all the more arduous, for sectarian narrow-mindedness as well as pompous self-will will have to be shed. One may predict that all of this will take time. The process will be long and wearisome as was the road from the false progressivism of the eveof the French Revolution—when a bishop might be thought smart if he made fun of dogmas and even insinuated that the existence of God was by no means certain9—to the renewal of the nineteenth century. But when the trial this sifting is past, a great power will flow from a more spiritualized and simplified Church. Men in a totally planned world will find themselves unspeakably lonely. If they have completely lost sight of God, they will feel the whole horror of their poverty. Then they will discover the little flock of believers as something wholly new. They will discover it as a hope that is meant for them, an answer for which they have always been searching in secret.
And so it seems certain to me that the Church is facing very hard times. The real crisis has scarcely begun. We will have to count on terrific upheavals. But I am equally certain about what will remain at the end: not the Church of the political cult, which is dead already with Gobel, but the Church of faith. She may well no longer be the dominant social power to the extent that she was until recently; but she will enjoy a fresh blossoming and be seen as man’s home, where he will find life and hope beyond death.
Joseph Ratzinger, Faith and the Future, Ignatius:2006,Chapter 5
There are, from multiple sources, some very, very hard times ahead.
My observations are not simply parroting “anti-Catholic” talking points…
I haven't taken them as such. There are those who do so; I haven't counted you among them.