Your post was making alot of sense until you got to the part about Martin Luther. It's amazing how Protestants will scream that all Catholics do is blindly follow the Pope, and then they call on all Protestants to follow EXACTLY what Martin Luther wanted on every issue that confronts him. Interesting double standard you have. Protestants ran around paranoid that JFK (who was only margincally "Catholic" was somehow "control" by the Pope (LMAO! JFK never meet the Pope and never wanted to!), but when devout baptist Jimmmy Carter ran from President, no Catholic complained that Martin Luther's teachings would "control" him. (which they didn't, even though he CAMPAIGNED like they would)
And it's funny how you would use the death penelty to bring up Martin Luther. It just so happens that the Catholic church RE-AFFIRMED their support for the death penelty when the convined the Council of Trent. Alot of us Catholics would perfer the church return to it's stances of the COUNTER reformation era, rather than those of the Vatican II era. Still, even with a couple "liberal" platforms, the Catholic church today is probably STILL more conservative than half the other Christian churches out there.