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Please, Pablo, call me Bustard.
Bashing? You? Not in this post. Disagreement is not bashing. As for what the Catholic Church looks like today, I think it's looks like what happened when the Church founded by Jesus grew beyond just a few people. He did tell us to preach the Gospel to all nations, this seems to me to imply growth on a large scale. My pastor doesn't "lord it over" his parish, neither does his assistant. Quite the contrary. Likewise almost all of the other priests, deacons, and the two bishops I have met.

Thanks, Bustard, for the calm reply. I will agree with you about the priests at the local parish level not being the ones I was referring to, and perhaps I could come up with a better term than "lord it over" (just the first thing to pop to mind). I certainly don't ever remember Father Larry from my local church acting that way (yes, I'm one of those dreaded born-again ex-Catholics...never thought I'd have that many hyphens associated with a description of myself!) It has more to do with how I perceive the highest echelons of the church (Rome).

I would love some good, solid, discourse on this kind of a subject but I'm still undecided if this is the best forum. I also have learned from experience here that even the slightest statement from someone critical of the RC church can draw some of the nastiest flames (and, to be fair, I've seen it go the other way, too).

Catholics on this forum may ask that since I am an ex-Catholic if maybe I don't have "issues" to work out. That may or may not be; I believe my issues are of a doctrinal nature mostly, and therefore born out of a concern for my fellow brethren who are still "in the Church", not any horrible experience that I had growing up in the Catholic church. On the contrary, I was very involved and, at the time, very committed to it, and I have fond memories of many of the priests and nuns that I knew.

I will agree with one aspect of this particular post, in that right now, it does look like the media is sort of "piling on", but I think that comes and goes, with the flavor of the day. A few weeks ago, it was Billy Graham, now it's the Catholics, next it will likely be some Protestant church/leader/? that gets dumped on.