I'll never understand why Roman Catholicism is still considered a "conservative" denomination. Down here in the Bible Belt it is much more liberal than the multitude of Fundamentalist Protestant churches that are available.
Let's see, anti-abortion, anti-homosexual acts, anti-homosexual "marriage," against embryonic stem cell research, against human cloning. Just for those, they're conservative.
Conservative because it is a dogmatic religion. Fundamentalists depend on an "inerrant" Bible whose very text they owe to the Catholic Church but more importantly, dogmas such as the Trinity, which is the very anchor of orthodox religion and the belief that the Jewish Scriptures are Christian and not the possesion of the children of Israel alone. I might mention the specific moral teaching that marriage is forever, a doctrine that is honored more in the breech than in its observance in Mississippi.