Spare me the propaganda. I was raised devout RC, and even after I became manifestly born again thru tearful repentance and faith in the risen Lord Jesus to save me as a damned + destitute sinner, i remained as a weekly (and holy days) RC participant for 6 years after, serving for some time as a CCD teacher and lector.
What RCs overall manifest they see in the cross is a mere religious artifact that promotes perfunctory professions, with little to no testimony of the God working in their life and of grace in the soul, and thus I found very few to fellowship with about such while in Rome.
We wish we could stand there to kiss Our Lord’s sacred feet...We wish we offer Him consolations in that dark hour,
Please, you are believing your own PR. Catholics coming in about last in evidences of commitment, only surpassed by likewise dead liberal mainline Prot churches. It is evangelicals who hold Scripture to be supreme as the accurate and wholly inspired word of God that haved manifested the most evidence the work of grace in the soul, from worship to service.
It would *break my heart* if I thought Jesus did all this for me and the accident of time and space wouldn’t let me be there on Golgotha to offer my Lord whatever simple consolations I could.
By reading and imagination, can relive any event in Scripture, but that does not mean it is occurring, and the issue is that of Christ actually offering himself continually with the Mass being a ongoing atonement, "a sacrifice of propitiation, by which God is appeased and rendered propitious," as by it He "offers himself a most acceptable Victim to the eternal Father, as he did upon the Cross," the victim "now offering by the ministry of priests, who then offered Himself on the cross."
That is a greater fantasy than they way you characterize RCs.
Oh, but you have nothing to do with those dead liberal mainline Churches do you? No no--your church has conveniently separated from them once, twice, three, four times over.
How nice it must be! Just carve out a tiny little niche of self-selected Christianity, built only of people who chose this particular theology, this particular pastor, and this particular worship style, and that's YOUR church, right? That Methodist guy on the street who can't be bothered on Sundays anymore--he has nothing to do with you. But the Catholic who votes for Pelosi and is contracepting--he is still mine, right?
Heck, if I could self-select my own Church from the most committed, the most devout, I could leave your puny little evangelical commitment in the dust:
http://benedictinesofmary.org/content/monastic-schedule
See that schedule? That's a DAILY schedule. Do you remember, from your Catholic days, what all those terms mean...if you were ever taught? Matins/Lauds, Prime, Terce, Sext, None, Vespers, Compline--every single one of those terms involves communal prayer and singing the Psalms. Every day starting at 5 AM. These ladies don't have families except each other, don't have jobs except whatever tasks they are assigned in the monastery. Their whole life is prayer. Individually and communally, orally and mentally.
But I *can't* self-select from the most devout. It's not MY church. It's Christ's Church. The Christ who prayed that "we might all be one" and who promised that the weeds would grow among the wheat. So yes, I'm a member of Christ's Church, and so is the Pelosi voter, and so is the poor soul who self-excommunicates and damns himself with the mortal sin of heresy--and may we all be saved from the fire come the harvest.
The Holy Sacrifice of the Mass is exactly what you once taught it was. We've always believed it, still believe it, and will always believe it. And you are doing yourself no favors by absenting yourself from it.