The death of Catholicism.

[Pat Mustard]

Considering that the Catholic Church condemned the "sin of Sodom" for over 2 millennia, how can the Church now embrace "gay love" without folks coming along and saying that the Church is contradicting itself?  And, if the Church contradicts itself (which, of course, it does and has), is not such evidence that it is just another man-made institution and not one founded upon any sort of divine "revelation"; and if so, why bother with it?  Speaking from a "person in the pew" perspective here.  As an atheist, I am definitively not trying to "defend" it; only surmising why Catholics may abandon it entirely and their reasons for doing so.

Considering that the church has had at least eight known positions on abortion, it is very adept at contradicting itself. And as Orwell outlined in Nineteen Eighty-Four it's not all that hard for people to suddenly veer 180 degrees away from their previous thoughts if they follow an organisation devoutly enough and the organisation has sufficient control and ruthlessness.

Also, I knew you weren't trying to defend the rcc in the thread, I was just putting my two cents in that Bergoglio's western face is much different to the reality of his views. Personally, I'm of the opinion that the rcc is becoming increasingly Afrocentric and fundamentalist, which will strike it's death knell. Even in countries like Poland which saw a catholic resurgence in recent years, the youth never really turned back to the church, and even many of the older people only had a superficial reconciliation based on the church's assumption of the leading light in the anti-communist "crusade" (while in substance managing to accomodate itself to the communist regimes quite easily in most cases. It did the same with the independence movement in Ireland, managing to hijack the movement almost on the point of victory while having spent the most of the previous two and a half centuries ingratiating itself to British rule).