Who will be the new pope?

[Minimalist]

Most American catholics think the church is full of shit on many issues...

http://ncronline.org/news/catholics-amer...olics-2011

. Fewer than one in three (30 percent) says that the Vatican’s teaching authority is very important to them, 46 percent say it is somewhat important, and 20 percent say that it is not important at all. Catholics also tend to de-emphasize the importance of the church’s social and moral teachings to their personal identity as Catholics. Although the Vatican and the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops have been highly involved over several decades in articulating the church’s opposition to abortion, fewer than half of American Catholics, 40 percent, say that the church’s teachings opposing abortion are very important to them personally. And even fewer say that the church’s opposition to same-sex marriage (35 percent) and the death penalty (29 percent) are very important. Similarly, Catholics also see the current structure of the church, despite its centuries-old tradition, as relatively unimportant to their identity as Catholics. Most strikingly, only one in five Catholics (21 percent) says that a celibate, male clergy is very important to them as Catholics, and almost half (46 percent) say that it is not important at all. By the same token, close to two-thirds (62 percent) indicate support for women in the role of priests in the church, and 75 percent express support for women as deacons.

In Europe the church is more of an irrelevancy than that.

The church is a criminal anachronism at this point. The sooner it goes down the tubes the better off we'll all be.