I dunno, John. The affection I feel for the Catholic Church is about the same as I feel for the house I grew up in: I smile whenever I think about it, I love to visit, and talk with the people there. But it's no longer my home, and the thought of living there again is sort of silly...

I suspect, from things that you have said, that you are, in fact, one who is "pulling against her."

And also you have the handicap of being a cradle-Catholic. You think of the Church as being like your local parish, with all its flaws and ordinariness. You can't see the big picture, so of course it "looks silly"

As CS Lewis had his devil, Screwtape, say: "One of our great allies at present is the Church itself. Do not misunderstand me. I do not mean the Church as we see her spread out through all time and space and rooted in eternity, terrible as an army with banners. That, I confess, is a spectacle which makes our boldest tempters uneasy. But fortunately it is quite invisible to these humans."

(Plus you have the handicap of having grown up in the post-Conciliar Church, and likely were just not taught very much.)

I have the advantage of discovering that all I grew up thinking of as "church" was just a late quirky offshoot of The Church. To be my age and suddenly have all my ideas change gives me a perspective that most people don't have. (But that's another subject.) Sort of like discovering a door you hadn't noticed in your funky old house, and opening it and discovering the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles! Awesome.

Before I begin, let me be _very_ clear: I do not consider the Catholic Church to be silly. Rather, I consider the idea of my rejoining the church to be silly.

Having said that, I did join the church-- of my own will-- at age 12. It wasn't until later (around age 17) that I came to realize that I simply lacked faith in the existence of Jesus, and that this disqualified me from Christianity. In the mean time, I attended a Catholic Highschool.

I did a minor in Christianity-- I am well schooled in early Christian theology and history. I am, in a large measure "pulling for" the Catholic church. I am "fond" of it.

But it's not mine.

I shouldn't be speculating on your thought-processes, though I can rarely resist the temptation.

But speaking about my own thinking, I'll say that we live in a culture of thought that conditions us to think of the Church as silly. We don't even realize how much our thoughts are produced by our environment, until something causes us to stand outside and look at them afresh

For instance, I mentioned Nominalism in this post.

It's a subject I'm just starting to delve into. And that in itself is a new thing for me. I've always assumed that philosophy was an unimportant intellectual game, but that I myself just "thought," without using any philosophical system.

In fact I was being just as silly as the time my son insisted that he didn't have an accent, unlike people from other places!

Our thoughts are determined in part by our underlying philosophy, and in our culture that's Nominalism, and its various offshoots. Nominalist ideas sound normal to us, realist ideas sound silly. Catholic beliefs are realist, and while a nominalist can believe them, it's something of an upstream swim. A nominalist finds it silly to think that bread can be both bread (and only bread as far as any scientific probing can find) and simultaneously—in a essence we can't see—the Body of Christ.

We don't think the universe works that way. So if we believe, we tend to assume that God is doing something arbitrary and "unnatural." Our gut-feeling is opposed to it. The Church teaches that the universe is working this way all around us. We tend to reject this out of "common sense," not realizing that we are in fact steeped in a way of thought we are too close to to even see.

I highly recommend this short piece on Nominalism: What's in a Name?

...weird how I can agree completely with both the Punning Pundit and John, even when they disagree with each other...

...I suspect that I have a lot to work out yet!