[*grumble*grumble* It helps to hit "Post" when you're done with a comment. Now I gotta re-type the whole darn thing......]

John writes,

"Well really, who would want a faith that says, 'You can take all this stuff cum grano?' Or that you should decide on your own what is true? What's the point?"

You make your point well, John. The problem is that it misses the point of why people are leery of the Roman Catholic Church generally, in a way that they're not of other Christian churches.

On the surface, the Church is all about human salvation through Christ. Yet the Church has an odious past in connection with politics and the establishment of, or support for, tyrranies of one degree or another. That history is, I'm sure, not far from many people's minds. It doesn't help the Church that it still rules a country, no matter how small that country is, or how innocuous the Church's rule is.

Perhaps Malachi Martin had a point in his novel, Vatican, in which he asserted that the Church could flourish as a spiritual organization only after renouncing the things of this world, even going underground if it had to in order to fulfill its mission.

My two cents' worth....

Gah. That's "tyrannies", not "tyrranies".

I need a proofreader. :-)

Well, I don't think so. That's the excuse. But I'd say it is about as sincere as those people who claim to be leery of the US because some of our founding fathers owned slaves.

People decide what to hate, and then look for excuses. They could easily, if they wanted, find thousands of instances of the Church being persecuted by tyrannies, and of it standing up for the oppressed, and caring for the poor.

(Also, if measured on the scale of global organizations, the Church is not rich or powerful. Its reserves, for instance, amount to a few hundred million dollars. Big corporations measure their reserves in billions. I read recently the Apple has 20 billion dollars to jingle in its pocket.)

People edit history to fit their prejudices. Slavery in America is a big deal. Slavery in Brasil is not. Torture by the Spanish Inquisition is a big deal; torture by Protestants is not.

People are "leery" of the Church because it is the real thing.

All true, John, but I don't think that the Church can "close the deal" with many people until it finally takes Martin's advice and renounce political power entirely.

It's sort of like the bind Islam is in-- because Islam has this congenital tie to political power (a tie that I don't think it can overcome), it is doomed to fail in its mission of universality.

I'm not sure exactly what you mean by "political power" here...

In Islam, God and Caesar are one, in the sense that Moslem religious leaders are often political leaders, not merely as opinion-mongers but as actual office-holders.

In the eyes of many, the Roman Catholic Church's big sin, which haunts the Church to this day, is that it ignored Christ's command about God and Caesar, and it strove to be both, compelling allegiance (at least outwardly) to the Faith by threatening earthly punishments, up to and including death.

You'd be perfectly correct in pointing out that the Church no longer has any meaningful ambition to dominate public life like it did prior to the Reformation, but people's memories are long, and the continued existence of Vatican City doesn't help the Church's case any.

But people's memories aren't long. Most people know nothing of the past. They only "know" bits of history if it is helpful to buttress some prejudice. If they "remember" some rubbishing popular version of the inquisition or Galileo or the crusades, it's just because it provides an excuse to hide from God, or to remain Protestant.

Those have all been renounced repeatedly, and it makes not the slightest difference. If the entire history of the Church was zapped out of our memories by those Neuralyzers the Men in Black use, people would just make up new crap. In fact, they are doing so anyway--just read the Da Vinci Code.