RE: Respect Yourselves.
Paul writes, “The truth is, most Catholics and most of the Christian mainline denominations chose to abandon their religious beliefs long ago.”
Not so fast. First, the Catholic Church is quite out-of-step with mainstream cultural mores and has been for some time. It is much more traditional. Note its positions on marriage and divorce. Paul is quite right: for many Catholics, their practice of religion is not the same as Church doctrine. So why are individual members of the Catholic Church, presumably with more liberal views on a range of issues from contraception to divorce to privacy, noted in comparison with “mainline denominations”? In the latter case, the Church doctrine and the churchgoers may have left traditional views more or less in lockstep but it is a comparison of apples (individual Catholic laypeople) and oranges (mainline denominations.)
His post makes a very good point. The “welfarists” among many churches — including the Catholic Bishops Conference and Catholic Charities — all opposed the 1996 Welfare Reform. This political move was widely viewed as motivated by the desire for a continuing stream of federal funding for their “front line work in the war on poverty.” These organiations were quite wrong…they embraced government programs and taxpayer funding not because the programs helped the needy, but because it enabled turf and empire building.
But this point can be taken too far. And, I wonder what facts support the assertion of “truth” that “most Catholics” have abandoned religious belief.
