Survey Says Catholics Are Becoming Less Catholic

It’s because the church doesn’t really punish laity and ordinary believers anymore. In some cases, they can exclude them from Communion, but that’s about it. It’s not really a punishment. If you’re a priest, theologian, professor, author? Then yes, they’ll defrock you, fire you, revoke your teaching license or forbid you from publishing. They have means against “professional” Catholics. But normal believers? Nothing

As for transubstantiation. That was never fully explained when I was a kid. It’s easy to think it’s symbolic. My father’s side of the family is Protestant. I’ve been to their services often enough. You can tell you’re in a Protestant church by the way it’s decorated, but otherwise the differences are extremely superficial. Yeah, the words are different during the ritual, but that’s to be expected even if effect were supposed to be the same. Unless it’s explained to you, or you pay lots of attention you couldn’t tell.

You’re right, but I’m fairly sure that cause and effect is reversed: It’s not that they don’t punish anymore and thus people stop thinking they’re right. It’s that people no longer consider them to be right, thus they’ve lost a large fraction of their power to punish.

I’m pretty sure that most priests are well-aware that the more time they spend talking about all the batshit crazy ideas the church has, but most catholics actually disagree with, the *less* people will bother even showing up for the service. (most don’t anyway, offcourse, since most catholics reject most of what the church offers)

Talking of the importance of celibate priests, and abstinence from sex before marriage, will at this point, just make people think about all the abuse-cases, and thus expose them as the hypocrites they are. Better to say nothing controversial, and hope people forget.

Honey badgers are unique amongst the animal kingdom in their impressive capacity to not care. 

(At this point, you should probably google “honey badger doesn’t care”)

It’s pretty easy to see that Catholics are no longer following many of the Catholic Church’s teachings.  All you have to do is look at the average family size now versus the average family size 50 years ago to see that the Church’s stance on birth control is being openly flouted.

When my parents were growing up, it was not uncommon for them to see families with 10 or more children at church.  No one so much as blinked at families that large.  My mom knew a family with 22 kids.  My dad, who was one of 6 children, came from an average sized family compared to the rest of his parish.  My fiance’s mom was one of 17 kids.  They were considered a larger family, but they weren’t thought to be so unusual that they should get their own TV show.

I can’t think of a single family in my parents’ parish that has more than four kids today.  The average is between 2 and 3.  Priests have to know their parishioners are using birth control, but no one says anything.  The ability of priests to meddle in the personal lives of their parishioners has been greatly reduced.  If people don’t like what they’re being told, they’ll just leave, and right now the RCC can’t afford to lose those donations.  They’ve got child-rape settlements to pay.

So they asked Catholics a question, “Do you believe that at the
consecration during a Catholic Mass, the bread and wine really become
the body and blood of Jesus Christ?

To clarify the position of the Holy Roman Catholic Church on this issue: they proclaim that the bread and wine really become the body and blood of Jesus H. Christ, but not materially. I.e. they believe that the supernatural is true reality. Believing in material transsubstantiation would just be silly – and open to disproof.

I had to check that too. Always learning a thing or two.

Living in the South, I’ve seen Baptist ideas rub off on Catholics.  It’s not hard to find Catholics who don’t know that the Catholic Church accepts the evolution of humans from primates. 
It also seems to me that Baptists are showing a lot more interest in realistic crucifixes, cherubs and putti than they did some decades ago.  I get a kick out of the way they portray Jesus in a medieval kingship role, while claiming that “true Christianity” was lost when Jesus died and rediscovered by Martin Luther.

Michael Nugent of Atheist Ireland said in a talk a while ago that Irish Catholics were effectively Protestants and Irish Protestants were effectively Atheists.

It’s that kind of bullshit that results in only ivory tower theologians caring about it.

Your average believer doesn’t, no matter weather it’s real or only symbolic for them. In practice, you can hardly tell a difference between the communion in a mainline Protestant and a Catholic church.

There are rather severe high level disagreements about performing ecumenical services, but the people who want those services don’t see what the fuss is about

As a reformed Catholic, I can tell you that most Catholics pick and choose – probably MORE than the statistics show.   It’s comforting to know that you can only shove so much bullcrap down a person’s throat before they start vomiting it back up and out! 

Did you mean you’re a  “reformed” or X-Catholic?

Once these were issues that the average believer did care about. So much so that they fought wars over it. Now they care about different things, and most don’t care enough about any religious issue to kill or die over them. Progress.

Not surprising at all! These are the kinds of Catholics I’m familiar with, which is a big reason why I’m more comfortable with Catholics than evangelicals. Catholics are just so much more “normal,” despite the official crazy that comes out of the Vatican. They’re also more frustrating in some ways. All these nice, moderate, birth control-using, pro-choice, non-sexist, non-homophobic folks don’t believe what the church teaches, but they still give money to support the hierarchy and send their children to be indoctrinated at Catholic schools.

It’s not just the lay people either.  When I was a Catholic (the cafeteria variety), I sought out the most liberal Catholic church I could find.  The priest stated during one homily that he knows the church dictates no sex before marriage, but the most important thing is really if you love the person. 

Another time, there was a nun who had to give some sort of speech for some classes she was taking.  The priest got up before the homily, noted that women are not allowed to give the homily during Catholic mass, so Sister Mary was now going to give, not a homily, but a “talk”.  Everyone laughed and the church was not struck by lightening during the “talk”.

The priest was reguarly suspended for such things, but he always ended back at the church before long.

The only thing you’ve accomplished here is making yourself look like an ignorant fool. Please go back & educate yourself more before you embarrass yourself again.

A nun at my high school was busted for saying the same thing your priest said about premarital sex. I remember she had to recant the next day. I was looking around my classroom, thinking, “Which one of you ratted her out to your parents?”

The word “X-catholic” conjures up a scary image of catholics dressed in spandexes sporting an “X”, wielding super powers and fighting against equal rights.

Isn’t the Roman collar scary enough for you?

No mention of the Sacrament of Penance (Confession)
In my Cathoholic childhood it was a BIG deal. Not today.

And only 50% think weekly Mass is important.
I was “taught” that if you were  late for the Consecration on Sunday,
you had to attend another Mass or commit a MORTAL sin.
Unconfessed mortal sins could lead to eternal Hellfire.

We’re living in a world full of Cultural Catholics — Cafeteria Catholics
— who pick and choose what parts of the faith they can accept and which
are expendable.

Or it means that the Catholic Church isn’t defining the Catholic faith any more. No True Scotsman, and all that.

It also means those of us who criticize the Church, point out the
obvious lies, mock the silly beliefs, castigate the Church for its moral
failings, and make the case for secular alternatives to the supposed
“benefits” of religion are doing a wonderful job.

Indeed, people who do this are doing a wonderful job. Moreover, it seems that most such people are inside the church, not outside it.

Nazi Germany. Really?
http://www.evilbible.com/hitler_was_christian.htm

Yeah, trot out the HitlerStalinMao card again. You are like a broken record. Do you you even want to be taken seriously?

Your ignorance is showing! 

1.   The secular nations of Europe really are less crime ridden and more humane than countries that contain many god-believers. 

Here is a link to one of the major research papers in this area, published in a reputable peer-reviewed journal.  It does NOT support your claims.  It strongly supports the notion that the more religious the community the more dysfunctional it is.
http://moses.creighton.edu/jrs/2005/2005-11.html

2.  Hitler and Nazi Germany were Christian, not atheist.

Nazi Germany was built upon the strong anti-semitism of the Catholic Church and Martin Luther.  Hitler was strongly anti-atheist, banned atheist groups and made religious education in schools compulsory in order to teach the appropriate moral values that he believed were necessary for the nation. 

In a speech 26 June 1934, Hitler stated:

“The National Socialist State professes its allegiance to
positive Christianity. It will be its honest endeavour to protect both
the great Christian Confessions in their rights, to secure them from
interference with their doctrines , and in their duties to constitute a harmony with the views and the exigencies of the State of to-day.” 

Hitler stated in a speech to the people of Stuttgart on February 15,
1933: “Today they say that Christianity is in danger, that the Catholic
faith is threatened. My reply to them is: for the time being, Christians
and not international atheists are now standing at Germany’s fore. I am
not merely talking about Christianity; I confess that I will never ally
myself with the parties which aim to destroy Christianity. Fourteen
years they have gone arm in arm with atheism. At no time was greater
damage ever done to Christianity than in those years when the Christian
parties ruled side by side with those who denied the very existence of
God. Germany’s entire cultural life was shattered and contaminated in
this period. It shall be our task to burn out these manifestations of
degeneracy in literature, theater, schools, and the press—that is, in
our entire culture—and to eliminate the poison which has been permeating
every facet of our lives for these past fourteen years.”

In a speech delivered in Berlin, October 24, 1933, Hitler stated: “We
were convinced that the people need and require this faith. We have
therefore undertaken the fight against the atheistic movement, and that
not merely with a few theoretical declarations: we have stamped it out.”

During negotiations leading to the Nazi-Vatican Concordat of
April 26, 1933
Hitler argued that “Secular schools can never be tolerated because such
schools have no religious instruction, and a general moral instruction without
a religious foundation is built on air; consequently, all character training
and religion must be derived from faith.”

3.  Authoritarian Communism is not synonymous with atheism. 

With the exception of Nazi Germany, the “atheist” nations you list were authoritarian dictatorships with strong ideologies that were de facto religions.   There is a huge difference in kind between (usually communist) regimes that were not friendly to any faction, ideology or religion that challenged or usurped their absolute authority and the (usually socialist) states and nations that do not promote religion but do not ban it either.  The US is different because it runs as a virtual corpocracy that is funded and maintained by right wing fundamentalist Christian groups. That is, the national religion is an insidious form of Christian Capitalism that promotes “moral” values that ironically lead to the exactly the problems that they are supposed to prevent plus a few more, as well: major crime, abortion, unwed mothers, poor education, poverty, racial, gender and sexual discrimination, coercive religious practices and lack of respect for people who have different or no religious beliefs.

“What is the difference between the slaughterhouses built by the Godless
Communists of Russia and China and the civilised liberal polities built
by the Godless progressives of Western Europe and elsewhere? The
obvious answer is that Western European countries are liberal
democracies committed to science and empiricism and reason, and freedom
of speech and debate; whereas Soviet Russia and Red China clearly were
not. It was not its atheism per se, but the illiberalism, the
undemocratic nature, the dogmatism of Communism that made it the
architect of so much 20th century horror.”

http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=6925&page=2