When I was young many well educated Catholic women in this country not much younger than your mother decided to talk about the things you've mentioned among themselves. The result was that feminist leaning women began drifting away from the church even back then. There was already an ongoing crisis in not having enough priests back then, so I think for those of us completely outside Catholicism, what you are saying is not news. We really rather expected it to happen.
I think the result of this trend over decades has been that the Catholic church which had been getting dramatically more liberal during my youth has been turning more conservative, precisely because the remaining loyal members are more conservative. Their numbers continue to shrink both in North America and Europe, and there are signs the same thing is starting to happen in South America.
The Catholic Church for important reasons has always been a monolith, but that works as a "universal" only when the vast majority agrees with the leadership. When there is no shame or effective compulsion to force people to comply, then the monolith must eventually begin to crumble. My Catholic cousins who are nuns must feel a bit jealous of my sister who has been a Protestant minister. When women, like Ann1962 above, say they are Catholic, but feel they have no part in the local church, then the Catholic Church will surely lose most of their children and grandchildren. Either the Catholic Church reinvents itself or in a few generations it will be a shadow of its already reduced state of today.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
branchandroot
no subject
Date: 2012-02-20 02:43 pm (UTC)I think the result of this trend over decades has been that the Catholic church which had been getting dramatically more liberal during my youth has been turning more conservative, precisely because the remaining loyal members are more conservative. Their numbers continue to shrink both in North America and Europe, and there are signs the same thing is starting to happen in South America.
The Catholic Church for important reasons has always been a monolith, but that works as a "universal" only when the vast majority agrees with the leadership. When there is no shame or effective compulsion to force people to comply, then the monolith must eventually begin to crumble. My Catholic cousins who are nuns must feel a bit jealous of my sister who has been a Protestant minister. When women, like Ann1962 above, say they are Catholic, but feel they have no part in the local church, then the Catholic Church will surely lose most of their children and grandchildren. Either the Catholic Church reinvents itself or in a few generations it will be a shadow of its already reduced state of today.