I suspect most modern Catholics would agree with you. I don't think its vet productive going round blaming each other for what our predecessors did hundreds of years ago.
Most modern Catholics are ignorant to all the suffering their religion has caused. As are most people of all religions, otherwise they would abandon it.
Your point rests on the premise that institutions carry some kind of permanent guilt with them that delegitimises what they stand for. There's a number of issues with that, not least of which is the fact that institutions are not neat abstractions that behave uniformly without contradiction or change.
This creates two issues for an institution as old and decentralised as the Catholic Church. Firstly, the church is not a corporation where processes and orders dictate the behaviour of employees and people are fired for insubordination. In practice it is highly decentralised, and the idea that it is centrally run by a single old man at the end of his life in Rome without access to a computer is farcical.
Secondly, the church is the oldest institution in the world. Even the United States, a 'modern' institution by historical standards, has to contend with the slaughter of native peoples, the enslavement of thousands of innocent human beings, countless wars (many of which have little to no serious justification), the destruction of the environment etc etc etc. And the US is by far the most just superpower by historical standards. In spite of all those things most people will agree that it has been an unprecedented force for human progress in its (relatively) short history.
Your comment was probably just a throwaway insult that didn't warrant such a detailed response but comments like it really irk me for some reason.
is pretty clear when you realize that only 4.3%[0] of their profit is for charities that they _only stand for money_, they use the rest for privately own businesses (incl. hospitals and schools, but completely private and run like businesses)
They also (currently, not in the past) been linked with money-laundering [1]; by the way your premise of the organization being decentralized and consequently non-responsible for the doings of their members is false; specially when they have special access to far more financial secrecy than the average bank or person.
Plus they are still a great spot for pedophiles[2] to do their things, even with the current pope they do not accept their bad handling of the acussations [3]
ivanca - let those of you without sin cast the first stone. I'm sure if you name a group you're a member of we can find something less than savory about it.
You should consider getting in touch with SpaceX and sign up for a one-person, one-way trip to Mars. Disassociation with all potential wrong-doers guaranteed.
My experience suggests the contrary (full disclosure, I'm Catholic, although I don't go to church regularly). Your argument is against religious INSTITUTIONS, which are, like all system we create, flawed. Religion itself is separate from what people do in the name of religion, just like the things the US has done in the "war on terror" is separate from the idea that terrorism is bad. Yes there have been bad decisions, but over thousands of years, for many of which the governments of the time did horrible things, it is not that surprising.
The reason many Catholics started coming to services again under the new Pope is not that they suddenly believed in God again, but that they feel the church has shifted to a stance they can support.(although it still has a ways to go IMO)
If an organization claims its legitimacy based on an unbroken line of continuity, and also claims certain fundamental values, then violations of those values at some point in the past should be seen as a break in continuity and a loss of the organization's legitimacy.
that would then mean that no government in the world is legitimate. Maybe we should invalidate all laws/regs passed during Obama's presidency, since he has fundamentally reneged on the promises he made in his campaign?
