Liberal Catholics: Shopping in the Wrong Store, by David Carlin

By David Carlin, The Catholic Thing, April 1, 2022

David Carlin is a retired professor of sociology and philosophy at the Community College of Rhode Island, and the author of The Decline and Fall of the Catholic Church in America and, most recently, Three Sexual Revolutions: Catholic, Protestant, Atheist.

I understand, and even sympathize with, Catholics who, realizing that they strongly dissent from certain Catholic doctrines or moral principles, abandon the Catholic Church and migrate, for instance, to the Episcopal Church or to the wasteland of agnosticism and atheism.  If you think it is absurd to believe that a child can be born of a virgin, or that a man can rise from the dead, or that Jesus can be actually present in what appears to be bread and wine, or that there is something profoundly unnatural in the sexual embrace of two homosexual persons, or that abortion is never justified – if you deny any of this, you are probably doing yourself and everybody else a favor if you leave the Catholic religion and go someplace else.

Further, I understand, and even sympathize with, Catholics who, for whatever reason, dissent from certain Catholic doctrines or moral principles and yet remain in the Catholic fold without publicly making a fuss about their dissent.  …

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