'Why aren't you Catholic yet?'

   For five hundred years, the fall of the Roman Catholic Church has been imminent, right around the corner, because she has been too corrupt & too cruel & too voluptuous & too removed from common life & too ascetic & too effeminate & too masculinist to survive.

   Spanish troops sacked Rome to the delight of Luther. who was sure that the reign of the Antichrist that had trained him & fed him & his ancestors was at an end.

   French Revolutionaries declared an end to the Church & expelled her from France & instituted a cult of Reason & Nature; Napoleon captured the papal states & Pope Pius VII, and it was certain then that the Church was finished.

    Italian Revolutionaries decades later unified Italy under secular rule & Pope Pius IX spent his last years as 'prisoner of the Vatican' & it was certain that the power of the popes had gone with the papal state, and that the Church was at an end.

   A German ambassador witnessing the installation of Pius XII, author of the anti-Nazi encyclical condemning the pagan state & its racism & brutality, said 'What a magnificent ceremony -- too bad it's the last one.' At the time, the Thousand Year Reich was already half done its course.

   After the war during negotiations, Stalin smirked "The pope? How many divisions has the pope got?" The USSR is gone.

   When I was a child, the Church began bleeding vocations as priests & religious left in droves and Catholics abandoned the faith because altars were being smashed & the ritual they had been taught was the most beautiful thing this side of Heaven all but vanished & devotion to the Mother of God had all but disappeared. The pope was irrelevant, the world was going to be new & full of peace & love, and the Roman Church was at an end.

   Now I'm nearing my half-century, and the ancient rite of mass is slow growing again & all the forgotten devotions have returned, and  again anti-Catholics cry down the Church & allege that all clergy are perverts & the pope a criminal, and once again, the Church is at an end.

   Come back in 500 more years, and you'll find again the same story -- scandal, weakness, the Church rocked and wracked with uncertainty & anguish -- and the same prophets and victors crying 'Babylon the great is about to fall! She's going at last!' and the Church of the year 2510 will once more be about to fall.

   And why aren't you a Catholic yet?