Greetings and welcome to the forum!
Like you I was raised catholic, but took it far less seriously than I should have. Unlike you, I’ve since been confronted with evidence that my recollections and reality are somewhat not-aligned. (More in a minute).
I spent much time with an evangelical group called the Navigators in college. Did the weekly bible study, one-one with staff, summer discipleship training, memorized versus, etc. I too grew greatly in my faith and came to believe I had been short-changed by the Catholic Church. Luckily, my own mother was sharp enough to see what was going on and called me on it one day when I was complaining. She pulled out all my old catholic school workbooks, some of the textbooks, book reports, etc. Boy was I embarrassed by how much I had let go in one ear and out another! That day I had to admit that I couldn’t blame the church for my own failures. Thanks mom!
The more I learned from the Navs, the more my conscience started to bother me. I too heard the grape juice theory. Grape juice is a non-existant item in cultures with no refridgerators! It either goes bad or turns into wine in no time flat! Besides that, read the next line. The steward OBVIOUSLY notes that it is alcholic wine. Nobody loses their ability to tell good ghrape juice from bad after having a few too many drinks of GRAPE JUICE!
I attended the services of some churches of other people in the Navs. Most were longer than one hour, but none contained more scripture. They had more music, more preaching ABOUT the subject scripture passage, but not more actual scripture than the three reading we get at mass. If you ever hear the passage where Jesus renames Simon to Peter, you’ll hear some distortion about the Greek words being different, but won’t hear that the REAL reason for that is the gender of the noun, not a distinction intended by Jesus. You won’t here that both forms of rock are Kephas in ARAMAIC, the language Jesus actually spoke. Understood properly, most evangelical pastors can’t explain why Jesus told Peter “You are rock and on this rock I will found my church.”
The catholic position of faith, works and justification has ALWAYS been harmonious with both Paul’s admonitions against ‘works’ (which to Paul’s audience are the works of the Mosaic law) AND Jesus words about the sheep and the goats. The catholic position has always been that we are justified through grace. But we further understand that the choices we make in living our lives IS ITSELF and acceptance or rejection of that grace. When we choose to subordinate our own will to that of Christ in our ordinary lives, that is an actual occurence of accepting the offer of God’s grace. It does NOT constitute an ‘earning’ of salvation (though individual catholics botch understanding of that distinction quite as often as they do other matters of faith and doctrine).
Evangelical pastors always need to wave their hands and deny the CLEAR MEANING of the text when asserting that communion is merely a symbol and a remembrance of Jesus and his sacrifice. Read those texts in John; why would anybody abandon Jesus over his choice of bread as a symbol? They wouldn’t. They left because they were repulsed at the need to eat his very flesh and blood. He let them go because God never forces us to obey. If they had merely misunderstood, he would have corrected them!
Finally, evangelical pastors never seem to notice that their brand of christianity is absent from history for the first 1,500 years! The earliest of christians wrote clearly about Christs real presence in the eucharist, had a hierarchy that placed critical importance on tracing succession to the apostles, believed in sacraments as sources of God’s grace, etc.
Please note that the Catholic Church does NOT place the Pope and councils on the same plane as scripture. The canon of scripture is closed. The Catholic Church teaches that no new GENERAL revelation is forthcoming. No church teaching can ever contradict genuine principles taught in scripture (versus distortions or misunderstandings of scripture). The role of the magesterium is to interpret scripture and provide guidance on the abundance of issues not definitively outlined in scripture (contraception, end of life morality, stem cells, other modern phenomenon not thought of 2,000 years ago).
Jesus instructed us to be in this world, but not of it. Catholics, in fact DO tend towards be too much of it. Fundies, in my experience tend towards not being IN it (random door-door hardly qualifies as being in the world). Different side of the same sin. If you aren’t IN the world, the lost folks can’t relate to you. You become Ned Flanders to them. Ineffective as witnesses and prone to spiritual inbreeding. The world is NOT evil. It is good, but fallen. Ponder that distinction between catholic and fundamentalist teaching long enough and you’ll eventually end up re-poping!
. All of us?