There’s a reason for the joke that RCIA stands for “Really Creative Ignorant Apostasy.”
I am amazed that anyone becomes Catholic after going through one of these programs, and that includes those taught by priests. Centering Prayer, the “Spirit of Vatican II”, divorce is now OK with the Church, genuflecting to the Blessed Sacrament is not done, contraception is a personal choice, the Resurrection may just be symbolic, Mary may not have been a virgin, Jesus did not work miracles (the loaves and fishes was just a bunch of folks sharing their lunch pails), Sunday Mass is optional, Universal Salvation is now doctrinally accepted, there’s no such thing as hell, or maybe there is but only people like Hitler and Saddam go there.
I’ve heard of some of that (not bending the knee to the body of our Lord, Jesus didn’t work miracles), but I’ve never heard of such damnable apostasy as “divorce is okay”, “contraception is a personal choice”, “the Resurrection may be symbolic”, or “Mary wasn’t a virgin” and “universal salvation” (excepting that “anonymous Christian” stuff, which I personally disagree with) preached in the name of the Catholic Church. That’s not to say certain Catholic scholars (Ray Brown) haven’t expressed some of those views about the historicity of the New Testament as hypotheses, but haven’t taught them as dogmatic fact to the masses, but are published in small runs on university presses for the college student, seminarian, and religious intelligentsia that can handle it, or are interested in the Bible as a formative document of Western culture, not inspired Scripture. Not preached to the standard, high-school-educated, folk-pietistic, John Public Catholic layman (that’s also the root of a lot of my problems with the NAB annotation: that’s it’s marketed to the average Catholic, and if an average individual reads the annotation, I can’t see how they’d keep the faith, unless they said, “the people who wrote this Bible are idiots” - I guess that’s what an overweening fideism does). Maybe I should be happy that I didn’t go through RCIA and should count myself lucky that I live near a traditional Catholic church (with the “church-like”, i.e. reverent, classical architecture and all, instead of some of the sterile white rooms with a cross hung over one end that I’ve seen) that celebrates the Tridentine mass and is relatively conservative - maybe I live in a conservative microcosm of Catholicism.
As an Orthodox, I was considered extremely liberal; as a Catholic, I’m considered quite conservative - holding the same views in both places.
On those last three, if they’re true… why is there any need for the Church, or for Jesus, or even religion? If we did not have first parents who sinned, we did not inherit original sin, and thus don’t need salvation. If Jesus wasn’t resurrected in the body, Paul himself tells us that his preaching (the New Testament) and our faith (Christianity) is a falsehood and vanity. If the Blessed Virgin Mother of God wasn’t a virgin - forgive the utterance - how could she have borne a savior, since the entire line would have been conceived in sin? Even Protestants believe that Mary was a virgin when she birthed Jesus, even if they impugn her honor by accusing her of carnal knowledge afterward. If everyone is going to be saved, why do we even need to seek God or try to walk the path of moral integrity? It seems those views would devolve into practical atheism in short order.
The whole divorce and contraception things are mortal sins and contraventions of the natural law, but don’t have to do with the truth and necessity of Christianity. The “Spirit of Vatican II” has been abused, but our current Holy Father seems to be doing his best to put a stop to the most egregious modernist interpretations that break with or even denounce received Sacred Tradition. The documents themselves are not nearly as liberal as the liberals make them out to be, but, like the Bible, people who are intellectually dishonest or capable of dealing with a good deal of cognitive dissonance (like those who deny first parents, the virgin birth, and the Resurrection, but still say they’re Christians) can interpret anything in any way to conform to their views, just like pro-homosexual, pro-birth-control interpretations of the Bible that I’ve heard - arguments which often drop to the Richard Dawkinsian level of argumentation, e.g. “the Hubble telescope hasn’t found Heaven, and our drilling platforms haven’t found Hell, therefore God doesn’t exist and the universe created itself, and everything in it is random”.
If your post wasn’t hyperbole (I often have a hard time detecting hyperbole and sarcasm, especially on the internet), I can’t imagine how far some of the “Church” has fallen - as far as Christianity goes, let alone Catholicism, people who hold those views are apostate. One can’t believe that man evolved from ape, didn’t have first parents, that Jesus was conceived by natural means in a sinful mother, and wasn’t resurrected and didn’t work miracles, and still be a Christian.
Even though it doesn’t work very well for general reasons, I would challenge those who hold to those views to a nice game of CS Lewis - that is,
Lunatic, Liar, or Lord.
