Personally I often view the role of the Church in the world as follows. Each of us is dropped off in an enormous wilderness, and we need to get home. In this wilderness there are many wonders, many dangers, and in particular, many dangers that look like wonders. The purpose of the Church is to lay out the path which will, without fail, bring us home. In doing so the Church naturally marks certain large areas off limits, because those areas will either waste our time or they will actually injure us. Now if we see something alluring in those marked-off areas of course we’ll complain that the Church is getting in our way of what we want (and we always only want the best, in our own minds). But the objective reality is much different.
Children want to play with matches and put their fingers in light sockets and hit their siblings on the head with sticks, and they scream when we stop them, but we must stop them because we know that what they want and what they need (and what they need to avoid) are two different things.
