There is One Issue Dividing the Church in America Today

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smithm29 said:
I would say there is one issue that leads to heresy, apostasy, and loss of salvation, and the issue is submission to the teaching authority of the Church. Like Tantum above said, this single issue is caused most often by the sin of pride.

The Church herself is not divided, but the lack of submission makes her far smaller than she appears.
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This.
If you want to say an issue is plaguing the Catholic Church in America it would be submitting to the authority of the Church. That is the root of the other issues.
 
manualman said:
Nah, those are just symptoms, not the actual dividing issue.

The real divide is between those who believe that God uses miraculous intervention to infallibly guide the doctrinal teaching of His Church and those who don’t. The issues you identified are just SOME of the ways the latter category show themselves.
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The Church cannot be divided. period. Otherwise, would not be One Truth. The Church is One in all matters. If people decides to leave or disobey, they are to be called heretics. How can One Church call anyone heretic if the Church is divided? It has to have one authority and not many.
 
The whole discussion has a tendency to revolve around what is perceived to be wrong with the Church in America; ignoring the far worse problems in Europe, ignoring the causes in Latin America, ignoring the issues in Africa, and totally unobservant of issues in the Middle East and the East. As such, it becomes somewhat insular, and tends to circular arguments.
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Therein seems to be the problem. A catholic (small “c”) or universal church can’t be called a “Church in America,” “Church in Europe,” “Church of England,” etc. That would be an attack on its very name. Each country has its own language(s), currency, government, laws, trade agreements, allies against outside agression, etc. And yes, even moral values. The Catholic Church has to transcend these barriers or the religion becomes more national/secular than spiritual, and what would be the reason for religion then?
 
ManOnFire said:
The roots of all 3 can be found in our pursuit of entertainment media for the Self. If we grew up in a rural area, not exposed to entertainment media, we could much more likely live as good Catholics without all these temptations which are leading us astray.

The entertainment media has distracted the attention of too many men away from the loving home relationship. The entertainment media has created a perceived need for consumerism, which compels people to spend more time at work to make more money. This takes men away from family time. If men were home more to validate and approve their boys into young men, then there would be less men who seek the approval and validation in the eyes of other men if their dads could have been home to fulfill their needs. Since dad prefers women, some boys will even try to be girls in order to gain dad’s approval. My heartfelt thoughts and prayers go out to them. We could help them through their pain, but their chief activists have already unilaterally made the decision for 100.00% of them by pushing for a declaration of normalcy, instead of healing through education of the causes. Premarital sex and abortion would be far less common if the entertainemnt media would stop profitting from our basest desires.
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There is a lot of truth in what you post. I hate to recommend a TV show in order to help prove your point (oh the irony!) but if you watch the program “19 Kids and Counting,” which shows the life of the Duggar family, you will see that so much of what we think of as normal in society is, in fact, brought on by exposure to media. The Duggar kids do not have television and never have, although they do have some access to movies (carefully screened by Mom and Dad). They are the most wholesome, healthy, PURE kids - more like kids used to be before TV and video games.

My own sons were more wholesome before Dad bought them an X-box. Finding E-rated games for the X-box was almost an impossible task. Most parents don’t even try, they just buy the M-rated games and let the kids have at 'em.
 
In my opinion the real heart of what disturbs the Church today, whether it be acts against morality, doctrine, disciplines, or any such thing, is the lack of a Catholic identity among individuals. What really, really separates the preVII era from today, IMHO, is formation of just that identity. My kids have to go to religious education at our parish in order to receive the sacraments, and at those classes they are trained to be protestant. Nothing, nothing that is done develops or is oriented towards any catholic identity. Nothing in our Masses is either. We have jettisoned wholesale all of that which gave people confidence in who they were, and in so doing we have prepared them to fall away or lose fidelity. The one thing the Church could do to restore sanity and strength among the faithful would be to act towards ensuring a good formation of a Catholic identity among the people.

As I have come to realize this failing, and its consequences, I have taken this as my first and last conscious parental goal. After the fiasco that was my youngest sons’ “first Eucharist” 🤷 preparation, I have sworn never to engage in such again. When confirmation preparation comes around it will either be truly Catholic or they will not participate in the program. I will no longer allow the sacraments to be held hostage as a lever to force me to submit to the erosion of my children’s catholic identity. Never again.
 
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