Poll: Support for gay marriage up among Catholics

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

Well it's a bit of a good point, do Catholic churches where almost 100% of congregants support gay marriage exist? They certainly do for other denominations, including some evangelical churches.

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

Well it's a bit of a good point, do Catholic churches where almost 100% of congregants support gay marriage exist? They certainly do for other denominations, including some evangelical churches.

There's obviously a lot more self selection amongst members of Protestant churches. 100% is also an extremely high threshold.  You can't get 100% of a population to agree on anything.

That's why I said "almost 100%". There's one (evangelical) church here that I can guarantee is close to 100% though since one of the pastors is gay and the lead pastor makes talking about supporting gay marriage probably the main thing he talks about. But let's set the bar then at a more attainable, say 80%.

I wonder what % of Catholic priests support gay marriage.  My guess is around 70%.

Uh, that's probably a good estimate for the percentage of mainline clergy who support gay marriage, but certainly not a group that's almost all olds or in this day coming from the third world. I will point out that there is only one priest here (and I have given him credit for it) who came out against the archbishop's fervent anti-gay marriage/pro-amendment ban campaign and refused to endorse it. He's profiled and interviewed here and here it covers him asking the archbishop to step down. But that's ONE priest in the entire Twin Cities archdiocese.

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Salon

These polls mean more when they poll actual mass attending Catholics, not people who identify as Catholic. There's a huge difference between the groups.

"No true Scotsman"

If you haven't gone to mass in 20 years and live your life completely irreligiously, you are not a Catholic in any meaningful way. Polls of mass attending Catholics show what the believers think. Polls of people who identify as Catholic are better for figuring out what people from Ireland/Italy/Poland/Mexico think.

Do you consider going to church every Sunday the only condition for living life religiously?[/quote]

Of course not. The problem is that the Catholic church does mandate Mass attendance unless one can't make it for a legitimate reason and holds that if someone does miss Mass for another reason they can't receive communion until they go to confession. So such a person is clearly not being much of a Catholic. Maybe they can still be a fervent Christian, but clearly not a Catholic. That's a point I've been making for awhile, a lot of these "cafeteria Catholics" have basically nothing theologically in common with the church and no beliefs that would identify them clearly as Catholic. Christian perhaps, but not Catholic.

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

BTW I should clarify above, there's a huge difference between disagreeing with the Catholic Church on issues like abortion, birth control and gay marriage, which are issues the church feels pretty fervent about but are still largely political ones, and theological ones like the Immaculate Conception, transubstantiation, role of confession and the sacraments, etc. Because those are the things that actually define the church as what it is and separate it from the rest of Christianity. If you deny those, what makes you a Catholic and closer to that church than most Protestant denominations? It's like being a "Christian" who denies the divinity of Jesus or a "Muslim" who denies the prophethood of Mohammad. At some point a line has to be drawn or Catholic becomes a meaningless designation. This is largely what I think DC Al Fine is saying and I tend to agree with him.