I grew up Catholic, converted to Evangelicalism, and am now an atheist. The one thing I’ll always give the Catholics that at least I grew up around is that they took the “feeding the poor message” pretty strongly to heart. They had a HUGE food pantry and they gave food to the local people in need of it every week. There were always drives happening for food and clothes and whatnot. It was enough of an institution that they had full time staff dedicated to it. I’m sure this isn’t the case for many other Catholic churches, but my anecdotal experience of at least one midwestern Catholic Church was pretty good on feeding the homeless. Now, the transubstantiation (literal bread turning to body, etc) stuff was bullshit and played a key role in my deconversion. People in my community didn’t even know that we believed that and when some of us kids found out, that was a bit of a reckoning 😆
Evangelicals, on the other hand, had their acts of charity but they were weak sauce compared to the Catholics. Occasional Christmas toy drives or whatever. They did free car washes. It was pretty inane compared to what the Catholics had been.
While the Catholic Church has a very long history of terrible things, they’ve also done some nice things like providing humanitarian aid, hospitals, foster homes, homless shelters, schools, etc. It doesn’t cancel out the terrible stuff but it does make it complicated. To quote Dave Chapelle “He rapes but he saves”
I grew up Catholic, converted to Evangelicalism, and am now an atheist. The one thing I’ll always give the Catholics that at least I grew up around is that they took the “feeding the poor message” pretty strongly to heart. They had a HUGE food pantry and they gave food to the local people in need of it every week. There were always drives happening for food and clothes and whatnot. It was enough of an institution that they had full time staff dedicated to it. I’m sure this isn’t the case for many other Catholic churches, but my anecdotal experience of at least one midwestern Catholic Church was pretty good on feeding the homeless. Now, the transubstantiation (literal bread turning to body, etc) stuff was bullshit and played a key role in my deconversion. People in my community didn’t even know that we believed that and when some of us kids found out, that was a bit of a reckoning 😆
Evangelicals, on the other hand, had their acts of charity but they were weak sauce compared to the Catholics. Occasional Christmas toy drives or whatever. They did free car washes. It was pretty inane compared to what the Catholics had been.
While the Catholic Church has a very long history of terrible things, they’ve also done some nice things like providing humanitarian aid, hospitals, foster homes, homless shelters, schools, etc. It doesn’t cancel out the terrible stuff but it does make it complicated. To quote Dave Chapelle “He rapes but he saves”