Warm fuzzies versus truth

I'll probably do a rant on this later on my rant blog, so it's mainly for later full reading...

are "men" turned off by churches preaching the warm fuzzies instead of truth and hard rules?

LINK2 has Professor Podles book on the problem



Intellectual Discussion here.
which even quotes Chesterton.

in 1928, Chesterton observed, “There are two kinds of people in the world, the conscious dogmatists and the unconscious dogmatists. I have always found myself that the unconscious dogmatists were by far the most dogmatic.”

Eccles is saved has a biting satire on the subject here...and in the rest of his blog which is funny only if you know what is going on in the hateful Catholic blogosphere which still thinks dogma and morals mean something.

myself? I go because I still believe in the sacramental presence of Jesus in the Eucharist.

And my Tagalog isn't good enough for me to follow sermons, which is fine since I rarely listened to them or found them worth listening to in the USA...

However, we do have quite a few men (about 40 percent) at the predawn mass so maybe things aren't as bad here as in the USA.

Maybe because between the Black Nazarene and the story of Ninoy/EDSA that men still know that suffering and heroism in the name of truth are part of the faith...

a feel good church ignores the importance of finding God in the duties of  your daily life...

the little way of St Teresa, where cleaning the dishes for love of God is a way to holiness, or even the spirituality of the latest ogre of the left, Opus Dei:

he could show them that their worldly work could be a way of pleasing God, and that piety would not convert them into sacristy hangers-on or sanctuary drones, but would help them to be responsible in their work. He stressed the divine filiation, the fact that grace truly converts us into sons of God.

My beef against the Pope is that he blasts the rich, condemns airconditioning while preaching the green gospel that would destroy the GM crops that feed the poor and the industries that would give them jobs, but doesn't preach the "good new" to the poor: That they too can serve God by driving a tricycle or growing rice or even by staying single and working as a maid in Saudi to support your extended family in the Philippines.