Cardinal Raymond Burke (whom Pope Francis has demoted) has given an interview. It tells us the reasons why men shun the Catholic Church. It's because women rule it:
Some snippets:
Cardinal Raymond Burke said in an interview with website “The New Emangelism: Drawing Men to Jesus Christ and His Catholic Church” that the church needs to return to its male-centered roots and stop catering to “women’s issues” in order to regain its once robust standing in the world.
...
“I think there has been a great confusion with regard to the specific vocation of men in marriage and of men in general in the Church during the past 50 years or so,” Burke told The New Emangelism (TNE) in an interview published Monday. “It’s due to a number of factors, but the radical feminism which has assaulted the Church and society since the 1960s has left men very marginalized.”
“Unfortunately, the radical feminist movement strongly influenced the Church,” Cardinal Burke complained, “leading the Church to constantly address women’s issues at the expense of addressing critical issues important to men; the importance of the father, whether in the union of marriage or not; the importance of a father to children; the importance of fatherhood for priests; the critical impact of a manly character; the emphasis on the particular gifts that God gives to men for the good of the whole society.”
“The goodness and importance of men became very obscured,” he said, and that needs to change.
Women and their needs have not only decimated the church, he said, but the institution of marriage as well.
“I recall in the mid-1970’s, young men telling me that they were, in a certain way, frightened by marriage because of the radicalizing and self-focused attitudes of women that were emerging at that time,” he recalled. “These young men were concerned that entering a marriage would simply not work because of a constant and insistent demanding of rights for women. These divisions between women and men have gotten worse since then.”
Worst of all, he said, the church took a “fluffy,” womanly attitude toward sexuality.
“Making things worse, there was a very fluffy, superficial kind of catechetical approach to the question of human sexuality and the nature of the marital relationship,” he said, which has led to sexual anarchy, the abundant availability of pornography, homosexuality and child sex abuse.
Delicious! Irresistibly funny, because it is so upside-down! Cardinal Burke is so far in some other reality (perhaps in the world of hyenas?) that I cannot stop laughing.
But I'm not writing this post just to ridicule a cardinal of a very patriarchal church for believing that his church has been taken over by the radical feminists cabal when in actual fact women are not allowed to be priests, women are not allowed to have any real power in the church and contraception and abortion are banned with the aim of keeping all women at home while also maximizing the number of new little Catholics.
Well, yes, I am. Honestly, this guy lives in a cloud-cuckoo-land. No amount of female subjugation would make him satisfied, I suspect. And did you notice that the female concept of sexuality is "fluffy" (pink ribbons around the genitals?) but nevertheless has resulted (according to Burke) in the crime of child sex abuse???
The gall. So the men inside the church who were pederasts would not have been pederasts if some non-fluffy male concept of sexuality had reigned? What would that be? Having intercourse while boxing? Or something more sinister.
This must be the most astonishing explanation for child sex abuse I've ever heard. To fluffy a view of sexuality??!!
The second point (other than ridiculing Burke) of this post is how much it reminds me of some more extreme MRA creeds which assert that what men's rights really mean is the right for men to rule as overlords of women and the right to get respected for that. Many of those creeds also begin with the assumption that the current society is run by a small number of radical feminists* (with frightening fangs and impossible powers, all aimed at killing off men), and that the proper rights of men (to be overlords) have been utterly stripped away. Therefore, the status quo is seen as oppression of men. Well, perhaps not in Saudi Arabia or Afghanistan, but in almost all other countries. That's why we have had an unbroken chain of radical feminist female presidents and commanders of the military and popes and stateswomen and so on.
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*That radical feminism has always been a fairly small part of feminism and has had very little impact on religious and other institutions is irrelevant in both the case of Burke and the case of some MRA types. That's because they paint any movements aiming for gender equality as a radical feminist takeover movement. Indeed, I suspect that they know this and that the terminology is carefully selected.