Fair question. And the answer is two fold, really, one arising internally, and one externally.
In the first place, the internal reason: my judgement is suspect. I was indoctrinated into a cult. Brainwashed. I was literally unable to critically evaluate my belief in G-d. That faith system had multiple highly effective techniques that were designed to shut down critical thinking, judgement, evaluation. In the light of that, my conversion to Catholicism is highly suspect. In Catholic terms, it fails to meet the standards of full consent of the will. Unless and until I tear down every single false assumption that my latter belief was based on, that latter belief is suspect. If you've inherited land, and you build a big fancy house on it, and then you find out that there's a sinkhole under your big fancy house, you don't keep living in the house. You inspect the soundness of your house. You determine if the structure is still sound. And even if it is, you can't just keep living in it. You have to move the house to solid ground before you can relax in it.
In the second place, the external reason: the Catholic Church has made serious, grave errors. They have persisted in these errors despite calls, exhortations, and demands that they stop and correct these errors. The sexual abuse of children in the Catholic church is not even the biggest sticking point. The biggest sticking point is the cover up. Yes, there will be predators. Yes, the predators will probably be in the Catholic Church in roughly the same proportion as the rest of society. Yes, some of them will escape detection until they have hurt people. No one expects the Church to be filled with only perfect people. No one expects the Catholic Church to be prescient. What we do expect of the Catholic Church is what we expect of every reasonable, responsible institution in the world: when predators are discovered, you do not spirit them away to Rome out of the reach of prosecution, and treat them like royalty. YOU CALL THE FUCKING COPS.
Look, I was not molested by a priest, but I was molested. I was maltreated sexually, and it was not invisible. There were signs and symptoms. People knew or suspected. Teachers talked to my family. Doctors talked to my family. I was blamed, and ignored. The perpetrator had hurt other people in the same way. People who could have intervened, instead looked the other way. People ignored what was right in front of their faces. People took the cheapest, crappiest, most useless advice in the universe: "Ignore it and maybe it will go away."
Now, I don't expect perfection, but I expect more than the absolute, rock-bottom worst humanity has to offer. My family were poor, drunken, uneducated, completely fucked up, inbred, redneck, hillbilly scum. If you claim to be the source of truth, and the foundation of faith and morals, if you claim to be the institution founded by G-d Himself, then by G-d Himself, you have to do better than that!
In the light of the Church's repeated choice to protect itself, its reputation, its wealth and its standing against the very advice of the G-d they claim to worship (something, something, something millstones), it is a fair question to ask: Where is your G-d? If you can swallow the camel of wholesale child rape, yet strain at the gnat of the ordination of women, you have no grounds to defend yourself when people suggest that perhaps right and wrong mean less to you than power and prestige.
If you are indistinguishable from the world, then it is not unfair for the world to look at you and conclude that you are no more, no less than the rest of us. It is not unfair for you to be painted as merely one other stripe of screwed up humanity. And frankly, it is an obscenity for you to demand otherwise. It is an obscenity for Benedict XVI, and John Paul II to write over and over and over and over that the sins of the laity are "profoundly disordered", "intrinsic evils", and "anathema", while repeatedly maintaining that the sins of the hierarchy are nuanced, complex, and moderated and partially excused by the prevailing culture of the times.
You and Descartes. And also me: I was lucky enough to find I'd lost faith, as you know-- and so got to work on constructing a viable set of ethics independent of the Sunday school lot. (Descartes decided that he couldn't trust his senses, so he'd best work out a method of extracting information from the universe that didn't fundamentally depend on sensory input. He lay back in a nice warm bath and got to it. And then he got busy proving there must be a God, but whatevs. Most people don't reckon much on that proof.)
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