I blame the Protestants.

For what Gracie?

I blame the Protestants for all the anti-Catholicism.  Really fundamentalist Protestants think the Catholic Church is the seat of the Antichrist and they say Catholics worship idols.  Mainline Protestants say we worship Mary and throughout history they made fun of Catholics for everything, ever since the Mayflower landed.  Thus forcing Catholics to make compromises and send nuns out in full habits to play baseball and priests and bishops to wear secular clothes and smoke cigars and drink.

Then the reforms of Vatican II came along and pretty much threw out the rest of the stuff the original Protestant reformers objected to.  With the Novus Ordo in place, Protestants came back to Rome with their Protestant ideas.  Evangelizing culture.

So what is so bad about that?  No one likes Protestants - so prim and proper, 'goes to church on Sunday but watch out on Monday' Bible-bangers.  The whole purpose of the '60's was to get rid of oppressive WASP morality.  Kind of.  Anyway, now Protestantism is in decline - who wants to go to church and just sing hymns.  Him no like hymn.  They did it to themselves - they made so many concessions to inclusiveness and diversity, they secularized themselves out of religion.  Kind of.  Who wants women bishops anyway?

Protestantism in decline...

A new study by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life found that Protestants now make up 48% of Americans, compared with nearly two-thirds in the 1970s.

The decline, concentrated among white members of both mainline and evangelical denominations, is amplified by an absence of Protestants on the U.S. Supreme Court and the Republican presidential ticket for the first time.

"It's a slow decline but a noticeable one," said Cary Funk, a Pew senior researcher. Funk said a major factor driving the decline is an increase in religiously unaffiliated Americans to 20%, up from 15% five years ago.

Two-thirds of the religiously unaffiliated still say they believe in God. But they overwhelmingly expressed disenchantment with religious organizations for being too concerned with money, power, rules and politics.The study did not give reasons fewer Americans now identify with any religion.

But it presented theories that included political backlash against the religious right, delays in marriage, broad social disengagement and secularization related to economic development.

Some analysts said a softening of American religiosity could affect such areas as charitable giving and volunteerism, which traditionally have been driven by churches.
Others, however, said that ideals originally identified as Protestant and Puritan have become firmly entrenched as secular American virtues. The idea of America as a "city set on a hill" — a biblical phrase — with a special destiny to lead the world to freedom and democracy remains a bedrock civic value, said Richard Land of the 16-million-member Southern Baptist Convention, the nation's largest Protestant denomination.

"America is a nation with the soul of a church, and that soul is Puritan-Protestant," said Land, president of the convention's Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission. "But in terms of defining the purpose of the nation, it's been secularized long ago." - LATimes
 

So now maybe the remnant is coming into the Catholic Church, but they don't understand Catholicism.  They don't understand devotions such as the rosary and the scapular, they don't even know what an Ember Day is, they think the Infant Jesus wears dresses, they think Latino people are superstitious - in other words - they are still influenced by that Protestant bigotry.  (Many Catholics have bought into the same, BTW.)  They come in with their wives and expect to be ordained.  They wear capes but don't even know what a fanon is. 

What?

Never mind.