What do you think would happen?

[SeaCat]

I was just reading a post on another board about the prophecies that the Roman Catholic Church is coming to a crisis.

Now my question is this:
What do you think would happen to our society in both the short and long terms if the Catholic hurch suddenly fell or became much less powerful?

As for me? I have no idea what would happen although I would hope that our soiety would become even more peaceul. (I sincerely doubt this would happen though.)

Cat

 

[elsol]

More peaceful? The Catholic Church is war-mongering in your area?

I live in the States, raised Catholic, and pretty much the only effect I would see would be

1. Some very vicious short-term real estate battles... in my old home-town the Catholic church own two blocks of real estate right smack in the middle of the most developed areas.

We're talking easily 30 million dollars in real estate available.

2. Some even more fucked up latin american countries.

3. Some very... very lost souls looking for a home. Evangelical Christianity could start looking VERY good to them. (Good luck with that one... cause EC's are day-to-day more insane than I am... though I definitely take them when the Pope says 'The blood of the unbelievers must flow through the streets.', but in that situation all bets are off.)

 

[cantdog]

No opinion. There were times when I would have said a lot on the subject, but at the moment, I guess the state of the Church is pretty much irrelevant to my life. It'd tear a big hole in the education system, dumping all those kids on the open market, and as El_Sol suggests, there's a lot more property held by mother Church than you'd imagine.

 

[Weird Harold]

What do you think would happen to our society in both the short and long terms if the Catholic Church suddenly fell or became much less powerful?

Define "our society."

In the USA, I don't think there would be much effect at all --except a glut on the real estate market and a lot of schools raising the tuition rates and reorganizing.

"Western Society" is not going to be all that much more affected than the USA except in areas/countries where the RCC is the actual or defacto State Religion -- it's not easy to predict oucomes in those cases without knowing more specific details.

Areas where there is already religious conflict, ethnic cleansing, etc, there is likely to be a short term increase in violence against catholics deprived of the "protection" of the Vatican; just long enough to cleanse those areas of papist influence.

In the long term, on a world-wide basis, a sudden loss of the RCC's influence is likely to leave a power vacuum that will take a generation or two of periodic violence and/or societal unrest to fill.