Non-Catholics, and especially the anti-religious secular liberals among us, think our values and ideals are ridiculous, and they ridicule us for holding them. But – when we compromise, when we blow it, when we fail to take those standards seriously, they note it, and they regard us with outright contempt for not taking our own professed religion seriously.
I was sharing this observation with Angie, and she said, “Years ago i got called out by an evangi for saying, as a supposed catholic, that i picked what i liked and left the rest…which is an AA principle –
she was 100% correct!”
Yep. It’s another reason to hold firm to the Faith that was transmitted to us: the nonbelievers WANT us to prove them wrong! They WANT us to love our Faith enough to be true to it.
Laura Lowder - One Woman's Thoughts 
Maybe that’s why they are so hard on our priests?
I think you are being unfair to the majority of Protestants. Their objections to Catholicism are theological and date back to the Council of Trent. They have nothing to do with ‘values and ideals’, which they share with Catholics. I wouldn’t lump them in with the secular crowd.
Happy to discuss further.
Churchmouse, I can only speak out of my experience. Here in the South, a.k.a. “Bible Belt,” Protestants in general are suspicious of Catholicism. When I was active in volunteering with a crisis pregnancy center in the late ’80s, there was hot debate over whether Catholics should be allowed to share in the pro-life ministry. Most of the “theological” presumptions I and my colleagues believed of Catholicism were badly mistaken. We believed they worshiped the pope and Mary, for starters, and rational discussion couldn’t make us see our wrong (remember: I was an evangelical Protestant then).
But at the same time, then and now, Protestants knew that Catholics disapproved of birth control, abortion, cohabitation, etc. – and expected Catholics to toe the line on those issues. If a Catholic woman admitted to being on the Pill, for instance, she lost a pretty strong degree of credibility – even though, as Protestants, we had no objections to contraception.
However, I will concede that I was more specifically thinking about a different group of people, secularists, when I wrote my post.