Joe, according to the bible Jesus said "Where three people are gathered in my name, I will be among you." This carries a strong implication that no huge top-down institution was ever needed.

I've argue with you before that there are churches that favour a non-hierarchical, plain-and-simple approach to worship, nearer in fact to the kind of model you seem to advocate than to anything found in the Catholic church. Your posts suggest that your own loyalty is rooted largely in dustom-and-practice, nostalgia, etc - ie you're comfortable with Catholicism because it's what you've always known.

A conservative Catholic theologian on UK TV yesterday, who is hoping there will be no backsliding on sexual orientation, etc, with a new pope, said to a liberal Catholic on the other side of the table: "If you want to play 20 holes instead of 18, go and join another golf club." There's surely no answer to that. Many of those who support the church's values do so out of deeply held conviction. It cannot be right that those with contrary values have a right to proselytise those values.

I know you compare your relationship with the Vatican with your relationship with the US administration, but there are the important differences that 1) you don't need to be part of the Vatican's organisation and 2) that organisation is not a democracy in which policies survive or fall according to the weight of numbers behind them. By staying within it, when you have the option to leave, you are contributing, however benignly or passively, to the strength of that organisation. When the pope or some cardinal tells us in all seriousness that condoms are no good because sperm can penetrate the membrane, far better for him that he does so in the name of one billion thinking catholics than in the name of a small and extreme cult. And thanks to you, he can.

On the question of flexibility, there are times in its history when the church was notoriously harsh, authoritarian and inmflexible. So if you were to claim that your church can trace an unbroken line right back to Jesus, you would also have to admit that the line has survived thanks to some extremely dubious people and practices, and that the church throughout its history has shown a tendency to modify its messages as those messages become unfashionable.