Susan, it is easy to account for the growth of Catholics in the third world: bribing the poor to convert by giving them what their governments don't: subsistence assistance. A large chunk of the money raised by the church goes to support the missions. With the first world economic boom in the 90s, the church was getting a lot more money from the first world, and spending it in the third. As it should be, of course. But that money from the church's missions always has strings attached.

Also, the Roman Catholic church has always assimilated the indigenous religions of the peoples it evangelizes by adapting the folk superstitions of the indigenous population to the folk superstitions of Catholicism, unlike many of it's more stringent Protestant evangelizers, who are more stridently Calvinistic in their leanings. The Catholic church is much more ritualized than most the Protestant churches too, and most indigenous religions are full of ritual. So in that sense, the evangelized are merely adapting one set of rituals to another.

Ah, and daylia. The church has actually come pretty far from the drivel you quote. Perhaps you could familiarise yourself with something a bit more current. And also realize that the majority of activist Catholic laity these days are women, not men. And that there is already a place for women in the Catholic church, and that they wield a lot of power in those arenas--especially in the missions, in education, and in health care. Certainly more power than women have in any other religions I can think of off hand.