Why is the Catholic Church so slow to change?

The Church is totally slow on innovative change. And yeah they usually persecute innovators and then canonize them a couple of hundred years later. The cool thing is this: with all its bureaucracy and hierarchy, most of the powerful doctrinal contributions have been made by lonely little monks, and nuns in far away monasteries. Their work is discovered and the hierarchy makes the person a doctor of the Church.

We have a recent example of this. Thérèse de Lisieux was a young nun who died at 24 years old in the late 1900s. She was a "nobody" in the Church - just a little nun in a far away Carmelite convent. The Church looked at her writings and they were floored! Her autobiography spread right through Europe like wildfire. They made her a doctor of the Church and she has influenced modern thought about the Bible in a major way. My evangelical friends will be glad to know that her greatest contribution was her total abandonment and confidence in Jesus. She had a "personal relationship" to Him. He was her personal Saviour. That is Saint Theresa's gift to Doctrine through our Lord and Saviour, and it is huge.

The Church thinks that some modern changes are not good. For instance, gay marriage, birth control, abortion, euthanasia, pre-marital sex, lack of family values, divorce, no parents at home to take care of the kids, etc... Some denominations have tried to change to accommodate these "advancements in culture and humanity." They thought their "progressive" views on these issues were going to turn around the low attendance at Church. It has done the opposite and the Anglican and United Churches are on the brink of extinction.

The Catholic Church is not here to be evangelized by society, it is here to evangelize. Yeah sometimes we are slow about new trends and ways we could be more progressive in our Evangelization. Our Evangelical brothers are showing us much about how to do that with its embrace of modern music which we believe is a good thing.

The Catholic Church is like an ocean liner on the sea of time -not the Titanic :-) - She has majesty, she carries millions of passengers. Many other denominations come and go, but the Church just plods along, slowly, carefully evaluating every twist of history and cultural trend. By contrast, The Evangelical Churches are like little speed boats that are fast and can turn on a dime. That's why the Evangelicals kick our butts on Christian Contemporary Music. They have responded to the culture much more quickly than us. They can easily pull people out of the water.

But out on the rough waters of the high sea of time, through the ages and ages the Catholic Church is there, never perishing when the perils of wind and the waves crash against her majestic hull. And we believe she will be there at the end of the ages, delivering her cargo to our Lord and Saviour.