Christ has failed to sustain his Church as Church.

Was it God's failure that the Jews betrayed him and Israel was not sustained as Israel?

Since the time of Moses, there has always been always a remnant loyal to him.

All have turned away, all have become corrupt; there is no one who does good, no, not even one. (Psalm 14:3)

Christ won. But only on the cross and in the lives of individuals.

Was it really a transient image that is bound to decay?

Or was it a beginning of something great,

Does it have to be one or the other? Does Christ's victory mean there will no falling away?

Of course it was the beginning of something great, and for a while the church was wonderful. But Christ respects people's free will, and sooner or later they traded in his gift for worldliness and luxuries and... well, for the laws of men. They made the same mistake as the Pharisees- supplanted God's law for man's law without knowing it. The original power and majesty died down, the old saints replaced the old apostles, and then even the old saints became fewer until they too were lost.

Let me ask you a question: imagine someone sees some of the infamous sexual scandals about Catholic priests that come out, or even that they were one of the molested children, and then they think to themselves: "No church of God would have ever allowed this to happen, therefore this cannot be God's church." Perhaps afterwards they become an atheist or a Protestant or a Buddhist or a Muslim or something else.

So my question is: who is to blame for that, really? Definitely people are accountable for their own decisions... but I also think the church failed in its duties to be Christ-like. Well, if it failed in those duties, and if, indeed, it's responsible for people abandoning religion altogether and so being damned to hell, why do you still call it God's holy church? Do you think any church under one of the original apostles could have ever had any possibility of a scandal like that happening? I don't mean the possibility of someone rejecting their church, I mean being directly responsible for the death of a soul due to the depth of its own depravity and perversion. The apostles would simply have "discerned the spirit" of the evil person in question and thrown them out on the spot before they could do so much damage... not covered them up! Where did the power all go?

It failed to such a degree that we now have gigantic communities of Protestants going about that number in the millions! If the church had been loyal to God, there wouldn't have been a falling away and there would be no such thing as Protestantism. In fact I would probably be speaking to you right now as a Roman Catholic instead of as a Christian mystic with no denomination.

A church responsible for such failures as these, and many others, is simply not one I can trust. So I won't. It's just done too much wrong and seems to continue to do a lot of wrong, and seems to lay claims to divine authority which it just doesn't have.

To be fair, I don't deny the church has also been responsible for good and it's unfair of biased people to only look at the bad, but then, if the church is responsible for a lot of good and a lot of bad, this is no different than any other worldly organization. Even a Muslim community could be responsible for a lot of good and bad.

So again, no. I won't get impatient or offended with you if you're still persistent, but... the answer will always be no.

By the way, based on all this where do you think I stand in terms of salvation? I won't be offended at your answer.