The angle of folks like the author and all the others is transparent and they rely on a false premise, which I just explained. This article was phoned in and could've been written from a fill-in-the-blank template: the Church is bad and archaic, it's victimizing this poor group over here, here's our enlightened secular position on this issue, the Church must meet our demands. Mind you, I'm not even Catholic. But I have to say, it is nice to have an institution in society that refuses to buckle to the demands of the secular elite who threaten everyone and everything who don't get in line with their fashionable dogma. If you want to see numbers take a nosedive, go with all the things you listed. People go to the Catholic Churchprecisely because it stands strong on its traditions. If they want the sort of Church that these folks demand, they'll go to some of the liberal Protestant churches that most of us can reel off our tongues quite quickly.