If you don't like the rules, start your own church

Miranda Devine rails againsts the Socialist take-over of the Catholic Church, and says that If you don't like the rules, start your own church:

The Socialist Alliance posters outside St Mary's Catholic Church in Brisbane said it all. "Dump Intolerance, not Father Kennedy." "Who would Jesus sack?" The father in question is Peter Kennedy, the 70-year-old Catholic priest who is being forced out of the church he has turned into a green-leftist New Age drop-in centre.

Devine is worried about the Communist Fifth-Columnists:

"I take my authority from the people," Kennedy told reporters. Not God? No wonder the Socialist Alliance loves him. Socialism regards religion as a "spiritual oppressor", in the words of Lenin, who also said "Atheism is a natural and inseparable part of Marxism".

It doesn't matter which dupes the left uses to destroy organised religion, or how they commandeer the social justice work of well-meaning church people, the aim is never to foster religious practice or nourish a love of God.

Emphasis Mine

This is rather revealing: no mention of love thy neighbour. Just practice and a focus on heavenly things. The last thing Capitalists want are people who are concerned about their neighbours here on Earth.

Devine's concern is discipline and orthodoxy:

While you can feel pity for Bathersby, the mess is his own making. Having tolerated Kennedy's antics for years, and having presided over the transformation of Brisbane into the most progressive and least disciplined archdiocese in the country, he can hardly be surprised by the result.

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Devine concludes by appealing to popularity (not of Fr.Kennedy but of Pope John Paul II):

Good luck to him. No one is forced to be a Catholic, and the church - as it has been for 2000 years - is thriving the world over, wherever it has remained true to its teachings. The thousands of young people who spontaneously went to Rome for the funeral of the very orthodox Pope John Paul II were not activists trying to dismantle the church. They are the future, not Kennedy's outdated mumbo jumbo socialism.

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Instead, the Catholic Church has the problem of youth leaving it for other churchs: She played Mary during World Youth Day. Now she's defected to Hillsong:

SHE was a poster girl for World Youth Day, when more than 400,000 pilgrims gathered in Sydney to celebrate their Catholic faith.

We come to the problem of legitimacy: is the institution legitimate by its existence, or do the members grant legitimacy to the institution?

As for the Opium of the People, the real quote is:

Religion is, indeed, the self-consciousness and self-esteem of man who has either not yet won through to himself, or has already lost himself again. But man is no abstract being squatting outside the world. Man is the world of man—state, society. This state and this society produce religion, which is an inverted consciousness of the world, because they are an inverted world. Religion is the general theory of this world, its encyclopedic compendium, its logic in popular form, its spiritual point d'honneur, its enthusiasm, its moral sanction, its solemn complement, and its universal basis of consolation and justification. It is the fantastic realization of the human essence since the human essence has not acquired any true reality. The struggle against religion is, therefore, indirectly the struggle against that world whose spiritual aroma is religion. Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people. The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions. The criticism of religion is, therefore, in embryo, the criticism of that vale of tears of which religion is the halo.

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The Capitalists, like Devine, would prefer us to keep our illusions, accept the discipline of our betters, and conform to the existing society. In other words, thinking for ourselves is dangerous.