Enamored but looking for home

The Pirate had a post which in his usual style happens to be brutally frank and viciously honest to which I refer here for reflection. He said

I think I understand rather well the mindset that leads otherwise intelligent people to believe that the pope really can apply merits from the heavenly treasury to your purgatorial debt upon fulfilling some rather arbitrary condition like visiting a shrine or kissing a talisman. I read enough blogs and theological literature to get a general picture of the psychological profile of the Catholic intellectual. It's the psychological disposition that can and will justify anything and everything for the sake of vindicating an institution with which one is rather enamored. It is quite a folly to imagine that theology is a dispassionate rational pursuit. In my experience, theologians of every church and tradition are generally motivated by something that runs much deeper than a simple commitment to intellectual integrity and that which can be certified as true. Quite often, the intellectual language of theology is simply a mask for the blind love of the institution, insatiable desire for academic respectability, desperate need for an identity within a certain traditional telling of history, unbridled self-importance, or disenchanted cynicism. To make a long argument short, Catholic intellectuals defend indulgences because they need to do so in order to validate both the institution and their identities within it. If Vatican II had declared the article in Trent concerning indulgences to be merely outdated pastoral advice rather than infallible dogma, or if Trent had never dogmatized them in the first place, indulgences would be today rotting on the ash-heap of theological history.

Yours Truly: I have noted that ex-RCs who become Prots specially from Hispanic origins are quite skeptical of Mother Church. I mean they seem to have an attitude "we are not easily impressed". Just about most you encounter now-a-days who are enamored with Rome Sweet Home happens to be from Anglo-Saxon background. Now you say, what is the point of that? Here is the point...

Our hommie, Past Elder said this in his comments to a Weedon post:

I was raised in the pre-conciliar RC church, and believed it to be the "true" church and faith. As I watched it dismantled and the new Catholicism put in its place, I could not see it as RC at all, and if the "true" church and faith were now lost, there was no reason to accept anything else, Christianity is false in any form

Yours Truly: Now again, the above comment is not for the easily bruised, OK? Just understand he is trying to honestly express a heart felt disenchantment, if I may say so. Here are my thoughts...

So you might be enamored with Rome Sweet Home, so you hiked the mountains,and hills, crossed rivers and plains and if Past Elder is correct, you get to Rome and find that home has left and changed as well. In other words, if his observation is accurate, Home Sweet Rome, is not there anymore. Where you went back isn't home as you supposed. From a human experience point of view, it does makes sense. Have you left your home and lived in some far away land for many years? Notice when you get back you find yourself a stranger in your own land. The truth is that just as much as you aged and changed, home also aged and changed ( unless home has always been with you, all along, of course).

If I may rephrase P.E. All roads lead to Rome, but where is it?