I am the face of the new catholic religion. Raised in a relatively strict house, I am a thirtysomething male who has been unable to justify the dogmas of the catholic religion with the secular realities of modern life. I am not in the midst of a spiritual crisis, or a lost sheep who has strayed from the flock. I am a realist and a pragmatist who has come to realize that the catholic religion has accounted for more bad than good in recent history, and I have, as a result, divorced myself from their way of thinking.
Take, for example, the current and ever-growing pedophilia scandal. It has become apparent that the catholic church has engaged in the most heinous of crimes - hiding child molesters from the law - over a period of centuries. Not just years. Not just decades. Centuries. Centuries of hiding kid touches from the law. If there was any bit of news that was designed to turn one from the catholic religion toward secularism, that would be it.
Of course, the catholic religion has other scars, other "crosses to bear," as it were. Jumping out into the forefront is the history of the Inquisition, which was perpetrated in the fifteenth century but which lasted, in one form or another, until the nineteenth century. The primary motive of the inquisition was to root out heresy, but in reality the motive was to suppress any and all opposition to the pope and Rome. This was in direct contrast to the enlightenment and protestant movements at the time, and the catholic religion killed millions.
There is also the history of the Crusades, a series of bloody invasions of the Holy Land from the eleventh to the thirteenth centuries. Once again, this was done in the name of the Lord - the idea was to free Jerusalem from the infidel turks - but the reality is that the crusades were as much about material wealth as they were about anything spiritual. In one very famous incident, the crusaders even ended up sacking then-catholic Constantinople because the pillaging at the nearby Islamic towns hadn't been good enough.
If the catholic religion wants to win back lost members of the flock, they have to answer for this history. If they don't, they'll continue to lose ground to secularism. Whcih, from my point of view, is a good thing.