The Catholic Church is and has been a force for good in the world

I would again like to remind everyone of the premises of this debate. Whether or not my opponent has been aware of it, we are debating whether or not the Catholic Church is a force for good based on its achievements in terms of either its hindrance or the bolstering of the advancement in terms of health, happiness ad educational attainment in the world. When reviewing this question, we ought to be aware of the wealth and power that the Catholic Church wields and through which it has managed to gain influence in a wide array of policy areas, one of which is HIV/AIDS health out of which 25% of the worldwide HIV/AIDS care is being run by Catholic organisations. When looking at this particular issue, I believe we ought to adopt a mindset that gauges the Church not so much from the point of view of the mere scale of its operations as much as to how these institutions are run. As the information that I presented earlier plainly shows, the best way to prevent any further spread of AIDS/HIV is to combine distribution of condoms with comprehensive sex education. These two means combined is a more effective way of remedying the AIDS-problem than the dogmatic abstinence-approach the Catholic Church insists the recipients of its care to follow. Furthermore, when high church officials, Pope John Paul II among them, assert certain untrue notions about the effectiveness and the safeness of (since this is not a formal rebuttal round, I urge the readers to review both of me and my pieces of information concerning the notion there are small holes in the condom through which the AIDS-virus could supposedly permeate, in order to settle your mind at this particular conundrum) as well as the sinfulness off using condoms, the necessary approach to handle the AIDS-issue is being thwarted because of the fear of and the suspicion against condoms that high raking catholic officials instills in the populace in those communities it provides social services for. Thus, since the Catholic Church's religious elements manifestly stands in the way for true progress in Africa with regards to the AIDS-issue, the immense scale of its involvement in AIDS/HIV health care worldwide is an argument against - and not for - the Catholic Church. If we were to hand over the responsibility of Catholic organisations to secular ones, we know they would implement the necessary course of actions needed to battle the AIDS-epidemic because they are not constrained by any religious dilemmas as is apparently the Catholic Church. The Church's overreaching influence in this area is therefore more problematic than a good thing. During our debate my opponent has tried to gloss over the numerous crimes perpetrated by the Catholic Church, essentially not by building up his own case, but by instead trying to copy-paste certain parts of my rebuttals that fit his purpose - while deliberately omitting some important bits - and try to refute those certain parts of information that I presented. This has led to some misleading errors on his part. For instance, we were discussing whether or not the Catholic Church had an official teaching until 1964, that it were the Jews who murdered Christ. I submitted that this doctrine was replaced with a new doctrine in 1964 which officially admonished antisemitism and which also ABSOLVED the Jews from the deicides relating to the killing of Jesus Christ. Why didn't my opponent choose to respond to that particular fact? I also wrote about how Jews have been persecuted over the course of history. If there had been a doctrine that denounced antisemitism and the association Jews had with the crucifixion of Jesus, the persecution of the Jews over the course of history committed by the Catholic Church would probably not have happened, or at least not to the same extent. Furthermore, the antisemitism we are debating at the moment is the fact that the Jews are reviled in the Bible because they crucified Jesus. I assumed that you were aware of that particular fact since, being a Catholic yourself, you ought to be knowledgeable of the Bible. I apologize if you are not, but in light of the information I presented - in which the Catholic Church evidently stated that the teaching that the Jews murdered Christ should be viewed in light of the Catholic Church's new stance, namely one of openly opposition to antisemitism - it should be patently clear that because the Catholic Church's doctrines"are based on the Bible, we know that the cause of the antisemitism is the very Bible itself My opponent has failed at acknowledging my contention, that The Lost Encyclical would have been completely unnecessary to produce in the first place were it not for the fact that the Catholic Church did not have a doctrine that denounced the parts in the Bible that could be a potential incitement violence against Jews. My opponent has not given any reason as to why Pope Pius XI views were in accordance with the Catholic Church at the time but not Pope Pius XII. My opponent has failed to give an answer to this question and has instead tried to dodge the question completely My opponent has also failed to give an account as to why homosexuality is wrong. He has given reasons as to why some natural occurrences and genetic dispositions, such as a genetic predisposition towards alcoholism, are wrong but has failed to draw any reasonable connections to homosexuality and somehow show that homosexuality is as wrong or dangerous as the aforementioned things. My opponent is also purposefully misleading when he argues for the "natural law". The natural law is the belief system that human rights should be on reality and in the nature of human beings. This, of course leaves room for interpretation as to what these laws are and how they should relate to the rights to human beings. So in essence the "natural law" is nothing more than the objective morality in the form of the eternal laws given to us by God, which is essentially what my opponent has tried to argue for during this debate. If my opponent would have replaced "natural law" with "objective morality", his argument would have entailed the same meaning, so that was not a new argument. My opponent has therefore purposefully tried to circumvent the question about why homosexuality is wrong and, hence, has not presented any criterion and reasonable arguments for his case. I take it to be a fact that opposition towards homosexual marriage in the US has major religious underpinnings and also that the US is an overwhelmingly Christian country with quite a large percentage of the American population being Catholic. I seriously doubt that my opponent has somehow overlooked these facts since he purportedly is a Catholic himself. I also demonstrated the Church's position about homosexual marriage. With that in mind, I affirm that Catholics have been a leading and contributing force in the instituting and the maintenance of DOMA 8 on the behalf of the "natural law" they believe in. But the natural law you have presented has, again, no sound basis so as to conclude that homosexuality is bad, so the discrimination against gays by the dint of the discriminatory DOMA 8 is therefore to be concluded to be evil in terms of the premise we are using for this debate since it unfoundedly harms a segment of the US population. "If those people who do what some would consider evil are violating official Church teachings when they do their evil acts, that actually supports MY claim that the Catholic Church is a force for good. " This is an argument that my opponent has reiterated a couple of times and, as I have shown, is inherently a flawed argument since the scripture and the message of the Catholic Church can inspire different acts. It is an astoundingly ridiculous notion to only take into account the good acts that Catholics are doing, given that they are inspired by their religion in doing so, and leave out the bad things perpetrated by Catholics that have been inspired differently by the Church's teachings. Furthermore, the Church has not had a fixed set of teachings, decrees and positions on public policy, so, again, this argument does not hold water. My opponent has made some unequivocal and plainly clear positions regarding the Crusades and the Inquisition. He did not specify as to what parts of the Crusades and the Inquisition he rejected, so we have to assume that he supports all of it since, as I demonstrated, they were instituted by the Catholic Church - hence not accidentally linked to the church. My opponent started by saying that "the concept of the inquisition and crusades was a noble one". He then went on to say that "sins were committed BY INDIVIDUALS during the Inquisitions" and that they were "VIOLATING Church teachings and as such, the Church was not at fault". So evidently this was a fruitless effort to defend the intention of the Inquisition but not how they operated per se. However, I presented the evidence that the inquisition was INSTITUTED and OVERSEEN by the Catholic Church itself. He responded by returning to his initial defense of the Inquisition by saying that the Inquisition was "ethical". My opponent has thus demonstrated his abject ignorance about the Inquisition and he has not given any justification as to how the heretics, predominately the Cathars and the Waldenses, posed any threat whatsoever to the realm. Concerning the Crusades, my opponent has seemed to ignore the facts I presented about there being several crusades, not only about the holy land. I talked about the Northern Crusades in which the catholic church waged a war against the pagan Slavs and the Cathars. There was also the attack on the Eastern Orthodox Church in the fourth crusade in 1204 when the crusaders sacked the whole of Constantinople. If you are inattentive or unknowingly stating that the Crusades were somehow noble, then you are by definition including all of the crusades.