I love that there are rules and strong authority and bishops and they get mad about stuff!
Awww, fuck, I thought I was built different! Leopards are eating my face!!
The Catholic Church has an extremely lively intellectual tradition still busy happening, a complex and concrete system of institutional self-governance, a long memory, and it highly values coherence across difference.
What appeals to authoritarians and trads = the main problem for most of them.
[one time there was an NYTimes article about how these young people love the idea that Catholicism gets real mean about popular things. then these guys got real upset that a ton of Catholics were mean as fuck to them about how they preferred to discuss Hell over attending Mass. it was perfect.]