Some were collaborators, yes. But many resisted, and more than two thousand Catholic priests were imprisoned for it. More than one thousand were martyred.
Priest Barracks of Dachau Concentration Camp
108 Martyrs of World War II
Yet somehow, despite the Church supposedly becoming apostate and opposed to everything of God's, we still put together the Bible as you know it today. Explain that one. If the Bible was compiled by the Church, which you say became apostate, then you would expect to see many apocryphal writings included in the canon, especially in the New Testament. It shouldn't have been possible for a Church opposed to the will of God and the teachings of Christ to put together the correct, doctrinally sound Bible centuries after falling away, because they refused to follow God's will in any respect whatsoever.
Last I checked, the Catholic Church was sitting at a billion members with outreach programs and charities literally everywhere. So, quite a few people hear the message.
First you say that wearing the colors purple and scarlet are signs that the person wearing them is part of the "Greater Babylon". Then you say they're not evil and there's nothing wrong with wearing these colors as God uses them very frequently in nature. Now you're saying that wearing purple and scarlet are bad because the Bible says so. Make up your mind.
Show me. Put your money where your mouth is.
An examination of the person's life. Were they faithful to God? Were they virtuous? And secondly, two miracles must be attributed to this person's prayers to God being answered. Two miracles not adequately explainable by modern science, or investigations for fraud, or demonic imitation.
Because there's no point in trying to predict the date that the End will come. It could be five seconds from now and interrupt me from typing out this very sentence, or it could be five million years from now. You guys have certainly guessed wrong enough times and staked a lot of your claims on it.
Watch Tower Society unfulfilled predictions - Wikipedia
The point of Jesus' warnings about being ready and vigilant for the end times wasn't so we could pinpoint the date. The point is that we don't know when the end will come until it happens, and so we should maintain lives of prayer, purity and watchfulness regardless. If we knew when the end was going to come, people could eat, drink, be merry, sin all they want, and then right before the end happens repent in sackcloth and ashes and they're good. "If the master of the house knew at which hour the thief would come, he would not let his house be broken into. Therefore you also be ready, for the Son of Man is coming at an hour which you do not expect." Matthew 5:43-44.
Have you never read St. Paul's words about the passions of the flesh or of the mind? "Passions" do not refer to fervor in the Bible, they refer to sinful inclinations, disoriented desires that need corrected.
If you look at history, it was monks who spread the faith. Monks spread the faith to England, to the Slavs, to Germany, to Scotland, to China, to Japan, to the Americas. Monks created writing systems like the Cyrillic alphabet (named after St. Cyril, Apostle to the Slavs) so that people could read the Bible in their own language. The Russians were among the kindest missionaries to the Native Americans. The Aleuts in Alaska are still Russian Orthodox to this day, and their first task was to translate the Bible and the Liturgy into Aleutian. The monks often protested loudly against any injustice that the Russian colonial government inflicted upon the Aleutian people.
They are praying for peace, for repentance, for good harvests, for those who are sick, for those who have died, for those who struggle. Some of them are living lives of repentance for past sins. Abba Moses the Black was once a raider against the monks, before he was convinced by their kindness and forgiveness, and dedicated his life to Christ.
Way to dance around the point.
The vestments have come to have symbolic meaning. The colors and each item all have meanings attached to them from Scripture. Clergy actually recite verses from Scripture with each piece of their vestments as they put them on.
I guess you choose to ignore the parts of the Bible where Jesus and the Apostles encourage and practice fasting? (1 Corinthians 7:5, Matthew 6:16-18, Matthew 17:21, Mark 9:29, Acts 14:23, Matthew 4:2, Acts 13:3)
We abstain from meat during fasting seasons because it's super expensive. I work as a clerk in a meat department, and I regularly see people blow more than 50 dollars on steak for one single household meal, and that's just on average. I've seen people pay more than 200 dollars on meat for one single cookout, and I'm not talking a cookout for 100 people, I'm talking a cookout for maybe 10. The normal price for a steak is anywhere from eight to twenty-five dollars per pound, depending on the cut. Compare that to vegetables and grains, and the difference is staggering. People spend disgusting amounts of money on meat, and during fasts, we are called to give to charity the money we save on not buying meat.
And we don't forbid marriage, either. It only became a thing in the 1200's in the West that priests were forbidden to be married. Because priests and monks were the only ones who learned how to read and write, kings and dukes were appointing them to important government positions, and so these priests began acquiring estates. Soon you had dynasties of powerful clergy who were also government officials, and these people began becoming corrupt. Because of this, the Church forbade married men from the priesthood, to end this practice. However, this was never a problem in the East, so in the Eastern Catholic and Eastern/Oriental Orthodox Churches, you do see married men becoming priests very regularly.