If I hadn't been born into a Catholic family, would I have chosen to join the Church? Would I have looked at an entirely male organisation that has had a poor record on treating women fairly, appears obsessed with sexuality and has shown itself to be too keen to cover up wrongdoing against innocent children in order to protect its own skin?
Or would I see an organisation with a proven belief in social justice, whose men and women of the cloth have provided medical care and education to the poorest across the globe, and who staffed schools in Ireland where social class was not a barrier to success?
It's a mixed bag. But as anyone who heard Bishop Donal McKeown's letter read out in Masses last weekend knows, it's also an organisation in crisis.
It was hard to listen, in the increasingly emptying pews, at the list of depressing statistics. The decline in vocations which will mean in 20 years, that there will be just 24 priests for 146 churches across the Diocese of Down and Connor.
Bishop McKeown pointed out that there would have to be an increased role for the laity as there aren't enough priests to perform Requiem Masses and other services which people have become accustomed to.
Looking around the congregation on Sunday, there were only a few young families – mostly from ethnic minorities. There was no sign of the others who had been there just a few weeks earlier, dressed to the nines, with their children rigged out in their First Communion finery, for what, for too many, is nothing more than a photo opportunity and a pleasant day out.
But the response to the crisis showed that there is really little hope for this organisation. Why is it still not even worth raising the possibility that Mother Church should maybe stop discriminating against half the population?
Why is it that when the Church decided to appoint deacons to help over-stretched priests, that even this role could not have been envisaged for women?
Let's not forget who was first on the scene after the resurrection when the apostles were hiding out in fear. Yep. Women.
But the Catechism of the Catholic Church states that only men can receive holy orders. Why? Because Jesus chose men as his apostles. That was more than 2,000 years ago when women's position in society was hardly one of equality.
It's almost as impressive an argument as my late Granda's, when he said there couldn't be women priests because they'd be "blabbering everything they heard in Confession".
Pope John Paul II reaffirmed in 1994 that this teaching on male ordination is definitive and not open to debate. The answer from the Church boils down to the argument that it has always been this way and always will be.
This is how decline becomes irreversible.
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I've never been a big fan of This Morning as it was never as much fun as the marital bickering of Richard and Judy, who graced the telly sofa for years.
Who can forget the eye-rolls and cringing from Judy Finnigan when her overgrown schoolboy husband, Richard Madeley, embarrassed her with his frequent faux pas.
He's still doing the full Alan Partridge, but Judy has had enough. Haven't we all?
By comparison, Phillip Schofield was too smarmy, and Holly Willoughby too bland a replacement for previous partner, Fern Britton.
Now the soap opera over Schofield's affair with a young runner on the show has been curiously dominating the news agenda, with our own Eamonn Holmes talking tough on GB News.
A duel is surely on the cards. Sofas at dawn.
Even Nadine Dorries, the former culture minister, has waded in, calling Schofield a bully.
She said, apparently without irony, "There are men – men particularly – who have positions of authority or trust and power, and kind of think they are above the law and above those standards that the rest of us are held by and held to."
Who could she mean?
There was a handy reminder from Nazir Afzal, the former chief prosecutor at the Crown Prosecution Service, who tweeted: "He had an affair while his wife was undergoing treatment for cancer. He took another younger partner on publicly funded trips. He lied to cover up his failures. Every day was playtime for him whilst he enriched himself. He was a nasty piece of work. And he ain't Phillip Schofield."
Quite.
