>>856402
I'm not even a Catholic, but I would tell you that I know firsthand that some Mexican communities have twisted the Church's symbols to their own end. Some of may look Catholic on a superficial level, but some are practicing Santeria. Not Christianity. Same goes with some Black churches in the American South, who kept hidden Hoodoo beliefs they carried over from Africa even later on in church circles (Hoodoo.. not Voodoo. People sometimes get these confused). You could say this for many other cultures too. Some Western Europeans kept cultic ideas from Nordic or Celt culture too.
This is why I've never been impressed by "Christendom" or care a thing about it's downfall. There are great things, no doubt, but some of it was not true mission work.. but conducted by force and coercion or merely the conversion of a King, who then required all of his subjects to follow him. All this accomplished was a paganism that hid in the underground, sometimes using Christian symbols to avoid authorities. Conversion wasn't always a sincere, widespread conversion such as you saw in Greece and Mesopotamia. Those Greek churches planted by the Apostles didn't like the old ways - and distanced themselves from old Greek ways of thinking. Gnostics, for example, were an old trapping from Pythagorean and Mithraic mystery cults. But the early Church combatted them. They didn't support them. The early church also pronounced anathemas on Platonism in the seventh council. This is Christianity done from the heart, and it didn't happen everywhere.