Are we honey or vinegar?

"You can catch more bees with honey than vinegar." But is reactionaryism (yep, it's a word) turning faithful Catholics into vinegar?

-A person piles up Styrofoam to light it on fire and announce, "I'll care about the environment when they make abortion illegal."

-The fad of spending time in church watching out for any signs that the priest is "liberal" and/or carrying out modesty inspections.

-The mode of Catholic education that ignores or gives a token nod to historical issues like the oppression of women and racism.

-The "unbiased" Catholic history lessons that judge non-Catholics by objective Catholic moral standards and devote sentence after sentence to "explaining" Catholic misbehavior on grounds of cultural norms and "no worse than what everyone else did at that time."

-The replacement of joy with a focus on the faults of popes, bishops, and priests as well as anything else negative happening in the Church.

-Ignoring papal wisdom if it does not match one's politics, while practically elevating one's own opinions on education, dress, hymns, etc. to the level of dogmas.

-Conservative Catholic subcultural - "We don't recycle....on principle." "We're not ecumenical." "We're loyal to the Pope, but even though the Pope says Mass with altar girls, we're 100% against them."

These things yield counter-reactionaryism (that one's made up) and revulsion. On the other hand, a healthy human is attracted to goodness that's accompanied by joy, by humility, by gentleness, and by a positive attitude. Being a Catholic who's faithful shouldn't bring out the worst in us - our love of gossip, our smug rejoicing in the failure of others, our snobbishness, or our tendency to rationalize. Let's use the vinegar in us to disinfect ourselves, killing the germs of sin, and attract others to Christ through the honey of a positive, loving approach.