Were there ever?

Yes, when I was growing up in the forties and fifties, there absolutely were. Abundant in our catechisms and missals, the Sunday sermons, the Catholic school classrooms where we knelt by our desks for prayers several times a day, the pronouncements about what was right and would get us to heaven, they gave us a facile map to follow. “Sister says,” was a common mantra we learned to accept because our parents insisted we must. Questioning the priests and nuns who ruled our worlds was bad, maybe even sinful.