I’m in love with the Catholic faith and I think it’s important, which is why I want to share, though it might come across as aggressive.
I don’t really understand the “love for the Catholic faith” as opposed to just “the Christian faith”. To my mind, the whole point is to love God and love your neighbor, since the whole law and prophets hang on those two commandments. Doctrinal disagreements, in my opinion, are fairly minor in the grand scheme. To me, the different denominations are essentially separate parts of the Body of Christ. None is less important even if one does not understand the use of another (1 Corinthians 12).
Frankly I don’t think God cares if you’re Catholic, Methodist, Baptist, Presbyterian, Church of Christ, Assembly of God or Seventh-Day Adventist. I happen to be Baptist, and there are certain doctrinal beliefs and activities (or lack thereof) that come along with that, but it doesn’t make my faith less meaningful or my life less useful to Him.
Also, I’m not really overly concerned with the “official” stance of the (Catholic) Church to a certain degree. If the “official” view was that God actually literally created everything, from the space-time continuum itself to human life on this planet, in 6 days—that is, only 144 hours—when to begin with a 24-hour day would have no meaning before our planet existed, then I don’t agree with that. I agree that he could if He wanted to, but I don’t believe that He did. And I enjoy learning about what our science has revealed that speaks to the wonder of His handiwork.
God is still teaching me about Himself, and I’m learning more about myself and about His creation. He’s just at a different place with me than He is with someone else.
It’s clear from the Bible that doctrine was important to the early Church. Take the dispute about circumcision, for instance. Jesus himself spoke strongly about various doctrinal issues that many Protestants disagree with (e.g. his condemnation of divorce, his statement that “unless you eat my flesh and drink my blood, you have no life within you”). He also prayed “that they may be one as we are one,” so clearly unity was important to Jesus. And to extend that line of thought, because Jesus is God, and Jesus cares about the unity of Christians, God does in fact care about what we believe because if we all believe different things, we aren’t unified.
Not to mention that most Protestant denominations just don’t have that much to offer in comparison to the Catholic Church. They don’t have the Eucharist (or most of the other sacraments), the tradition, the depth of theology, the saints, or any number of the things that set the Church apart and make it so incredibly rich. Different denominations have incompatible beliefs regarding salvation. The fact is that we can’t all be right, and if we boil down the Christian faith to what we all have in common, we’re not left with a whole lot of substance.
As a side note, the Church has no official stance on how quickly the earth was created. I would say most Catholics accept the scientific data in this regard.