Good point, Eric!

I suppose I should have said:

"If the institution disappeared, there would be no mechanism whereby the Roman Catholic faith could be carried forward RELATIVELY intact and coherently to succeeding generations.

I suppose the problem is similar to the childrens game of "Whisper down the alley", where one child whispers a message to the next, and that process is repeated down "the alley" of several children until the last child repeats the message out loud, and the amount of garbling of the original message makes everyone laugh.

Or perhaps a more apt observation is the quotation:

"A thousand priests, a thousand religions."

Dave