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You'd have made strange bedfellows with cranky Catholics who thought so too, 60 years ago after Vatican II's modernization reforms.
> You can see this with the number of members for Unitarian churches (declining) vs Amish (growing).
Hold on a sec, you ought to clarify what you mean by "gain more members" - the Amish have a very high birthrate, averaging 6.1 kids per woman. While Unitarians are below the replacement rate.
> Games which chase inclusivity often fail, because the very people they appeal to don't actually want to play video games.
How is this old culture-wars canard still being rolled out? A glance at the character rosters on the Game of the Year winners for the past 10 years proves you wrong.
I think it was dusted off when the game Mixtape received glowing reviews despite there being hardly any actual gameplay in it.
Why not? When i was an agnostic I liked the Catholic church as an institution (and many other religious organisations too).
> The idea is that by relaxing norms, he wants to gain more members.
That is a ridiculously cynical take. People join the church, and even more the priesthood because they believe. Why would they corrupt the message to get the numbers up?
I do not know what norms have been relaxed by the church anyway? Changing the mass used by the majority of Catholics? Its happened many times historically.
> But it doesn't actually go that way. It alienates the core, and the people for whom compromises are made don't want to join anyway.
I see no sign of alienation except in small fringe groups (so not the "core").
> You can see this with the number of members for Unitarian churches (declining) vs Amish (growing).
The Catholic church is growing globally.
OP doesn't appear to be saying Catholicism ought not to grow - rather that they believe trying to appeal to a wider audience than that which is already interested in religion is likely to fail, or worse, backfire.
Religions grow by appealing to a wider audience than that which is already interested. That is precisely how Christianity spread in the first place.
What the Catholic Church is doing is not backfiring even in the terms of the original argument, and I would challenge the assumption that losing people is "backfiring". The church has a duty to preach what it believes to be the truth, rather than what all its members want to hear. Losing some members might not be a bad thing.