Whenever you hear someone predict who the next pope will be, usually that simply reveals who the one predicting hopes the next pope will be.

Your average middle-aged-to-older adult remembers when it was a requirement for all Catholics to abstain from meat on all Fridays as long as their health allowed.

It's not going to happen overnight, but change it will if and when it's God's will. However, leaving the church rather than sticking around to help it change helps change happen not at all.

When you ask if “sacraments work,” I presume you want to know if the Catholic Church's seven sacraments (Baptism, Eucharist, Confirmation, Reconciliation, Anointing of the Sick, Matrimony, Holy Orders) are real or mere “symbols.”

Does God change? It's possible that what you're asking has to do with whether God's “mind” can be changed by human prayer.

A friend who is a member of the Roman Catholic Church in the Spokane Diocese works as a lay para educator at a Catholic elementary school in Spokane. Now of course she is unemployed.