Getting Macro -- Again: I lost a longer version of this, along with my patience to recompose it. This will have to suffice. You say, ". . . if you disagree with one of the tenets of the belief . . ." But that treats the issue rather cavalierly, as though we were talking about not eating meat during lent. The position of the Catholic Church is: No, good Catholics cannot disagree on abortion. (You may, in fact, disagree with that too, but you just go further onto shaky doctrinal ground.) Remember, the pope is not fallible. He is the authority in interpreting Christian morality for his church. If you disagree with him on the subject of an ex cathedra pronouncement, you're denying the infallibility of the pontiff.

In other words, you disagree with the pope over abortion. If you think that's okay, you've also disagreed with the church itself on the pope's authority. Seems to me that you can keep up these disagreements until doomsday. So what's the call here? How much dogma can you actually disagree with and still be a Catholic? Half? Three-fourths? Are any disagreements off limits? Murder? Apostasy? Can you be an atheistic Catholic?

So it comes down to this, the very reason the Anglicans call them Papists: Either you believe the pope has this authority or you don't. If you do, you're a Catholic. If you don't, you're a protestant (i.e., protesting the authority of the pope).

The Church hasn't spoken definitively on contraception, capital punishment, fasting, and other moral matters. The Church has a position on these issues, but they are not issues of dogma. Abortion is -- whether Catholics like it or not.