if meant for me, it were many factors over time. the big one was the Eucharist as mentioned above. as a Protestant we're taught that everything in the Bible is very literal, besides this particular passage. They say, this is figurative. Jesus didn't "really" mean that, what he meant is.... (who are we to assume he meant something other than what he said..).

This passage goes on to explain how many of his followers left after he said this, saying these are hard teachings, who can accept this. So to them, who left him, they believed it was literal and they weren't about to consume human flesh because that was against the law.

Well elsewhere in the Bible, if a parable was given and the audience was confused, Jesus would give them another one. But in this instance, he doubles down with what he said saying, amen amen. also, the original translation of this text when talking about eating, is "to gnaw". again, doesn't really translate well into figuratively speaking. Not only this but for quite some time, this was just the accepted belief. It wasn't until some 500 something years ago where we're like wait... everyone was wrong up until now...

There are also many Eucharistic miracles that haven't been explained. This would be a perfect opportunity for Catholic haters to show them whats up, but these things remain miracles.

Mary was a difficult one to grasp. It's funny, I could accept this bread was Christ true body but Mary... I dunno now that's a tough one. Eventually I came around. One thing that helped me was to consider how she is the Arc of the New Covenant. Now think back the old testament, where God gave very specific instructions on what the Arc should look like, just how perfect it should be. This was to hold the word of God. Fast forward, then you have God's mother in the flesh. It stands to reason that as she is to should be perfect if she is to give birth to God in the flesh. So as God's mother she should have a large degree of reverence. It was Mary who asked Jesus to perform his first miracle which he did.

Basically the more I dug into these things, the more they made sense than didn't.

And yeah, I can appreciate how people are upset about centuries of corruption in the church. But what they've done or said, doesn't really change our focus on Jesus. And many of these events have little to do with church doctrine. It's unfortunate that people leave the church because a priest or pope did something despicable, etc etc. It's still the same church Jesus started.