....is probably the worst and yet most important underlying act of deception that The Catholics in particular (and Christianity in-general) has committed. And which appalls me more than anything else. Because it is the means by which all the other lies and deceptions are given an air of credibility.
It must be understood, that the whole of this religion is based the theft of beliefs from other religions. In other words: it is a LIE.
Christianity today, is nothing less that a compilation of many different religious doctrines that were stolen, absorbed and re-packaged as something new and different. And it has been time, threats, murders, torture, coercion and ultimately their position as a state religion of Rome, not to mention their relatively effective attempts at the total destruction of all evidence to the contrary, that has enabled them to withstand the test of time. Christianity is the LIE that everyone knows is a LIE but accepts it in it's role as the keepers of the dark superstitions.
The learned Christian advocate, M. Turretin, in describing the state of Christianity in the fourth century, has a well-turned rhetoricism, the point of which is, that "it was not so much the empire that was brought over to the faith, as the faith that was brought over to the empire; not the Pagans who were converted to Christianity, but Christianity that was converted to Paganism."
Edward Gibbon says: "It must be confessed that the ministers of the Catholic church imitated the profane model which they were impatient to destroy. The most respectable bishops had persuaded themselves, that the ignorant rusties would more cheerfully renounce the superstitions of Paganism, if they found some resemblance, some compensation, in the bosom of Christianity. The religion of Constantine achieved, in less than a century, the final conquest of the Roman empire: but the victors themselves were insensibly subdued by the arts of their vanquished rivals."
Faustus, writing to St. Augustine, says: "You have substituted your agapae for the sacrifices of the Pagans; for their idols your martyrs, whom you serve with the very same honors. You appease the shades of the dead with wine and feasts; you celebrate the solemn festivities of the Gentiles, their calends, and their solstices ; and, as to their manners, those you have retained without any alteration. Nothing distinguishes you from the Pagans, except that you hold your assemblies apart from them."
Excerpted from: Bible Myths And Parallels In Other Religions, Doane, Thomas W. Chap. 36, p. 410; Gibbon's Rome, vol. iii. p. 163.; a Quoted by Draper : Science and Religion,p. 48.
So, in the end, it is not so much that The Church disdains and abhors these pagan rituals. It's that it disdains and abhors them -- now. Because they no longer feel threatened by the potential loss of adherents back over to paganism, and they believe that they can now safely look down their holy noses at a religious belief system and its rituals that have in fact been incorporated and absorbed into its own practices.

- In their own minds The church sees themselves as a "New & Improved" version of these beliefs which extend well beyond their own plane of existence. In fact, they are old and irrelevant....
on edit: spelling