I’m curious to know, how many cradle Protestants were extensively exposed at an early age to anti Catholic propaganda and literature.
I was. In fact, at the age of seven or eight I sprayed a statue of Mary with a water hose because I thought it was an idol (to be fair, my parents rebuked me for this). I read Chiniquy’s
Forty Years in the Church of Rome and similar accounts (at least partially–I don’t claim to have read every word of Chiniquy, which is long!) at a fairly young age. I devoured the
History of Protestantism by J. A. Wylie (an extremely propagandistic 19th-century work), and I also read Milner and Neander on the early Church (Milner was an early 19th-century Calvinist Anglican; Neander was a much fairer historian–one of the major 19th-century church historians in fact–but definitely with a strong Protestant bias).
Out of this, how many of these misunderstandings have been cleared up at CAF and other Catholic resources?
By the time I came to CAF I was already close to finishing a Ph. D. in church history, so I’d been exposed to good scholarly treatments of these subjects for a while. However, my friendship with Tim Gray (a former student of Scott Hahn, currently teaching at the seminary in Denver I believe) and other devout Catholics in my early years in grad school did a lot to clear things up. And even before that, my [Protestant] professors in college had refuted many of my biased ideas, and my reading of Catholic writers (medieval primary sources as well as modern writers such as Chesterton) had also changed my views considerably.
That being said, there are points where anti-Catholic propaganda turned out to be confirmed by reality to some extent. Obviously the continuous accusations (from the Reformation and even before) linking priests with sexual misconduct had some basis in fact. The claim that “Rome” is interested in power and is in some sense a continuation of the Roman Empire also has some truth to it. I don’t mean that the current Pope is power-hungry. But the way your Church functions is deeply shaped by the heritage of the Roman Empire, in some rather troubling ways. In other words, many of the stereotypes have some basis in reality–they aren’t necessarily simple “misunderstandings” (and obviously others are based on theological positions–again, they aren’t misunderstandings but are reasonable characterizations of Catholicism if you grant certain assumptions).
Of course, the same is true of Catholic stereotypes of Protestants. If there’s one thing that being at CAF has taught me (not that I didn’t already know this from other places, but CAF confirms it regularly), it’s that Catholics can be just as prejudiced as Protestants! And like Protestant prejudices, Catholic prejudices have some basis in fact. That doesn’t justify them–on either side.
Edwin
).
