(snipped for character limits)
Good points. I think too often people assume that the first thing we Catholics do is buttonhole poor Protestants and start in: HI I’m Catholic and I just want to say we don’t worship Mary or the saints and statues aren’t idols they’re just like pictures of your family and sure we think you all are Christian too and have some of the truth and did you know that ALL Christians believed in the Immaculate Conception and the Perpetual Virginity and Jesus never had flesh and blood brothers and the Pope is only like a Dad… And dads are like the head of things and Mary is like our Mother because she is Jesus’ Mother and that’s why she’s the Mother of God and we don’t recrucify Jesus at Mass and. . . . You know, kind of throwing everything out there at once.
Of course, on too many of these fora we see too many Protestant posts like this:
Hi I’m a Christian and I just wonder why Catholics worship Mary and the saints because the Bible tells us we shouldn’t speak to the dead and we shouldn’t worship idols like Catholics do with statues and of course your Church made up all kinds of stuff like ‘priests’ and forbid them to marry and don’t eat meat… And Christmas trees, those are so evil. Plus you killed millions of Protestants at the stake with the Inquisition and you added books to the Bible…and you force women to be nuns and sacrifice them to the priests, the ones that AREN’T pedos…
Actually, I would start out with explaining the first 1500 years of the Church (Orthodoxy isn’t even on most Protestants’ radar screen), and how we didn’t just pick up the Bible and start interpreting it — “first of all, why do you believe in the Bible to begin with, and how do you think it came together in the first place, how was it preserved even in those earliest years, and what did the Church look like through the centuries,
all of them, not just the past five or six?”. For many Americans, history began in 1492, then somehow we fast-forward to Plymouth Rock and Jamestown. I don’t remember, in eight years of public primary education, ever
once being told that Columbus was Catholic and brought priests with him (though, admittedly, not the first time):
(Note well: I am not a TFP adherent, I wouldn’t agree with them 100% on everything, but they put out some good stuff, and this is one example.)
Then, after having done that, I would try to bring up the Real Presence at some point, and John 6:53 (as well as to point out that Our Lord allowed many people to leave Him, when He could easily have said “oh, don’t take this literally, it’s just a symbol” —
had that been the case!).
The “no Christmas trees” think is from Garner Ted Armstrong’s Worldwide Church of God. Never heard that one before about nuns being sacrificed to priests as carnal slaves. You can never know too much about the other side’s objections.
Your spinach dip sounds good (I’d add some MSG and garlic powder, or possibly some Hidden Valley mix), but then again I like spinach. I’ll have to try it.
