Explaining to children

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The difference between catholic and Protestant. My daughter spent time with a friend who said to her “we aren’t catholic like you”

We have family and friends who aren’t catholic.

My daughter is having a hard time understanding, I understand why obviously but having a hard time conveying in a charitable way.

I don’t want her to feel lukewarm or indifferent about Catholicism
 
How old is your daughter?

The way I’ve explained it to my children is that Jesus gave us the gift of the Catholic Church to guide us after he rose to heaven. Some Christians disagreed with some of the teachings of the Church and began other Christian churches. They are still our Christian brothers and sisters who we should treat with respect and we pray that some day we will all be one Catholic Church again.
 
Obviously it depends on the age of the children and the type of protestantism.
 
Really all you need tell her is that there are many religions in the world. Protestants belong to one that we call our separated bretheran, Explain the history to her.

Tell her about judaism. does she know Jesus was a Jewish man on earth?
 
If your child is very young, you might say to her that not everyone is a Catholic and attends the Catholic Church, and that many people choose to attend a different church or even no church at all. If you know where her friend’s family attends, you might say, “Susie’s family goes to the church that we pass on the way to the ice cream stand” or whatever.

You can then say to her that you and her father belong to the Catholic Church because it’s the one originally started by Jesus, and you believe that it’s the one with the most truthful teachings and that Jesus would most want us to belong to. While there are some good people at other churches (such as Susie and her family), you pray that one day we will all be one church in the Catholic Church.

When I was a small child I really didn’t understand Protestantism either, but was content with the explanation that the Protestants had their own churches that we, being Catholics, didn’t attend (I could see their churches around town) and that they didn’t follow the Pope. I didn’t think about it any deeper than that. I learned the history of Luther, King Henry VIII, and Calvin when I was much older, like at least 11 or 12.
 
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It really depends on the child’s age, but even with my 4yo, when she asked why there were different kinds of churches, I told her that there used to be only one Church that was started by Jesus and that people began to break away and start their own churches because they didn’t like the way the original Church did things. I tell her that our Church is the Catholic Church that Jesus started and that it was important to us to stay together, even when we don’t always agree with everything the Church does or don’t understand everything she teaches.
 
When I was a kid, we would play with the Methodist neighbors.

We often played church.

They would “sprinkle” us, we would baptize them by immersion in the wading pool.

The most important thing is to teach your kids to respect the dignity of their friends and their friends’ religious beliefs. People can disagree and still be friends.
 
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