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ignatius777
Guest
Thats all great stuff but the question is, is it easier TO BE protestant or a catholic? It seems much easierto be a protestant whether or not thats where you start out or end up.As a Protestant who’s been thinking seriously about the church and attending both Mass and a Protestant service for 3 months now, I’ll take a stab. First, I’d say that it REALLY depends on where you’re coming from. If you were, for instance, to take a person raised entirely outside of Christianity, and ask me to pick them out a church to initiate them into- assuming I knew nothing else about them- I would not pick the Catholic Church. Not if I wanted it to take. Even assuming that the Catholic Church is the One True Church- because in that case, I’d also be assuming the possibility of invincible ignorance, and that someone entirely outside of the Christian faith might well be invincibly ignorant enough to get saved “through” the Catholic Church but in, say, the Methodist Church. Not that I’d send them to the Methodist Church either. I don’t know where I’d send them.
Probably someplace like the non-denominational church I’ve attended where they’re doctrinally OK- accept the Apostles Creed, no sex before marriage (though keep a little quiet about that, huh?), the Bible’s Inspired and maybe even inerrant depending on what’s meant by that, abortion is wrong, etc- but where there are singer’s with pink hair, tattooed guitarists, and a preacher with the fire of the old-time evangelists but a message that teeters between orthodoxy and Christianity as Rebellion. This isn’t maybe the kind of church that endures (perhaps there really is only the one of those) but it’s one that does OK with one of the biggest challenges to the modern evangelist, Protestant or Catholic- getting people to think of Christianity as a viable option. There are non-denominational Protestant churches like this sprouting up everywhere and if they’re sometimes, like much of Protestantism, a kind of social club- replacing popular culture and society with their own version- they’re usually not wildly wrong on doctrine. Maybe on emphasis. But doctrinally, not a whole lot you can put your finger on. They get people in the door. And once they’re in the door, hearing a message at least closely related to the true message, I figure the Holy Spirit can work on their hearts.
That said, the person and the situation matters. Yes, I wouldn’t want to send a generic, unchurched person straight to the Catholic Church because the Catholic Church is bound to seem particularly “hard” if you’ve never been any kind of Christian, and because the Catholic Church looks rather different from the outside. I was talking to my mother about this recently. She grew up a Catholic and I was actually baptized one (though, as best as I can tell, that was the first and last time I went to mass until adulthood) but she doesn’t have any bitterness toward the Church. She’s not one of those. She just likes praise music and was taught “extra ecclesiam nulla salus” badly (and is too compassionate to be comfortable with the caricature) and so she was born again and hasn’t given the Catholic Church much thought, for good or ill, since. We were talking about Mary and the Saints interceding which seemed to me the one really big difference between orthodox Protestantism and Orthodox Catholicism- outside of the specific claims of the apostolic succession and the Church itself which are inherent to Catholicism- and she asked me if I believed they could or did, and that we needed them to intercede or whether Christ was enough.
I didn’t have an answer for her, not really, and still don’t (and yes, I understand that the conception of intercession is complicated), so I said simply, “well, if I become a Catholic I’ll have to believe that, won’t I?”. So the real question was whether or not I was going to become a Catholic. And since the question of Saints or Mary interceding had never occurred to me before- indeed Mary and the Saints had never occurred to me before- it wasn’t going to the stumbling block for me. But the point was, as a potential convert to Catholicism, it didn’t really occur to me that I could ignore doctrine of the Church and still be a coherent Catholic. I think everyone outside of the Church with even the mildest sense of history realizes that becoming a Catholic means something and that, in some sense, places obligations on you. I don’t think there are many non-Catholics who would convert to Catholicism unless they were planning on being faithful (i.e, faithful to Church Doctrine) Catholics.
I have the sense that it looks different from the inside. There are, and I’m sure you’ve met them, any number of Catholics who see no contradiction in believing that the Magisterium is true and infallible dogma, while simultaneously believing they’re free to ignore that dogma. I think it is probably slightly easier to be a Cafeteria Catholic than a Cafeteria Protestant. If only because Protestants don’t hang around the building if they don’t like the food- they go to a whole nother restaurant. Catholics, maybe because of culture, maybe because of the religious education they go through, are slightly more likely, I think, to go through the smallest of motions while remaining mentally Catholic and nominally Catholic. I don’t think there are many Protestants who do this. Again, they either go to another, laxer church, swear off church entirely, or get born again and find a stricter sect. They’re not ones for half-measures (ask the Catholic Flannery O’Connor, whose stories were filled with wild, passionate Protestants). So I guess the long and short of it is, I think it’s probably easier to become a Protestant but easier to stay a Catholic.
Peace, Carlan
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