Not only does he need to have respect for you, but very special reverence. If that’s absent, it’s a bit hard to imagine him always treating you as a lady in years to come. You are correct when you say that you need his respect. But you need his respect if you’re ever going to marry him. You don’t need his respect to serve God in your church.
If he questions your faith in God just because you stick with Rome instead of following King Henry, something is wrong with him, not with you. My sweetie is Protestant and not even the relatively close Anglican denomination. We do differ on things and there have been bitter words but none would even think about questionning the other’s faith in God.
His looking down on Catholics may well be a method of taking out his complex about splitting from the mainstream. You know, the mainstream founded by the Lord himself needs to have gone
very wrong to justify a split. Or does he really claim that you can’t believe in God and petrine primacy both at one time, or some such?
There are Anglicans who pray to saints and even Anglicans with a Marian devotion. The third last Archbishop of Canterbury prayed at the grave of St Thomas a Beckett. So is an evangelist wiser than the ecclesiastical head of that church? Obviously, there are many sub-denominations within the Anglican church, differing largely from one another and there are groups of Anglicans who believe closer to Rome than to some other groups within their church. Should your evangelist boyfriend be awarded the monopoly for truth? And they say papal infallibility is absurd…
Still, this is not to criticise his faith. This is to shoot down his claims. Please note what he said in the beginning:
he said that he accepted me the way i am right now
only to say:
he asked me to join him or it’s over between us
The contradiction is obvious. Either he lied or he changed his mind 180 degrees. Either way, he has some serious consistency problems. Not the best material for a doctrinal, let alone spiritual guide, don’t you think? We have a number of wonderful Anglican posters here and I have no doubt that most of them would disagree with his attitude.
It may look easy for you to start going to his church, then to disavow the Pope, accept his stance on matters like divorce or purgatory, but what next? Stop praying to Holy Mary, to the saints… then what? You aren’t his private altar girl.
The littany isn’t going to find an end and sooner or later you won’t be able to agree with something. You will then want to take back all previous declarations and return to the faith you previously believed in clean conscience. Here’s the story of Bishop Bonner (
click).
Plus, you don’t have any guarantee that he won’t dump you after you join his faith. I don’t want to invent accusations without merit, but what if he finds your faith insufficient and moves on to the next girl he’s going to try converting or finally settles down with a woman sharing his views in all matters? I’m getting a feeling it’s not so much about believing the true faith as about believing what he believes.
You are in my prayers and so is he. What suggestion I can give is you is pray, pray and pray a lot. Then find strength and confront him. A good idea might be to call it over before he calls it over and to give him reasons for doing so. You need a man but one who will bring you closer to God, who will respect you and support you. Who will love you with the love from
Corinthians and be a husband from
Ephesians.
