What I am saying is that every topic that comes up winds up with some sort of Prorestant bashing. I was half way raised Catholic and half way nothing. When I grew older I became a Baptist then my first husband decided to go to Church and we went to an Assembly Church for many years. So been there done that. I was very happy in my Church, but always wanted to return to the Church of my childhood. I did 9 years ago and I am just as happy because I have Jesus in my heart, not any Church.
So if people don’t like greeters don’t look at them, trust me if you want to avoid saying hi go for it!
I must say in all my years I have never heard negative things said about Catholics like I hear from Catholics.
I am still very friendly with my Protestant Pastor and his family. They came to my second wedding to a Catholic and have done nothing but be gracious to me and my husband adores them!
I just have a really hard time understanding all that is said here at CAF against Protestants?
God Bless you all in your journry with Christ.
I have my own theory on that.
You have to remember that it was not that long ago that both Catholics and Protestants found some identity in not doing things that the other one did. When Vatican II came around, the Catholic Church became somewhat more willing to stop rejecting certain ways of doing things if the only reason for not doing them seemed to be that the Protestants did it that way. Since members in the Catholic Church were the ones forced to change, the Protestants tended to look at the Church more favorably, feeling more as if the Church accepted them as Christians, but those Catholics forced to change tended to look at the Protestants even less favorably. (As in, “This is all YOUR fault…”, though not necessarily that explicit.)
Then there were places where it became the vogue to choose ways of doing things precisely BECAUSE it wasn’t the way our parents or grandparents did it, even if it went beyond what the Church allowed. Why stick with the “old” liturgical colors? Royal blue is so pretty, so much more “Advent” than purple! Those same parents and grandparents were still very much alive and in those parishes, and they weren’t wild about the changes, understandably so. It was a generation gap and a culture gap, but it wasn’t necessarily felt that way. It felt to some like the Protestants, rather than other Catholics who were infatuated with ideas they got* from *the Protestants, who were taking over the Church.
It wasn’t felt as enrichment, either. It seemed to many that our uniquely Catholic traditions were being supplanted wholesale by ways of doing things that the Protestants did. There was a sense that when a Protestant way of doing things came in, a traditionally Catholic way was going to be thrown out. It seemed to some Catholics that “our” ways were losing out to “their” ways. There is some truth to that. Corpus Christi processions: gone. Forty hours’ devotions: gone. The Rosary: passe. In its place: Bible study. Terms like “Fellowship”, used as a verb, new parish churches that looked more like the new Protestant churches than the old Catholic ones, and all sorts of other vogues that were going through the Protestant churches at the same time. Only we’re Catholic. We have traditions. We don’t do vogues. Well, we didn’t used to, anyway.
In spite of the fact that most saw many “new” things, like reading the Bible more, as a very good thing, there was still the sense of Bible study being “instead of” the Rosary, not “in addition to”. There wasn’t just an infatuation with the new; there was often a disdain for the old. It wasn’t just “confession doesn’t have to be weekly.” No, it went all the way to “who goes to confession any more?!”…and guess who doesn’t have confession? Protestants don’t, that’s who. And who doesn’t need anyone to explain the Bible to them, or worry far more about what “scholars” teach this week than what bishops are still teaching the same as they were centuries ago? Do you get the picture? There were battles over old and new that played out in many minds as battles over the Catholic way or the Protestant way, and there were hard feelings. There still are.
Anyway, it is more about how Catholics have treated each other since Vatican II than how Protestants have treated us. I suspect that it is just that Protestants are blamed as the source of all these “wild ideas”.
It would be like going to Japan and feeling that people resented Americans, when in fact what they resented is how the traditional Japanese ways were being supplanted by infatuations with everything American. It’s not really the American’s fault, it is the Japanese who are choosing American ways, but that distinction might easily be lost on the traditional Japanese you ran into.
