Viewpoint from another angle – I grew up in an fundamentalist holiness church, became a bit of a bible scholar out of self defense, abandoned that church as soon as I was old enough to know better, joined the wave of atheism that was trendy at the time. Now I am pushing 60 and realize that I know very little about anything.
I also dated a Catholic girl, to the expressed horror of both our families, so perhaps I had a better view of this up close. First I should say that the Catholic family was more tolerant and eventually accepted me, I think always with a conviction that I would convert eventually.
Personally I can get along with Catholicism far better than with fundamentalism. At least priests tend to actually read the Bible and try to understand it before they get up to talk about it publicly. A lot of what goes on in fundamentalism is somebody echoing something that somebody said, who was echoing something from somebody before him, and so on, ad nauseum.
There is a lot of misinformation about Catholics floating around. The number one complaint is that Catholics are not Christians because they pray to the Virgin Mary (or saints, take your pick) instead of Jesus/God. With all the Hail Marys everybody has heard from a distance or in the movies, I can understand their error. They know little else about Catholicism, except that it is bad for some nebulous reason, and there are censers and robes involved.
I have heard people refer to the practice of praying to saints, relics, statues or other depictions of saints or Mary, what have you, as a form of Idolatry – a very big no-no in fundamentalist thought.
The Pope is the Antichrist, a particularly ignorant claim.
There are others, but they all boil down to rationalizations to justify their prejudices. The bottom line is that early Protestants were willfully misinformed by people they trusted, people that they were taught were as infallible as the Church sees the Pope. It started with the king of England and the Anglican schism, and proceeded apace from there.
Some of the things we have been taught or “everybody knows” about Catholics will turn your stomach. They boil children for dinner. They sacrifice “real Christian” children (meaning their preferred flavor of Protestant) so they can use the blood in religious ceremonies. Plenty of true and not so true references to The Inquisition. All kinds of ignorant nonsense has been handed down generation after generation and accepted blindly. This was mostly by design, on the part of Anglican and Protestant powers, in an effort to sway people away from Catholicism.
I grew up thinking “papist” was a curse word, because of the way I heard it used. But I must say things have improved. The other day I heard one of my Holiness preacher cousins opine in a hushed whisper that a good Catholic probably could get into heaven after all. Mirabile visu!
No resurrection without the crucifixion and if Christ has not been raised our hope is in vain.
