continued from last post
Unity WILL happen. It’s already happening. I’ve only been around this earth for 53 years, but I’ve seen amazing changes in relationships between Catholics and Protestants, mainly evangelical Protestants. I actually believe that within the next 20 years, we will see the collapse of evangelical Protestantism and the return of millions of evangelicals to the Catholic Church.
I’m not a prophet, but I see this happening, and it’s like watching a landslide. Right now there are a few trickles of pebbles e.g., my husband and myself and other evangelicals who are converts. Occasionally we see a boulder rolling down the hill in the form of a respected and famous evangelical who converts to Catholicism. But the avalanche is inevitable. Right now all the rage in evangelical churches is the 'emergent church" trend, in which “Catholic” worship is used (e.g., candles, chant, lectio divina, Latin, confession of sins, study of the saints and Mary, etc.). Many evangelical magazines feature articles debating this movement and the question is, “Is the emergent church leading us all back to Rome?” Well, duh! Of course it is!
Twenty years ago, even ten years ago, my father in law and mother in law were utterly opposed to the Catholic Church. They were raised in the Assemblies of God, an evangelical/Pentecostal denomination that has traditionally taught that Catholics are anti-Christ.
But in recent years, my FIL and MIL have been listening to Catholic radio, attending Catholic Bible studies, and watching Catholic TV, and even attending Mass. When my nephew was diagnosed with cancer, they made a trip to Our Lady of the Snows shrine to pray for him and asked the priest to pray for him.
And last night, during our celebration of his 75th birthday, my FIL asked us, "So when is the next class at your church?’ He is interested.
And amazingly, shockingly, last year, the huge Assemblies of God megachurch in our city hosted the intitial meeting of the 40 Days for Life at their church. It was utterly bizarre for me to see monks and nuns and priest in cassocks wandering the Assemblies of God sanctuary, sitting in their coffee shop, and browsing through their bookstore! It was even stranger to see the hip, young, pastor (who looks kind of like Sting) embracing Father John, a Fransican friar, during that meeting! Twenty years ago, I would have said this would never, ever happen! But it did. And we’ll see more and more of it in the next 20years, and eventually, we’ll see the evangelical Protestants come home because evangelical Protestant truly love Jesus and truly hunger and thirst after righteousness, and Jesus promised that those who hunger and thirst after righteousness WILL BE FILLED!
I think what really started changing the evangelical Protestant mindset towards Catholics was the leadership of Catholics in opposing the sin of abortion in the U.S.
Right after Roe vs. Wade, many evangelical churches were completely clueless about abortion. If you read the first edition of Tim and Beverly LaHaye’s classic marriage book, The Act of Marriage, which was published in the mid-70s, you will find a section in which these great evangelical teachers state that abortion is sad but sometimes necessary. They just didn’t know anything about abortion and what it really was and what the theological implications were. (Evangelicals were really naive about the “world” back then!)
But by the time the LaHayes published the second edition of their book only a few years later, they changed this section, stating that abortion was a grave sin and hideous evil.
This mirrors what happened in many evangelical churches back in the 70s. I graduated from high school in 1975, and I was never taught that abortion is wrong in my Conference Baptist Church. In fact, the prevalent thinking in my church seemed to be that it would be better to end a pregnancy rather than bring an unwanted child into the world and give him/her an unhappy life. We didn’t know anything.
Much of the reason for this switch of thinking in evangelical churches can be credited to the work of Dr. James Dobson, who exposed the evil of abortion on his radio show, Focus on the Family. Dr. Dobson is revered among evangelicals, and from the beginning, he understood exactly what abortion was and why it was evil, and he didn’t hesitate to tell all of us to stop burying our heads in the sand and start working to end abortion.
And in those early anti-abortion shows on Focus, Dr. Dobson had little choice–since there were so few knowledgeable Protestant people, he featured CATHOLICS who could teach what abortion was and why Christians should oppose it.
We heard about the March for Life, a very Catholic event, through Dr. Dobson.
And Dr. Dobson often lauded Catholics and the Catholic Church for leading the way in the fight against abortion.
In his latest book (Bringing Up Girls), Dr. Dobson features several chapters that include interviews with Catholics, and he actually endorses Rick Santorum for President!
So I think that in a perverse way, the evil of abortion has actually helped to bring Catholics and Evangelicals together (the name, BTW, of Chuck Colson’s and Father Richard John Neuhaus’ organization that is working to bring Catholics and Evangelicals together).
You are the targets of many of Satan’s attacks, and the world (including many misguided parts of the Christian world) are grossly unfair towards you. Ok, unfair isn’t strong enough. They make up ridiculous stuff about you and slander the name of our Lord in the process.
