One of the things with which I grew up was an instinctual, ingrained, anti-Catholic bias. Where did I get it? From my parents. I just simply accepted what they told me as being true. Even if it did not make a lot of sense, I just simply accepted it as part of the reality that surrounded me.
My mother tells of an instance where she happened to pick up and look at Ann Wicker’s (who was Catholic) Bible, and was told in no uncertain terms that she should never look at a Catholic Bible.
I also had come to understand that Catholics prayed to statues, and believed that they could not pray directly to God, but had to go through a priest in order to get to God’s thrones. So convinced was I of the correctness of my position, that I can remember trying to convert Nicholas Vrankovich of the error of his ways, and of the sagacity of my own.
And don’t even get me started about the magic of transubstantiation. Talk about hocus pocus (which comes from the Latin part of the mass in the prayer of great thanksgiving where the priest lifting the bread says, "Hoc est meus corpus")! How could those Catholics be so dumb? (But then, I’ve also wondered how the devil could be so dumb . . . has he not learned after 2,000 years? Is the perception of who he is and what he does so locked away, and so frozen in time as a few places in Holy Writ suggests?)
Besides, Catholics used a service you couldn’t understand, and they were primarily those darker, poorer Europeans. Who needs them?
It wasn’t until I got to seminary that I began to discover the error of my ingrained ways. Nearly all of my prejudices about Catholicism came crashing down. I felt a little angry about it. That which I had believed had to be true, was false. The next time I went back home, I proceeded to instruct my mother about all these tales I had heard and believed about Catholics, refuting them all, and then asking her, "Why did you tell me these things? Where did you come up with all of this?"
And after thinking for a moment she said, "That was how I was taught." I had fallen into the trap of blindly accepting what I had been taught—by an authority figure in my life to be sure—but taught wrong nonetheless.
All of this is to say, that I think all too often we Protestants inherit and believe these religious molehills which we proudly build into mountains with landscaping and fencing and well manicured trails, and so many of them are so far from the truth. Our treasured domain from the past on this particular score has not served us well, and has continued controversy and division that just need not and ought not be there.
For here is the truth: THERE IS FAR MORE IN WHICH WE ARE ALIKE THAN IN WHICH WE ARE DIFFERENT. Yet, so many love to accentuate the differences. And that does not serve Christ’s body well.
The reality is that our beliefs are far more similar than they are unlike, and that probably the biggest problem is our semantics—talking about the same reality but using different words that are loaded with a religious meaning from days and wars of years past. Perhaps it even boils down to some epistemological (double click on the word) problems, that if it is left up to the academic community to parse out, will be decades if not centuries in the resolution. And all the while, the utter scandal of Christians excommunicating each other from the Lord’s Table provides a terribly defective witness of our stance that in Christ we are products of "one Lord, one faith, one baptism" (Ephesians 4:5).
Are there differences between Protestants and Catholics? Yes, and amazingly enough, they probably only boil down to four primary things: (1) the primacy of the bishop at Rome, (2) the dogma of papal infallibility, (3) the Mariology dogma, and (4) the understanding of apostolic succession.
That is only four. The rest we have essential agreement on. And I do not believe that those four have to be impediments to a unified witness and a full acceptance and recognition of our membership, our orders, and of full participation at the Lord’s Table. We need to work together to see what can be done to increase understanding and not allow these four things to be stumbling blocks to Christ’s prayer in John 17
