Replies

Actually, the Bible is read completely in the mass in three years. We have one reading from the OT, one from NT and one specifically from the Gospels.
Along with that, I started a website "Read the Bible in a Year" through a Christian Homeschool group I belong to. Pitifully, I have not gotten there yet but all of us have to start somewhere and I will be through it in June. I like starting my day with The Lord and will then start over and do it again.
Catholics are Christians and I have found people who are shocked when talking to me about it. A few ladies were taken aback when I said I was Catholic and I actually had one woman say to me, "But you're so Christian!" Truly I know this is not the run of the mill. I am surprised, however, listening to some of my friends who forget who is in the room when a discussion starts. I have at least convinced these ladies that we don't pray to statues!

Reading the bible is wonderful and I hope you make time to read it at the very least once per year. You will not find much about Mary in there though. The more you read it, I hope, the more your thinking will align with what you find in there. I would even hope that after reading through it several times you might start asking some of those difficult questions of your Catholic "Priests" and teachers.

A few ladies were taken aback when I said I was Catholic and I actually had one woman say to me, "But you're so Christian!" Truly I know this is not the run of the mill.

You might be suprised to realize that this is more common than you think.

Historically, Protestants have been taught that Roman Catholicism is a perversion of Christianity -- that it is the result of an unholy union between Christianity and paganism. Hislop's The Two Babylons still looms large in Protestantism. They've been taught that Catholicism is Mystery Babylon, Mother of Harlots, Queen of the abominations of the earth. (Thats Rev. 17 language, BTW).

In recent years, though, the pendulum has begun to swing the other way. Due in large part to the parachurch organization movement -- PromiseKeepers and Campus Crusade, for instance, and also the pro-life movement, Protestants and Catholics are getting to meet each other in religious settings and finding out, hey, this guy's not so different from me. A whole another world of Christians is opening up to Protestants.

The pendulum may have swung too far the other way: now, there's a tendancy amongst Christians (evangelical Protestants, anyway) to minimize the doctrinal disagreements between evangelicalism and Catholicism. There are some very real and very serious theological disagreements that we cannot simply pretend do not exist. Veneration of Mary is a good example. To an evangelical Protestant, the veneration of Mary violates the very basis of monotheism. To a Catholic, disagreement with the veneration of Mary is an attack that evokes the same emotions when someone insults one's own mother.