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It Came From The Roman Church: Catholic horror stories told by Evangelicals & how to respond
This Rock/ Catholic Answers via Petersnet ^ | David Mills

Posted on 07/31/2002 9:27:40 AM PDT by Polycarp

Title: It Came From The Roman Church . . .
Author: David Mills
Title: It Came From The Roman Church . . .

Larger Work: This Rock

Pages: 12 - 15

Publisher & Date: Catholic Answers, Inc., San Diego, CA, April 2002
Includes: Identical text with no graphics.
Description: Catholic horror stories told by Evangelicals (and ex-Catholics) and how to respond to them.

"It Came From The Roman Church . . . "

Don't Flee From Catholic Horror Stories

By David Mills

In the brief time since my family became Catholics, some of my Evangelical friends have gone out of their way to tell me Catholic horror stories. They will tell me about some near-pagan example of Catholic folk religion they once saw, or an oppressive priest (reactionary or liberal) they once knew, or a Catholic family next door who went to Mass regularly but didn't know anything about the Bible and the faith, or a married friend who happily carried on a long affair supposedly by going to confession after each visit to his girlfriend.

Some of them like to talk about "recovering Catholics" who were supposedly so horribly damaged by growing up Catholic that they just had to become Protestants. (They are always surprisingly unskeptical about these stories.) These people suffered by being made to feel guilt and shame about everything they did or to feel that they could not ever satisfy all the rules God insisted they obey before he would love them.

This is both a personal and an evangelical problem for Catholics. Almost any Catholic who talks very long to a serious Evangelical will be told in some way that though the Pope is a wonderful man, and some Catholics really love the Lord, and thank God for the Catholics in the pro-life movement, the average Catholic parish is either a den of iniquity or simply dead spiritually.

The Evangelical will often claim, by contrast, that Evangelical churches are alive, and, since our Lord said we shall know them by their fruits (Matt. 7:16), Evangelicals are the real Christians. (This ignores, of course, that what Jesus said applied to individual teachers, not to movements or theological systems.) The implication is that if you're a Catholic you've been had.

It is probably worse for a convert, because his friends sometimes speak as if he were either a dullard who hasn't noticed the problems or a romantic who refuses to see them. "You won't live in Rome, you know," one close friend told me — meaning, I suppose, that the Catholic faith I would encounter wouldn't be pure — as if this would be shocking news to me, the mere stating of which would bring me to my senses.

What To Think

How can one respond to this line of argument?

First, you must admit that the Evangelical has enough facts to make a reasonable charge. The truth is that many Catholics do not lead a visibly faithful life. Most, for example, do not obey the Church's teaching on contraception. Few (amazingly to me) go to confession.

On the other hand, many Evangelicals and their churches appear to be models of faithfulness. They study Scripture, try to order their lives by its teaching, share their faith with others, and at some sacrifice minister to the world in many ways. We can learn much from them.

Second, you must listen with sympathy yet question the horror stories. Most of us have trouble doing this, because something in our culture trains us to accept any story of suffering without question and to assume that the Church must have been guilty of almost anything it is accused of.

Take the stories of "recovering" Catholics. Of course, some people have suffered real abuse and have been treated badly. But most of these stories I have heard from the allegedly "recovering" Catholics themselves do not ring true.

What I hear, beneath the emotion and the anger, is usually one of two things. The first is an unwillingness to grow up and forgive what seem to be the sort of offenses we have all suffered from parents or teachers or pastors. The second is an unwillingness to live the Catholic life, leading to a desire to blame the Catholic Church rather than admit this. I say this because the offenses they describe were often surprisingly minor, even trivial, and were often simply attempts — some clearly clumsy or unkind, but some apparently not — to get them to live a fully Catholic life.

For example, many (I do not know how to put this delicately) left the Church when they wanted to remarry after a divorce, and the conjunction of their remarriage and their enlightenment is too convenient for me to accept the latter at face value. (In my experience, it is rare to find an ex-Catholic in Episcopal churches who is not divorced and remarried, and friends tell me that this is also true in many Evangelical churches.)

And of course the Catholic life is a difficult one to live and some people do not want to try. My wife works a few hours a week in the nursery of a budding megachurch nearby, and several of the other women she works with were once Catholics. They have all told her they left the Church because they "found Jesus" elsewhere. I suggested she look them in the eye and say, "You're using contraception, aren't you?" (She didn't.)

Now, I do not mean that you ought to tell the "recovering Catholic" that you do not believe his story. That would be unkind and perhaps drive him yet further from the Church. I suggest only that you have a mental reservation, based on a reasonable reading of the evidence.

Hard To Argue With

Third, you must remember that the Evangelical has a different idea of the local church. He is comparing apples with oranges and complaining that the oranges aren't red enough.

For the Evangelical, the local church is primarily a gathered community of those of like mind and social class that forms a fairly complete alternative community for its members. For the Catholic, the local church is primarily the place we — people of different minds and classes — gather to meet the Lord in the Mass and from which we go out to exercise our vocations in the world.

The Evangelical church will therefore produce lots of public ministries, from Bible studies to short-term mission trips. The Catholic church may or may not have a lot of these ministries, but in either case they are not essential to its life and not stressed in the way they are in the Evangelical church.

The time and energy Evangelical put into their churches' public ministries Catholics may be putting into other, less visible religious activities. They may go to daily Mass when the Evangelical would go to a midweek Bible study, but for some reason going to Mass is not counted as a sign of "life."

Fourth, you must remember the practical differences between Catholics and Evangelicals. There is less attachment to a particular local church in Protestant circles because these churches are more transitory: They get created, split, and cease to be much more regularly than do Catholic parishes.

The Evangelical church therefore has to provide its people with the nourishment that deeper roots provide those who have lived there longer. The type of social interaction that the Catholic may have in his extended family the Evangelical may have to find in his church. The Evangelical church will seem livelier, though it is only giving its members what the Catholics have already. Its social homogeneity helps a great deal as well. There is more potential for interaction among its members due to greater similarities, interests, goals, et cetera. More diversity — which you find in many Catholic parishes — means less potential for interaction.

Because the two churches are different in theory and in practice, the Evangelical church can be presented as livelier than the Catholic church next door, because its life is much more public, while the life of the second is largely hidden from view. The Catholic parish may be producing saints by the dozen, but it may not produce enough visible efforts to get credit for "life."

Fifth, you must remember that as a Catholic you are tied down in a way the Evangelical is not. Anyone who doesn't meet the standards of holiness or zeal required in a particular Evangelical church may either leave or be disinvited to attend. The Evangelical can simply declare that the offender is not a "true Christian." But Catholics cannot disown bad Catholics. A Catholic is stuck with every other Catholic in the world, no matter how badly he behaves.

Besides this disadvantage, the Catholic Church does not even get to claim her own saints on her own behalf. Because they feel any good Christian must in some sense be one of them, Evangelicals will often adopt a Mother Teresa as a sort of honorary Evangelical and try to take credit for her as well. (This, I should make clear, has happened to me in discussions with my Evangelical friends.)

The Evangelical World

Sixth, you must realize that though there is much to admire in Evangelicalism, things are not exactly as they seem. A Catholic will have to note that even the most conservative Evangelicals have capitulated completely to the contraceptive mentality and for the most part to the divorce culture as well. Almost all neglect the sacramental life, and though they all recognize the authority of Scripture, they are enmeshed in intractable disagreements over what it means.

And even one of their own pollsters, George Barna, has found that they are doctrinally a confused body. Over one-third do not believe in Jesus' physical Resurrection, and over half do not believe in the existence of the Holy Spirit. About two in five "born again" Christians believe that "it does not matter what religious faith you follow because all faiths teach similar lessons about life," and from half to three-quarters believe "there is no such thing as absolute truth."

I bring this up not to put down our Evangelical brothers and sisters, who on most issues are our closest allies and often are models of faithfulness. I bring it up only to encourage those who have been left tongue-tied by the sort of argument I've described. Out of charity, you should not be quick to quote these statistics in return but will, I hope, be able to listen with some serenity to someone put down the Catholic Church as inferior to Evangelicalism.

A Sign

Finally, you must see that realism about the Catholic Church implies a surprising proof of her claims. My Evangelical friends think that comparing lax Catholics to lively Evangelicals will make me an Evangelical. Their horror stories may be disturbing to me personally, but not to my faith. They do not make me doubt the claims of the Catholic Church. Fallen men in groups rarely keep a high standard and almost never do so over any length of time.

As a barely Christianized teenager, listening to classmates in my social studies class sneer at Christianity because the Allies and the Germans both sang hymns as they killed each other, I thought that such a thing was only what one would expect. That Christians in 1915 thought that God was on their side did not seem to me to have much to do with the question of whether Jesus of Nazareth was the Son of God who rose from the dead almost nineteen hundred years before.

Laxity seems to me almost inevitable in something as big and as old and as embedded in the culture as the Catholic Church. But I do not suggest that Catholics console themselves with a realistic view of the Catholic Church as a human institution, because in the body of Christ sociological inevitability does not have the last word.

I began to love the Catholic Church in part because she kept reviving when she seemed to be dying and men of the world were writing her obituary. Time after time, when sociologists predicted her death, she exploded into new life. These revivals have always seemed to me a sign of her unique divine life. We are, I think, at the beginning of such a revival even now.

What To Do

But what to do, when a friend tells you Catholic horror stories? It is trying, being treated as a dolt or a fool. I have found the best way to respond is simply to say, gently, "I'm not stupid, you know." This will usually send your friend into retreat — though not always, I've found. While he tries to apologize you can begin to tell him about the one Church whose status is not affected by her members' sins and failings.

And then you can admit that most Catholics are not perfect Catholics and explain that in the Catholic Church you have found all the graces by which God will help you pursue God. You can say that you love and respect your Evangelical brothers and sisters, but only in the Catholic Church are these graces to be found in their full range and power — which is why all the horror stories in the world will not discourage you.

David Mills is the author of Knowing the Real Jesus (Servant/Charis [2001]) and a senior editor of Touchstone: A Magazine of Mere Christianity.

©2002 by Catholic Answers, Inc.



TOPICS: General Discusssion
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To: Starwind
Dear Starwind,

Yes.

sitetest

181 posted on 07/31/2002 7:35:28 PM PDT by sitetest
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To: drstevej
But to conclude that the Catholics I know left Catholicism for the reasons you stated is presumptuous.

From my Catholic perspective, the vast majority of Catholics who leave do so because 1)they never really knew the faith, and 2)thus they were easily deceived by others regarding the faith, or 3)left the faith for an easy or 4)more emotionalism-filled experience, or were 5)divorced or in some other irregularity regarding the faith.

Few leave Catholicism knowing the faith well but purely because they think the doctrines of Catholicism are wrong, but 1 through 5 above will generally insist this to be the case none-the-less to rationalize or assuage guilt.

Just IMHO.

182 posted on 07/31/2002 7:37:00 PM PDT by Polycarp
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To: redhead
Thank you for the very nice response. I was actually just warding off all the arguments that I get hurled at me. You and one other poster that I have dealt with, and it has been quite a few, are the only two that have come out and said plain that the catholic schools are pitiful at teaching their own faith. If more of the catholics recognized that fact it might be able to be fixed. Good Luck.

Becky

183 posted on 07/31/2002 7:37:27 PM PDT by PayNoAttentionManBehindCurtain
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To: redhead
I am a trained RCIA facilitator, and I know how easily and frequently RCIA classes can be derailed into liberal and deconstructionist paths.

Wow! I am in awe of all of you who lead those wanting to learn about the Catholic Church through RCIA. God bless you!

184 posted on 07/31/2002 7:46:19 PM PDT by Salvation
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To: Polycarp
***Few leave Catholicism knowing the faith well but purely because they think the doctrines of Catholicism are wrong***

I could come up with six names fairly easily. And the people I am thinking about do not feel guilt over their decision -- there is peace, joy and dedicated service to the Lord.

Our perspectives are vastly different -- conflicting humble opinions. I do appreciate your responses.

drj







185 posted on 07/31/2002 7:47:57 PM PDT by drstevej
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To: PayNoAttentionManBehindCurtain
Thank you for the very nice response. I was actually just warding off all the arguments that I get hurled at me. You and one other poster that I have dealt with, and it has been quite a few, are the only two that have come out and said plain that the catholic schools are pitiful at teaching their own faith. If more of the catholics recognized that fact it might be able to be fixed. Good Luck.

The catechetical intellegensia, which has left nearly two generations of Catholic uneducated, is dug in pretty deep. They are the root of the problem. With the intoduction of the Cathechism of the Catholic Church in the early 90's, orthodoxy shall prevail in the end. It will still take a while to uproot the freakshows.

186 posted on 07/31/2002 7:49:34 PM PDT by Evangelium Vitae
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To: drstevej
Our perspectives are vastly different -- conflicting humble opinions. I do appreciate your responses.

You too, DrSteve. God Bless you. (And who you trying to kid? We both know my opinions are rarely really humble ;-)

--Still Proud2bRC

187 posted on 07/31/2002 7:53:33 PM PDT by Polycarp
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To: Polycarp
Around our house we have a term "UTB" which stands for Universal Taste Bud. A UTB believes everyone ought to agree with his tastes, preferences and ideas.

1-UTB-2-Another :-)
188 posted on 07/31/2002 7:57:49 PM PDT by drstevej
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To: PayNoAttentionManBehindCurtain
"Thank you for the very nice response. I was actually just warding off all the arguments that I get hurled at me. You and one other poster that I have dealt with, and it has been quite a few, are the only two that have come out and said plain that the catholic schools are pitiful at teaching their own faith. If more of the catholics recognized that fact it might be able to be fixed. Good Luck.
Becky"

LOL! Thanks, but I know the truth about the sorry state of "Catholic" education. The little town I live in has a "Catholic" school with grades up to 8th. They have to have an EVENING catechism class because faith formation is not taught in their "Catholic" school. In place of SCIENCE, they are taught to venerate the earth.

In my own parish in a different town, the catechism classes are just pitiful. The teachers are sweet women and good men, but they are all products of their own failed Catholic educations, and can't be expected to pass on a Faith they scarcely understand. This wouldn't be TOO much of a problem if it was just a parish here and a parish there that was weak. But the modernizers have been undermining the faith for the last 30 years at least, and the first place these inroads appear is in the books that are pushed on the children in the CCD classes (CCD means "Continuing Christian Development" Talk about buzzwords...!). Glossy pages covered with color photos take the place of books filled with questions and answers.

Most of the older posters on these threads remember the old Baltimore Catechism in one form or another. We learned the Faith by rote, but by golly, we LEARNED it!

189 posted on 07/31/2002 8:02:03 PM PDT by redhead
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To: Polycarp
And of course the Catholic life is a difficult one to live and some people do not want to try. My wife works a few hours a week in the nursery of a budding megachurch nearby, and several of the other women she works with were once Catholics. They have all told her they left the Church because they "found Jesus" elsewhere. I suggested she look them in the eye and say, "You're using contraception, aren't you?"

The trouble with using this kind of argument on Modern Evangelicals is, you'd likely get no answer but a slap in the face.

Admittedly playing "martyr" for a second... I know from personal experience that -- to offer one example -- if one suggests to the average "Social Gospel" Modern Evangelical that the Government Schooling system is foundationally predicated upon a violation of the Eighth Commandment ("Thou Shalt Not Steal"), the adversarial reaction from the pseduo-christian "brother" or "sister" to whom you present this argument is going to be intensely personal and vitriolic.

If "Social Gospel" Modern Evangelicals would react so violently against simply proposing the direct application of the Ten Commandments to the open courts of their school boardrooms, just how open-minded do you think that they would be towards a confrontational argument to apply an indirect extension of the Ten Commandments (the anti-contraceptive argument) to the privacy of their marital bedrooms?

You might get your teeth knocked out, that's how "open-minded" they would be.

It is almost as if you and I are off in a corner-room somewhere, arguing a heated dispute over the nature of Christian Authority; meanwhile, outside the corner-room, the Anti-Nomists of both "traditions" rage, admitting of no authority at all save their own vain imaginations. Deep down, Anti-Nomist Romanists don't really care if you "win" the point that Rome is the Authority, they have no intention of obeying the Canon Laws of Rome anyway; and deep down, Anti-Nomist Protestants don't really care if I "win" the point that the Bible is the Authority, as they have no intention of obeying the Theonomic Laws of the Bible, either.

If I were sufficiently Graced to be able to "win" my argument by hammering through to you first thing tomorrow morning that James (and not Peter) is clearly recognized in Biblical and Traditional citations as the "Synod President" of the early Church's ruling Jerusalem Council... it would not matter a hill of beans. To the heart of the Anti-Nomist Modern "christian", the proper identification of Christian Authority is almost a silly argument, only of concern to those who are stuck 500 years in the past. They are modern "Christians", and have neither desire nor willingness to submit to Christian Authority at all.

(OP snorts derisively) yeah, right. If Jesus Himself employed His own typically-confrontational communication style to rebuke any "modern christian", Roman or Protestant, about their Apostasies against the law of God...

...they'd probably crucify Him.

190 posted on 07/31/2002 8:08:09 PM PDT by OrthodoxPresbyterian
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To: redhead
Most of the older posters on these threads remember the old Baltimore Catechism in one form or another. We learned the Faith by rote, but by golly, we LEARNED it!

Count your blessings! Us post-Vatican II brats had to learn it all on our own. I'm 36. Everything I know now I've learned only in the last 11 years.

Of course, we're homeschooling. My kids are going to get the gift that was withheld from me: Real Catechesis!

191 posted on 07/31/2002 8:08:42 PM PDT by Polycarp
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To: OrthodoxPresbyterian
Dear OrthodoxPresbyterian,

LOL. That was amusing and to the point.

Thanks,

sitetest

192 posted on 07/31/2002 8:11:53 PM PDT by sitetest
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To: constitutiongirl
CG: "...and I've heard every one of them.."

Even this one?:

"Daniel Rambaut, of Vilario, the father of a numerous family, was apprehended, and, with several others, committed to prison, in the jail of Paysana. Here he was visited by several priests, who with continual importunities did all they could to persuade him to renounce the Protestant religion and turn papist; but this he peremptorily refused, and the priests finding his resolution, pretended to pity his numerous family, and told him that he might yet have his life, if he would subscribe to the belief of the following articles:

1. The real presence of the host.
2. Transubstantiation.
3. Purgatory.
4. The pope's infallibility.
5. That masses said for the dead will release souls from purgatory.
6. That praying to saints will procure the remission of sins.

M. Rambaut told the priests that neither his religion, his understanding, nor his conscience, would suffer him to subscribe to any of the articles, for the following reasons:

1. That to believe the real presence in the host, is a shocking union of both blasphemy and idolatry.

2. That to fancy the words of consecration perform what the papists call transubstantiation, by converting the wafer and wine into the real and identical body and blood of Christ, which was crucified, and which afterward ascended into heaven, is too gross an absurdity for even a child to believe, who was come to the least glimmering of reason; and that nothing but the most blind superstition could make the Roman Catholics put a confidence in anything so completely ridiculous.

3. That the doctrine of purgatory was more inconsistent and absurd than a fairy tale.

4. That the pope's being infallible was an impossibility, and the pope arrogantly laid claim to what could belong to God only, as a perfect being.

5. That saying Masses for the dead was ridiculous, and only meant to keep up a belief in the fable of purgatory, as the fate of all is finally decided, on the departure of the soul from the body.

6. That praying to saints for the remission of sins is misplacing adoration; as the saints themselves have occasion for an intercessor in Christ. Therefore, as God only can pardon our errors, we ought to sue to him alone for pardon.

The priests were so highly offended at M. Rambaut's answers to the articles to which they would have had him subscribe, that they determined to shake his resolution by the most cruel method imaginable:

they ordered one joint of his finger to be cut off every day until all his fingers were gone: they then proceeded in the same manner with his toes; afterward they alternately cut off, daily, a hand and a foot; but finding that he bore his sufferings with the most admirable patience, increased both in fortitude and resignation, and maintained his faith with steadfast resolution and unshaken constancy they stabbed him to the heart, and then gave his body to be devoured by the dogs." [end excerpt]

FOX'S BOOK OF MARTYRS CHAPTER VI
Persecutions Under the Papacy
http://www.webwriterscanada.com/anewyou/fbm/ch6_fbm.htm

Such religious tyranny could easily happen again, since the Roman Church has to this very day never retracted its official denial of religious freedom and its right to use violence to force people to accept its doctrines.

The only thing standing in the way of tyrants in America is our Constitution.
193 posted on 07/31/2002 8:12:17 PM PDT by Matchett-PI
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To: PayNoAttentionManBehindCurtain
Why don't you buy or get from your local library books,tapes,videos by authentic Catholic writers who teaches what the Church believes.Start with the Fathers of the Church and "The History of the Church" by Eusebius and also "The Didache-Teaching of Jesus Through the Apostles." You will find in all of those sources, proof that the Catholic Church is the one founded by Jesus Christ and you won't find a Baptist,Evangelical,Anglican,Presbyterian among them!
194 posted on 07/31/2002 8:13:10 PM PDT by Lady In Blue
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To: sitetest
Dear OrthodoxPresbyterian, LOL. That was amusing and to the point. Thanks, sitetest

My pleasure. I aim to please... and to offend. ;-)

195 posted on 07/31/2002 8:14:56 PM PDT by OrthodoxPresbyterian
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To: Salvation
"Or Else" Ways to Evangelize
196 posted on 07/31/2002 8:17:43 PM PDT by Matchett-PI
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To: OrthodoxPresbyterian
This reads like a great paradox! If I read you right, it sounds like, although we stand apart, on either side of a great divide, we really are only separated by a small trickle of a tributary of the mighty river that separates us BOTH from those modernist Christians on the other side of a grand canyon? And the river they will not cross to us is essentially the river of obedience to the foundational authority of our Creator God.

(Of course, its late, and I might not be reading you right. And I have bluntly asked fellow Catholics if they are contracepting. And I have successfully gotten a few of them to come over to the culture of life side of the canyon you and I inhabit.)

197 posted on 07/31/2002 8:18:09 PM PDT by Polycarp
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To: Lady In Blue
Why don't you just pick up the bible and trust God to teach you instead of man.

Becky

198 posted on 07/31/2002 8:19:00 PM PDT by PayNoAttentionManBehindCurtain
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To: Matchett-PI
Shoot. The rest of us were having fun. I thought you left.
199 posted on 07/31/2002 8:19:46 PM PDT by Polycarp
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To: OrthodoxPresbyterian
By the way, good to hear from you, OP. (Now I actually smile when I see you join the fray.)
200 posted on 07/31/2002 8:21:05 PM PDT by Polycarp
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