Crossing the Street. Robert R LaRochelle
held suspicions about the Catholic Church among those who claim Protestantism as their heritage.
In any attempt to be both historically accurate and to attempt to lay out all important issues so that true dialogue between Catholics and Protestants may be achieved, it is necessary to acknowledge an anti-Protestantism existent among Catholics as well. As with anti-Catholicism, we are now seeing the remnants of historical battles which are simply not as relevant to this generation or this culture as to generations and this culture in its past. For Catholics as for Protestants, some of the antagonism stems from forces beyond religious dogma, though certainly religion is part of an often complicated mix. The battle between the Irish and the British, as we have noted with respect to conflicts in Northern Ireland, is rooted in political decisions quite removed from discussions of theology or the polity of one church over and against another. Whatever the causation, there has been a historic pragmatic impact upon behavior. The facts that I never set foot in the ‘Protestant’ funeral home in my native Putnam for the entirety of my youth or that several Catholic parents I have known were troubled that their Boy or Girl Scout son or daughter had to recite the ‘Protestant Our Father’40 at a scouting event is most certainly indicative of something!
Theologically speaking, if members of a church accept the claim that they belong to ‘the one true church’41 as many Catholics have done throughout the years, based on what they have been taught was the teaching of the church, there does evolve a certain sense of the deficiency of other churches and the attendant supposition that Christian unity would best be served by the conversion of Protestants to the Catholic faith. Does this position represent an anti Protestantism as such? While the degree to which the Catholic would go to promote the conversion of the Protestant would most likely be a determining criteria in responding to that question, it could be argued convincingly that there remains even today a tendency within many members of the Roman Catholic Church to have knowledge that they as a church have something that others don’t. On some level, even among Catholics who would freely label themselves as progressive, the need to assert the special place of Roman Catholicism strikes me as a part of their mindset.
Bear with me as I take you through what may at first seem like a diversion. I am a Boston Red Sox baseball fan. To Red Sox fans, the Yankees are the archrival and the passion between the teams intense. I have a wonderful relative, someone very close to me, in fact, who happened to grow up in Massachusetts, home base of Red Sox Nation! When this relative of mine discovered back in late 1990s that I was leaving the Catholic Church and then becoming a Protestant minister, I think it is fair to say he was not pleased. He comes from a family with deep Catholic roots going back many generations. He was also extremely supportive of me as I pursued my training for the Permanent Diaconate in the Catholic Church. Now, fortunately, he is also a wonderfully kind and good humored guy and has been consistently terrific to all of us in what has become a large extended family. In his own unique and jocular way, he loves to talk about ‘how I’ve gone over to the other team.’ He says that I have left the Red Sox and joined the Yankees, the implication being that there is something better about the Red Sox and worse about the Yankees. While I think he’s correct on that premise, I happen to disagree with him regarding its applicability to one’s church of choice.
To be honest, in my lived experience as a Protestant and my prior experiences as someone seeking to learn about Protestant churches and theology going back into my late high school and my collegiate days, I have not seen anything within individual Protestant denominations with respect to one another along the lines I have described in the example of my Catholic relative. In fact, I would even go so far as to say that while his reaction was unique to him, the underlying need to identify the primacy of the Catholic Church as, in some way, THE church, is one held in common by Catholics across the conservative-progressive spectrum.
I am not saying that it is not important to Protestants to see the Reformation approach as more Biblical or sensible to them. Nor am I saying that there are not large numbers of Methodists, Lutherans, Presbyterians or Baptists who are deeply connected to their heritage. Yet despite these connections, it has also been a typical occurrence for a Protestant to join a Methodist church while living in one state and then a Congregational Church in another, to be Presbyterian in New Jersey and join the UCC in New Hampshire. My experience with Roman Catholics, including my reflection on my own evolving mindset through the years, is that there is a Catholic impulse to see the Catholic Church as THE church and to somehow measure other churches against it. In fact, a quote that has long stood out to me is the one in which someone contended that the Catholic Church is ‘the one church that sees itself as THE church.’42
How often do we hear of Catholics who have decided to leave Roman Catholicism and have found themselves in the Episcopal Church, landing there with the claim that ‘it is the closest thing to the Catholic Church.’? Is the implication there that the ideal by which all ecclesial bodies are to be measured is that of Roman Catholicism or is it simply an expression of spiritual comfort level? My experience as a Catholic Permanent Deacon who taught in the Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults program in my parish, a process by which people enter the Catholic Church as adults, is that there exists a yearning among a large number of Catholics, even among those sincerely and consistently ecumenically understanding and kind, to establish the uniqueness of the Catholic Church among all of the other churches. Many Protestants might assert the preferability of Protestantism, for sure, but fewer zone in on the outright superiority of a specific denomination!
This sense I have was exemplified quite powerfully in a lengthy conversation I had after one of these RCIA sessions. As part of our parish’s program, we had an ‘RCIA team’ consisting of a priest, a deacon and several active lay members of our parish community. Our RCIA candidates, in my view, were most fortunate to be surrounded and supported by a group of fine Catholics who happened not to be members of the church’s official clergy. One particular couple who was deeply involved exemplified a life of deep commitment to Catholicism’s highest ideals having served the parish and the wider church in a variety of ways over the course of their life in their local church.
One night, our RCIA session centered on the sacraments and moved to the Roman Catholic view of the Eucharist, including the issue of what it means to receive the body and blood of Christ in Communion. As I had been actively involved in the teaching that evening, I had presented the group with my perspective that much of the alleged division among Catholics and Protestants on this question of Christ’s real presence is both overstated and misunderstood. This is a position to which you will be subjected as you move on through this book.
After this session, this gentleman on our team came up to me and, after saying how well he thought the evening went and how interesting the discussion was, proceeded to ask me this question: ‘Bob, were you in church a couple of weeks ago when Father preached about the Eucharist and Communion?’ I told him that I was away that weekend (actually, I think on that day off from church responsibilities I went to a Red Sox game!) and had not heard this particular homily. He then told me how good it was and how helpful it was to him in getting a better sense of the Catholic perspective on Communion.
He explained to me how ‘Father’ told the congregation that morning that if they were to see Communion celebrated in a Protestant church, they would notice a difference between what Catholics do with the leftover element of bread and what they would see at that particular church. He then explained how it was typical for Protestants to take whatever is left over and just throw it out and how the very act of taking this bread and placing it in the garbage shows the difference in Eucharistic theology. He contrasted this with the Catholic practice of the reserved sacrament whereby consecrated hosts or any other unleavened bread are placed in the tabernacle for future use or for bringing Communion to those unable to worship at church.
I told this man that, while I had not heard the entire homily, I did feel, based on what he was saying, that this good and experienced priest had oversimplified the distinction and had minimized the Protestant sense of profound respect for that which was ordained by Christ ... as stated in the Bible!! I then gave a different perspective on it, probably showing some evidence of my ‘Protestant’ tendencies indeed. But my point here is not to debate Eucharistic theology. It is instead to demonstrate how important it is to Catholics to draw that distinction which, in some way,