The Catholics

If you have been reading my blogs from the beginning it will come as no surprise to you that I was brought up Roman Catholic attending Catholic schools until I was out of 8th Grade. I hated school, I needed to get out of my house and get on my own, and I wanted nothing to do with church. That sums up my life before November 1971.

Just weeks before I turned 19 I dedicated my life to Christ and was then emmersed into Southern Pentecostal and Charismatic Protestant culture which did not like Catholics which was the results of Centuries of anti Catholicism in the U.S., especially down South.

In 1785 there were fewer than 0.6% Catholics in this country - that's less than 1%. In the 1800s Catholics (half of which were Irish) integrated into the U.S. with a huge cultural backlash from the Protestants, many of who decided that Catholicism was the "Whore of Babylon." Persecution and even murder of Catholics increased at alarming rate as Catholics were blamed for disease, violence, and raising taxes.

Eventually the Catholic Church has found its way into American culture, but were still under a cloud of persecution and suspician. Even today the Catholic Church is considered the "Whore of Babylon" by many Protestants and End Time Fictional books.

When I dedicated my life to Christ I entered into that anti-Catholic world. I read books claiming that the Catholic Church was the church of the Anti-Christ and I was still under the influence of my own personal anti-Catholic Church feelings from my childhood.

As all my brothers and sisters and I became Born-again believers, we argued with my parents who stayed Catholic. I must confess, we made it very hard for them for awhile, but eventually we calmed down and the arguments faded away and love once again rule the house.

Almost 40 years later I can now say I have met good Christians who are still Catholic and I can now see that even though I was anti-Catholic for years, even then my Catholic upbringing was big part of my Christian walk, behind the scenes where I didn't see it. Here are some examples:

1. Catachism - I didn't learn how to have a personal relationship with God, but I learned about who God is. When I surrendered my life to Christ I had a large part of my Christian worldview already in place. It needed a bit of tweeking, but I understood a lot about who God was, heaven, hell, angels, demons, and so on.

2. The Holiness of God - Evangelicalism has an amazing gift in their focus on a relationship with Christ. Unfortunately, this focus on the nearness of God (the imminence of God) all too often deflects us away from the holiness of God - or in other words the fact that God is separate, high above and holy. Holiness means separate.

3. The Fear of God - The fear of God is also all too often neglected when we focus on the friendship of God. Hebrews 12 teaches us that it is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God. The writer of Hebrews was talking to Christians!

4. Discipline - Although I quit the church in 7th grade, I learned certain things that are crucial to the Christian walk such as going to church every Sunday. I never questioned it after I stared a new life in Christ, I just knew Christians went to church on Sundays.

5. The Knowledge and Severity of Sin - Every Catholic in my days grew up learning that they were sinners. Sin defined for us, its seriousness was emphasised and we were given ways to deal with it. Protestants do deal with it in different ways (through prayer and repentence rather than through Confession) but few Protestant churches can match what I learned about the seriousness of sin.

These are things that took me years to be able to see. Back in my younger days, I was convinced that the Catholic Church had nothing good in it at all and as I mentioned, several of us in our family discussed our views with my parents. In the end, although they continued in the Catholic Church, I am told that they did some soul searching and grew stronger in their faith.