For thousands of years man has wanted to grow wings and fly. For those of us who have done so with the aid of an airplane, we understand why. The ancients longed for something they missed but could not explain. The most breathtaking experiences in life can be found 30,000 feet in the air looking down. In the summer of 2008 I was flying to from Kansas City to Minneapolis on a weekly basis. One Friday on the return trip, as I watched the sun setting over clouds that looked like ocean waves painted in gold and orange, I found myself turning away from the astonishing beauty to contemplate the turmoil in my own heart.
A friend had been giving me pamphlets on Catholicism. These pamphlets and books I soaked up eagerly – not knowing or suspecting that I was searching for something deeper in my Protestant faith, I enjoyed what I perceived to be a friendly debate. I would read the arguments and return my own, supposedly better, ones. I realize now I was just repeating hollow catch phrases I had heard from my other friends.
I don’t know what particular tenet of faith I was thinking about that Friday. Perhaps I wasn’t even concerned about Catholic apologetics at all. But the first seed of logic was then planted in my mind that maybe Protestants weren’t the be-all-end-all authority on Christianity that I thought we were.
Here is the chain of thought. Catholics rely on the teachings of the church – which consists of priests, bishops, and the pope. Each priest is in charge of a parish – people that are his surrogate family. The priest goes to eight years of seminary - eight years to learn about theology. So he knows the Bible and the Catholic teachings very well. (Here we must understand that I already realized that the difference between Catholics and Protestants was more than just sola scriptura, for no matter what they called it, the differences were not about the scriptures themselves but how to interpret them). Each week he was in charge of saying the mass, saying the prayers of the Eucharist – prayers that Catholics believe turn bread into the person of Jesus Christ.
Here’s the problem – if any one priest ever had a doubt about major Catholic tenets of faith, such as transubstantiation, then to continue to participate would be blasphemy. In addition, because of his advanced learning, he would be more culpable for leading others astray. Many people fall away from the faith of their youth, and many will deceive others because they are embarrassed to admit they were wrong. However, could the overwhelming majority of priests go to school for eight years, perform masses every day of their lives, and truly not believe in their hearts that the doctrine was sound?
My mind whirled onward. I began to think of the pope. Catholics have a doctrine of papal infallibility which by that time I understood enough to not get it confused with some kind of worship. They believe that what the pope and the church leadership (usually working together and always with prayer) set out as doctrine will not be wrong. This comes from Jesus’ own words to Peter saying the gates of Hell would not prevail against the church. But what about all the corruption that had plagued the papacy? Surely the pope knew about all the darker secrets of the Catholic Church for the last 2000 years. I am sure that if there was a secret book of knowledge hidden in the Vatican, some documentation of fraud in the church or Christianity itself, the pope would know about it. And if priests could be culpable for leading people astray when their consciences tell them otherwise, how much more a pope! For not only does he have to believe what he teaches, but he has to do everything in his power to make sure it is theologically correct.
But this couldn’t be. Everybody, Protestants included, loved Pope John Paul II for his humility, service, and moral standards. Hadn’t the Pope been taken up into heaven with Jesus in the Left Behind series, which was written by two fundamentalist Protestants? (random, I know, but this was a thought I specifically remember) To suggest that the pope of all people is a fraud almost certainly means he is a liar, because of all people he should know how much of what he teaches is true and how much isn’t. And if he is a liar, then he certainly cannot be the humble man that he is seen as.
And here I was astonished to find the first glimmer of Catholic sympathy. We are to examine the teachings of our elders and leaders against scripture, and if we do this with the teachings of (at least recent) Catholic popes, then we find that there is nothing anti-biblical about them. However, as Protestants we tend to choose which teachings we follow. We may give the pope a big thumb’s up because he reprimanded a world leader about a policy that violated human rights. However we ignore the pope’s teaching on abortion and contraceptives. It’s not just a matter of convenience for Protestants – it goes back to who gets to interpret the Bible, which I will talk about later.
This thought lodged into my head like a grain of sand in my eye. If I blinked enough times it went away, but usually it sat there and irritated it. You see, around this time I was already beginning to struggle with the moral relativism that had come into the world even among Christians. I wanted to be free and independent and not have anyone tell me what to believe. But when I looked at a moral situation, and everything seemed gray, I wanted black or white. From that moment a sympathy arose in me. I wanted a pope. I didn’t necessarily want the Catholic pope. But I wanted that certainty – that voice sounding out among the debate. Some form of authority – a gavel pounding, a tie breaker, an executive order – anything.
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