About Catholicism

I was saddened when I received news of the death of Pope John Paul II. There was a day when my feelings about the Bishop of Rome might have been expressed much differently.

In my youth there was a statement that I heard over and over: “The Roman Catholic Church is the Great Whore of Babylon mentioned in The Book of Revelation, the Pope (or at least some future Pope) is the Antichrist and Catholicism is a cult that has and has nothing to do with Christianity.” So said many of the people in my area of eastern Tennessee. Oh, my parents didn’t teach that and, as far as I know, never said anything negative about the Roman Catholic Church.

(Let me pause here to reflect that I am aware that Catholics refer to their church as “The Catholic Church,” and that it is mostly Protestants who add the word “Roman” in front of “Catholic.” Nevertheless, there are churches that hold that they are part of “The Church Catholic” and contend that there are Catholics other than Roman, including Orthodox, Polish National Catholic, Anglican, and the various Episcopal communions, to name a few.)

I must confess that, many years ago, reflecting this attitude, I preached a sermon entitled, “Smells and Bells, Incense and Other Nonsense.”  For 19 years, I was a member of a denomination whose most visible televangelist, before his fall, railed against Roman Catholicism on television with great vitriol. So, it might be surprising to some to learn that I attended a memorial Mass at Our Lady of Mercy Catholic High School at the invitation of Father Paul Burke, chaplain of the school, and that I briefly commented and read scripture, at the invitation of Father John Walsh, at an ecumenical memorial service for Pope John Paul II at Holy Trinity Catholic Church in Peachtree City.

A gentleman shared with me a few weeks ago that, when he was young and living in a southern state, the Ku Klux Klan burned crosses on the mountainside. “It wasn’t blacks they were after,” he said. “It was Catholics and Jews.” I suppose that all this conflict came out of what Protestants call The Great Reformation and the years following when both Catholics and Protestants visited horrible atrocities upon each other and both often acted more like the Taliban than like Jesus. Messy divorces have messy consequences for years to come.

The first Catholic I ever met was a guy named Joe. I was a sophomore and playing football for Dobyns-Bennett High School. Joe had transferred from St. Dominic’s Catholic School that year and joined the football team. I was the center, he played guard. For three years, we were side by side in the huddle and on the line. We played church league softball against each other and even double-dated a few times. We sometimes talked about church and not once did I glean that Joe was anything other than a Christian. Confused that he didn’t have horns, and seemed to believe much like I did, I took a home study course from the Knights of Columbus, a Catholic men’s group that I saw advertised in the magazine section of the Sunday paper. As a teen, I became convinced that Roman Catholics might (I say, “might”) be Christians.

Over the years, the more I studied, the more I shed old ways of thinking, the more I laid aside stereotypes, the more I found I had in common with my Roman brethren. A few years ago, serving in that other denomination, I took our very Protestant youth group to a Catholic Mass and, in turn, their Confirmation Class visited our morning worship service. There were differences, to be sure, but the similarities were legion. As I got to know and work with more priests Catholic laity, I found that I was becoming much less of a “protester” and more — well, dare I say it? — “Catholic,” even though not “Roman.” When I became a hospice chaplain, ministering almost exclusively to Roman Catholics, I discovered a spirituality in the dying that demonstrated the devoutness of faith that many held as they faced eternity. All of this metamorphosis in my outlook caused quite a scandal with some of my friends who felt that I was being way too chummy with “The Beast” and betraying my Protestant forebears.

When Pope John Paul II died recently, I felt as if a great and mighty oak tree had fallen. This was a man who had endured both the Nazi and Communist oppression of his native land, had suffered the loss of members of his family at an early age, and had, nevertheless, become perhaps the most influential individual of his day. He was an athlete, a soldier, a scholar, a worker in a mine, an author---but above all, a man of prayer and of deep conviction. He could be just as hard on American consumerism as he was on Soviet Communism. He chided, and even rebuked, Republican and Democratic presidents alike. He was unapologetically pro-life, pro-family, and pro-freedom. He loved the young, the old, and the poor and demonstrated the heart of Christ by visiting and forgiving the man who shot him. When he died, he had no money or possessions to leave behind, something that cannot be said about many ministers and preachers in our land who accumulate wealth and possessions to the point of vulgarity.

John Paul II wasn’t my bishop or my pope, but I still feel diminished by his passing. It was said that he died clutching the crucifix to himself and praying until his last breath was gone. Whether he died that way or not, he certainly lived that way. So, it was with humility and honor that I stood with my Roman Catholic brethren in their loss and mourning. John Paul II’s joy is now “unspeakable and full of glory.” May God send his like among us once again.