I once had a friend, a dear friend, who helped me with personal care needs in college. Reformed Presbyterian to the core. When I was a Reformed Presbyterian, I visited their church many times. We were close. I still consider his siblings my friends. (And siblings in the Lord.)
Nevertheless, when I began to consider the claims of the Catholic Church to be the Church Christ founded, he took me out to breakfast. He implied--but never quite stated--that we would not be brothers, if I sought full communion with the Catholic Church. That came true; a couple years later, I called him on his birthday, as I'd done every year for close to ten of them. He didn't recognize my number, and it was the most strained, awkward phone call I have ever had. We haven't spoken since. We were close enough that I attended the rehearsal dinner for his wedding. His wife's uncle is a Catholic priest.
I remember reading a blog post of theirs, that early in their relationship, she told him of the pious tradition that a woman named Veronica (St.) had wiped the Lord Jesus's face with a cloth, after the scourging by Pilate and his soldiers. (It is amply and beautifully depicted in the film, "The Passion of the Christ.") My friend said, "Where is that in the Bible?" She tells how she searched and searched, and obviously didn't find it in the Scriptures. She (tragically) concluded that it never happened, and absorbed the assumption that only what is found in the Scriptures is the total truth about Jesus.
At this point, I need to say that I remain blessedly obsessed with the Bible. How could you not be? The Bible as we received it is--among other things--truly God's love letter to humanity, and to every single person who lives, and has ever lived. Even so, I think some elements of American Catholic culture conspired to make it easier for some Protestants to dismiss Catholics as ignorant (unsaved) fools. Namely this: Most Catholics don't know the Bible very well. You're gonna lose every Bible "gotcha" game, if you don't know it, chapter and verse. Now, I think some interpretations folks throw out in those games are weird, silly, and sometimes dangerous. But if we Catholics don't really know our own Bible--and I'm perfectly willing to say no one anywhere would even have one, without the Catholic Church--how are we going to know? We Catholics are aiding people's "evangelism" of us, by being ignorant of Scripture!
In my journey toward the Catholic Church, the mechanism of that happening was actually thinking about church authority structures. Anybody Christian that you care to associate yourself with answers to someone, church wise. Denominational meetings, church courts, committees, you name it. Sometimes, they don't just deal with the mundane and the practical; sometimes, a minister somewhere runs afoul of the set of dogmas he is supposed to profess. Heresy trials still exist today, and they should. To keep it brief, I had this realization: If none of these church structures are infallible, we can't actually separate what's true and false--what's from God, and what's from man--if and when we need to. That was supposed to be the "gift" of the Protestant Reformation: that no assembly of men speaks infallibly at any time, with the word of God. That might seem to be a good outcome, if some people ask you to believe weird, harmful things; it's not good at all, when you need to know what God has said.
Meanwhile, most people don't worry about it that much; a lot of average people just want a community of good people, who will help them in trouble. It's a bonus, if they happen to believe in eternal life, because most folks aren't too terribly worried about judgment and Hell, even though there really is plenty of talk about those things in the Bible.
Anyway, I couldn't afford to be casual about any of it, since I was intending to make it my entire life. I also think that if a person finds a church community small enough, he or she has the luxury of completely ignoring the Catholic Church, and its more than 1 billion baptized members. Still, any serious claim of truth that's binding on the conscience has to take account of Christian history,--an account of the Church--as something Jesus is doing, saying, guiding, and preserving, as a part of reaching everyone He loves, and wants to save. It's right there that the Catholic Church starts to win some arguments. Pastor Jeff from Somewhere Community Church can't claim your allegiance totally, if he or someone like him wasn't there at the beginning. Somewhere in our hearts, a lot of us know this. Heck, some folks find the Catholic Church--or something close--attractive, precisely because it is old. I don't think that's enough, but I understand it. And I guess I'm not too upset about the (insufficient) attempts to claim the early Church as one's own, since I'll be preaching in a Protestant pulpit soon enough. We should just know that what we believe matters, and that following God will cost us, sooner or later.
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