An Open Letter to My Protestant Brothers In Christ
Part 2
This is Part 2 of a 3-part series of letters detailing the thought process that took me from being a non-denominational Christian to becoming Catholic. If you haven’t yet, read Part 1 here.
Naturally, there were still some things I didn’t understand: but what if the Church had been corrupted? What if the Pope was an evil man? What’s the Catholics’ deal with Mary?
Those were all very valid concerns, and some of the talking points that I heard my Protestant friends raise up when we discussed Rome’s authority.
Keeping in line with my honest admission of ignorance which I explained in the first part of this letter, I will leave the difficult argumentation of such matters to more educated scholars and apologetics on both sides. What I want to discuss in this letter is, again, my thought process and my current understanding of such matters, which I hope can be helpful to clear some misconceptions and maybe even have the unwanted but welcome effect of simplifying the answers enough so that whoever is close to my beginner level of theological understanding can make sense of them.
What’s The Deal With Mary?
I’ll start by admitting that those of you on the Protestant camp who believe Catholics place too much of an emphasis on Mary, to the point that it becomes almost indistinguishable from worship, have a point.
Within the Catholic Church, in general, there’s a strong Marian devotion. We love Mary. As the mother of Our Lord, we believe she can intercede for us and that we have a mother in heaven. I think this devotion is good and healthy, and I think having a feminine role model of purity and virtue is incredibly valuable for the girls and women who need a female ideal of virtue to aspire to.
We men have Jesus as our model for the ideal man, but if you don’t have Mary as an example of virtue, who are women going to try and imitate? You might say that it’s Jesus too, but Jesus was a man. Masculine. Imagine how difficult it would be for you, as a man, to try and extract from a female figure the masculine aspects you should try to imitate. In that sense, having Mary as a model of virtue and purity is incredibly valuable —and this is merely my opinion as to how the figure of Mary serves a more practical role.
But like I said at the very start of this section, I understand why Protestants feel some rejection to the devotion that us Catholics direct towards Mary. I feel it myself at times, even now. This is something that I need to look more into, but it still bothers me a bit how sometimes there’s more of an emphasis placed on praying to Mary than in praying to Jesus directly. I’m trying to be as honest as possible, and maybe here a more educated Catholic can explain why that is. I don’t think it’s a problem to pray to Mary, not at all. I love Mary too. But maybe out of a failure to catechize properly or for some other involuntary reasons, I 100% think that some Catholics, usually the less educated ones, actually start treating Mary as if she was God. This is a problem.
As stated, the problem, in my view, is not how the Catholic Church actually and truly views the figure of Mary (this is a good thing, and I fully believe the Catholic position on all the Marian dogmas and doctrines), but rather the fact that there is a lack of clarity and effort in teaching the everyday Catholic those dogmas and those beliefs in a simplified manner, which can easily degenerate into an involuntary misunderstanding of the role and power of Mary.
All of this to say, that the issue of Mary is not an issue of the actual doctrine of the Catholic Church, but of the failure to teach that doctrine properly so that Marian devotion serves the purpose of further glorifying Christ, instead of distracting the average, poorly educated Catholic, from the figure of Jesus.
This is my opinion on the question of Mary. However, it’s still important to clarify and state clearly: we Catholics aren’t taught to worship Mary. We are taught that she’s in Heaven, and that as the Mother of Christ, she can intercede for us very effectively. We are taught that she’s an example of feminine virtue and that she cares for us as the Holy Mother of all humans. We are taught her love is a mother’s love, and that she wants us all to be in Heaven with her and her Son. We believe thus that she’s alive in Heaven, and when we pray to her, we are asking for her intercession, but knowing full well that the One who decides is God, not Mary. Just like I might ask you to pray for me, I can go to Mary and ask her to pray for me as well. This does not, in any way, mean that I can’t go to Christ directly in prayer. I absolutely can and I absolutely do.
A Protestant-turned-Catholic speaker to which I recently listened to put it nicely: “If you want to know someone on a deeper level, you have to meet their family, right? In a similar way, meeting Jesus’ mother allows us to further know Jesus. Why wouldn’t you want to know the mother and father of Jesus? His friends and followers too? Developing a relationship with Mary doesn’t mean having less of Jesus in your life. It means having more Jesus.”
I think that sums it up well.
But The Church Has Been Corrupted
If the Church was merely a human institution, I would agree. But under this same argument, you could say that all the Protestant churches have been corrupted. Every exclusively human institution can and will be corrupted at some point. So this argument only holds any weight if you believe the Catholic Church to be a merely human institution.
However, our belief is that the Holy Church is protected by the Holy Spirit from being corrupted as an institution, and that Jesus clearly stated this when He established it:
“And I tell you, you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the powers of death shall not prevail against it. I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven, and whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven.”
— Matthew 16:18-19
Think about it: the only institution which you could conclude to be divinely protected, is the Catholic Church. That was a big point in my conversion. If Jesus told us that His Church would prevail, who are we to claim that He failed to keep His promise? He didn’t say this about any other Church, but the one which He established and which has remained steadfast and protected by the Holy Spirit and through the tradition of Apostolic succession. He didn’t say this about any of the other thousand Churches which men founded, claiming to be the ones who could understand and explain Scripture properly. Everyone of us and our own private churches is liable to error. Not the Catholic Church. Jesus promised and Jesus has kept His promise.
None of this is to say that there won’t be bad, corrupted men, within the Church. Of course there will be. Jesus didn’t promise every follower of His would be perfect. Not at all. But He did promise that the Church, as an institution, would not be led astray. And is it not a bit hypocritical to think that the Catholic Church is corrupted, but that the Lutheran, Anglican, or any other Protestant denomination’s Church isn’t? If there’s no institution which is divinely protected, then all Churches are merely human, and thus they are all corrupted. The only one which we can safely claim to be divinely protected, is the Church which is documented to be started by Jesus, and which Scripture tells us is divinely protected.
It’s even more impressive, if you think about it, and a testament of God’s power, that no amount of corrupted and sinful members have been able to bring down the Church of Christ. Because here’s the key: the Catholic Church acknowledges the reality of sin within its members but maintains that its holiness comes from Christ. Of course the Church will have problems, as any institution with a human component will. The Catholic Church teaches that while individual members of the Church, including its leaders, can be corrupted by sin, the Church itself, as the Mystical Body of Christ, cannot be corrupted in its essential nature or its teachings.
Thinking about it from a merely logical standpoint, which of all the millions of Churches and denominations is bound to be the right one?
The one which Jesus Himself claimed would prevail or any of the many ones which we, flawed humans, think best aligns with truth at any given time? Do we trust Jesus’ promise even though we might not agree with a specific doctrine of His Church? Or do we, again, believe our own understanding to be superior, ignore Jesus’ promise, and use the sinfulness of men to disregard the holiness of the Church Jesus gave us?
No Church but the Catholic one has been promised this divine protection.
This was initially supposed to be a 2-part series, but I decided to write one final letter so as to make each individual letter more digestible.
To be continued. Part 3 of this letter will be released on Wednesday, the 21st of May, 2025.
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Thank you for posting. There is a lot of good stuff in here, and it’s quite edifying as I am a Confessional Lutheran who, from time to time, feels the allure of Rome. How could I not — I’m engaged to a Roman Catholic! That said, though I do have some points…
First, on the point that the Roman Catholic Church, as we know it today, being the church Christ founded: the Eastern/Oriental Orthodox make the exact same claim and make the same claim to apostolic succession, as other commenters note. This has only further been muddied by church history suggesting the Bishop of Rome as merely an authority, rather than the supreme authority, among bishops (again, as EO/OO and the Reformers argue). I struggle with these conflicting claims, and it has certainly given me pause to wholeheartedly commit to swimming the Tiber, though I understand why one would commit to any particular side of this historical debate.
Another hang-up I’ve consistently had on the primacy/supremacy of the Pope is the interpretation of that passage from the Gospel of Matthew that you quote. In his retractions he wrote later in his life, St. Augustine stated:
“I have said in a certain place of the Apostle Peter, that it was on him, as on a rock, that the Church was built. but I know that since that I have often explained these words of the Lord, ‘Thou art Peter, and on this rock will I build my Church,’ as meaning upon Him whom Peter had confessed in the words, ‘Thou art Christ, the Son of the living God’; and so that Peter, taking his name from this rock, would represent the Church, which is built upon this rock. For it is not said to him, Thou art the rock, but, ‘Thou art Peter.’ But the rock was Christ, [1 Cor 10:4] whom because Simon thus confessed, as the whole Church confesses Him, he was named Peter. Let the reader choose whether of these two opinions seems to him the more probable." (Retract., i, 21)
Pair this with many instances of Scripture where God is called a rock: 2 Samuel 22:2, Psalm 18:46, Psalm 62:6, Psalm 144:1, Isaiah 26:4, Exodus 33:21, etc. This, of course, was not the unanimous interpretation of the Church Fathers when it came to that verse (the lack of censure or outcry toward St. Augustine for saying such a thing also suggests this was not his view alone nor a doctrinal error against the church on his part), but this does dig at a deeper issue the Reformers pointed out rather effectively in the Book of Concord, among other confessionals: the Early Church is not as unified and theologically consistent as RC apologetics would have you believe.
As for the idea that the Roman Catholic Church being incapable of corruption, I suppose I should start out by saying as institutions operated by men, it is my belief that any church denomination may encounter corruption from time to time; my denomination, the LCMS, is certainly not immune, but given the counter-reformation presented by the Council of Trent, and an agreement with many of Luther’s theses, Rome admits it can err or encounter corruption as well, albeit not of a doctrinal nature, as it would assert.
That aside, you choose an interesting translation of Matthew 16:18 to cite. Most translations I read do not use “the powers of death”; rather, most say “the gates of Hell” or “the gates of Hades” will not prevail against it or overcome it (“it” being the church). I find this interesting, because most commentaries I read note that a gate is a defensive structure, and this passage takes on a very different meaning when we view the church as on the offensive rather than the defensive against Hell. It also does not foreclose the possibility of corruption or error occurring from time to time, merely that such corruption or error will not prove fatal to the church or “lift the siege” in keeping with Jesus’ imagery.
All this is to say that I respect your journey from non-denominationalism to Roman Catholicism and admire your willingness to share your testimony; I am certainly grateful for it! I merely wish to proffer my own responses to some of your points, with no intention of changing your mind; rather, I hope my response inspires further reflection and study of these things. I resolved to sit down with both my LCMS pastor and an ecumenically-minded Roman Catholic priest to discuss these and other topics in greater detail, as I too have much to learn.
Praise be to God, brother.
Good read!
Question:
What would you say of the Orthodox Church which asserts the very same things you say about the Catholic Church