Wh We Aren't Catholic

Why We aren't Catholic. by Dean J. Seal
Growing up Lutheran, I remember learning two absolutes about the faith. First, We Are Not Catholic. Second, you can ask any Lutheran for a ride to the airport because cabs are so darned expensive and a waste of money.
Luther did not address the second Law of Lutheranism, but he spent a lot of energy defining what he did not like about the Catholic Church, and as a practicing Presbylutheran, I still agree with him.
It boils down to faith, and I want to assure you this is not a finely sharpened discussion of splitting hairs. Remember,. Luther was an Augustinian Monk, a Catholic professor famous for his exciting lectures, so this was his daily bread and butter. He practiced also in a church, and one day it came to his attention that some Catholic representatives of the Pope were selling indulgences. This meant that one could pay only to the church for the redemption of sins. You could even pay for someone already dead. It was kind of like bail or a fine. He went postal- actually that would be apoplectic- because then the power to be forgiven was in the hands of humans, and he believed that only God can forgive. He notified the authorities that they had it wrong.
The Catholic Church responded, however, with the rebuttal that Luther had it wrong. The nature of Faith (here it comes) in the Catholic Tradition is that faith is the first step to salvation, that it is the intellectual assent to he truth of the church- that what the church teaches is true, and you take it on faith. Also, this in itself is Not Sufficient; you have to follow it with works of love. The goal is to become "perfected" and while sin makes this hard, it is not impossible. Doing good works and receiving the sacraments makes it happen.
Communion is the sacrament most closely associated with the ongoing perfection process, because it is medicinal. Sacraments bring grace to us, as if we were taking medicine, and it empowers us to resist sine, giving us strength and discipline because we have the power of the holy spirit put into us by this medicine. That is how God gives us grace (unconditional love). Grace changes you from being self centered and turns you out and makes you free to serve God and neighbor.
To Luther, however, this was anything but conditional. Faith is the connection between humans and God. He said if you believed this, you are deceiving yourself. We will never be perfect, . Monks and Nuns love themselves first and only care about being saved themselves. Grace and merit are antithetical. No one deserves God's love, and all the good works in the world don't make you perfect.
Luther (and John Calvin, a generation later) defined grace not as a supernatural power communicated through sacraments. It refers soley to God's love as mercy and forgiveness. Faith, then is a trust we have in the heart of God's mercy, not an intellectual assent to the church's teachings. And this is the Good News, the Gospel, that Jesus brings to us: The news that God forgives. Hence you are saved whether you know it or not, whether you recognize it or not. But if you do recognize it, then you are free to act on it in gratitude. Then good works are not tainted as some admission fee to an afterlife; they are given freely from the heart.
Now, here's a p[art that many people miss, especially many ministers. Jesus did not die on the cross to win our forgiveness; God forgives freely through grace, unconditional love. Jesus is there to show that God ha forgiven us. God gives us the righteousness of the Christ, and all we have to do is claim it, even though it is not our own. And without forgiveness, we can be destroyed by guilt.
We can see how this works out in the real world. First, the Catholic Church has only celibate men as priests. This is a teaching of the church hat was not the case int he early church- you can cite the precedent that Peter's mother in law was cured by Jesus as one of his first miracles, so the first "pope" was married. This celibacy rule has many problems, but let's look at two. First, they don't have enough to do communion to people who need it because of the shortage of priests. So the priests bless the substance that they sue for bread (wafers etc.) and then send it out to authorized lay people. This apparently suffices to transfer the power of the Holy Spirit. In my mind it brings up the old saw about the Catholic church: it has more rules than anyone, and it has more ways around those rules than anyone.
The second problem is, of course, the sex scandals of pedophilia. Mel Gibson, the anti-semitic conservative Catholic Movie Star, blamed Vatican 2 in 1962 for the sudden perversion of the priests; but there's plenty of historical evidence that it goes way back. The latest Irish scandals about orphanages goes back several decades, and Catholic boarding schools for native American children stolen from their homes were routinely raped by priests, boys and girls. This went on for years and years. Then when it got tot he general population, the sin of the church was to forgive these men and move them to another place, under the theological assumption that they had been "perfected" by a round of confession, absolution and communion. Transfered to another parish that was not informed of the past history of the pedophile, they raped again. I am not alone in the belief that if women were priests, those guys would have never been allowed to be with children again after the first episode.
But if the core of your belief is that the church is the focus of faith, you have no choice but to follow the rules. Many of those who accused the priests were spat upon and mocked by true believers who understood that the church was being attacked, because for them, the church itself was holy, the focus of their faith, and therefore the priests could do no wrong, and were already so close to sainthood that only the minions of satan could accuse them of something so horrible.
Please keep a couple things in mind as I wade through this. The Catholic Church has some amazing and wonderful things about it. When it works, it is a whirling cascade of love. Several of its institutions have long-standing deeply committed staffs that live out the love gospel for those who cannot fend for themselves. I am not throwing the Baby Jesus out with the bath water.
But we all have to be a part of the solution here. The Catholic church is Christian, and as Lutherans and presbyterians, we pray for the holy catholic church, small c, every time we say the Apostle's creed. In that sense we are part of that church, and can criticize it and encourage it to change. It is not "anti-Catholic" to criticize something you are a part of. As Calvin was a Lutheran, and as Luther was a Catholic, so we are all part of the church universal. We have different understandings of the practice of the faith, even as we have different definitions of what faith is.