Why Catholics Don’t Join In Protestant Worship.

One difficulty which Protestants feel about our way of acting will now, it is hoped, have been cleared up. Catholics are blamed as bigots for not attending Protestant services, while Protestants make no scruple about attending a Catholic service. Many years ago, being still a minister of the Kirk, I remember a young person saying to me, “Is it not a curious thing that the Catholics in our work will never come to our church, though we go with them sometimes to the chapel ?”

“The reason,” I answered, “seems fairly obvious. They believe they have all the truth in their Church, and do not need to go elsewhere in search of it: whilst we believe that truth is scattered here and there in all the Churches, and we go wherever we think we shall hear it preached.” It was not, indeed, a very theological answer, but considering the inchoate condition of my ideas about Catholicism at the time, it might pass as fairly correct so far as it went. I may improve upon it now, and say that the primary reason for holding the attitude we do is:

(1) we are forbidden to take part in false worship. Protestantism is false, and therefore as it stands is a sin against faith, in which we may have neither part nor lot. That it contains some elements of truth, no one of course will dream of denying ; otherwise it could never have survived at all ; whatever it carried away from the Catholic Church when it started in the sixteenth century is necessarily true. The same thing may be said of Mahommedanism and Confucianism and Hinduism and any other religion yet discovered. Some fragments of the truth they must possess, although in some the truth is overlaid and buried beneath such a mass of falsity and corruption that its influence is hardly felt at all. Again, it must be admitted that in all religions, there are multitudes of people who are in good faith, and not only are they in good faith, but they are actually good, according to their lights, living good lives, and following whatsoever things are true, honest, just, lovely, and of good report. But to admit that is by no means the same thing as to admit that their religion is true. Take Protestantism. The system in fact is false, and the goodness to be found in thousands of its adherents exists in spite of the falsity of the system. Whatever is good in it is due either to those natural truths implanted by Almighty God in the hearts of all men alike “the law written in their hearts,”as St. Paul calls it (Romans ii. 15) or to those scraps of Revealed truth borrowed from Catholicism. To the operation of any exclusively Protestant tenets no goodness can possibly be attributed. Hence we may truly say that if a Protestant is good in the supernatural order, it is owing to the Catholic influence inhering in his religion; and if he be saved, he is saved in so far as he was a Catholic at heart. He belongs to the soul of the Catholic Church,though not to its visible body; he is, as theologians would say, a Catholic “in voto” A good Protestant is always better than his creed, while a good Catholic can never be better than his. Protestantism, then, as a system no matter which section of it you may take, whether Presbyterianism or Anglicanism or any other is false. We may admire and respect thousands of its adherents; we may cherish a warm personal affection for many most estimable individuals amongst them, and even prefer them in many respects to some of the “household of the Faith “: yet, considered as a scheme of Christianity, a guide to salvation, a system of theology or of morals or Church government, or of anything else, it must be pronounced as an apostasy, an offence to Almighty God, and as such must be condemned without reserve. And this, I repeat, is the fundamental reason why Catholics are forbidden to have anything whatsoever to do with it. We believe that we are obliged to worship the one living and True God, not in any way we like, but in the way that He wishes not in any fashion we please, but according to the form He has been pleased to reveal; and I am sure that Protestants themselves no less than Catholics would judge it to be a great sin to countenance or participate in a religious worship which they were persuaded was displeasing to their God and Saviour.

(2) But there is another reason for our attitude towards Protestant services. I say nothing for the present about the scandal that might be given to other Catholics, or the false impression that might be left on the minds of non Catholics, or the harm that might conceivably be done to the man’s own faith by attending heretical meetings. One thing alone that would make his presence both unnecessary and absurd is this, that in the Catholic Church he already possesses the truth, and the whole truth, of God, and that outside the pale of Borne there is not a scrap of additional truth of Revelation to be found. This arises from the fact, to which I have so often alluded, of the Catholic Church being the sole depositary of the Faith revealed by God the Son in His Incarnate Life. Every true dogma as to faith and morals, every true form of spirituality dogma unmixed with error, and spirituality unspoiled by fanaticism exists within her wide embrace. Divine Science and heroic sanctity flourish in all their beauty side by side or rather the one springs from the other; and never in her long history could it happen that the Church borrowed aught from another. What possible benefit, then, could a Catholic derive from a Protestant service? What is new, he will not have ; and what is true he can learn, and learn far better, from his own mother and mistress the Catholic Church. He is content with what he has, he desires nothing more, and he is consoled by the thought that all the Heavenly treasures of grace and of wisdom are to be found within her bosom, and that generation after generation they are brought forth by her own children, at once a pure offering to Almighty God, their Creator and their Source, and a striking demonstration to the world that she alone is the one true Church of Jesus Christ.

(Culled from What Faith Really Means By Rev Henry Gray Graham).