I started wondering this because of a debate about Kerry being able to take communion since he has been excommunicated from the church. One person said that the only people who can take communion are the ones that beleive “everything” the Catholic church says. So what is it that makes them different from say a Methodist or a Baptist? Or an Episcopalian for that matter.
When was Kerry excommunicated?
A quick google search brought up a lot of sites say he should be, or that he has been but the church is keeping it secret.
Well, first, it’s technically correct to ask: “What makes Protestants different from Catholics?” After all, the Protestant Reformation originated as a protest movement against what we today call (Roman) Catholicism.
One major difference: the Catholic Bible (of which the Douay Version is the prime example in the USA) contains many books that other Christian denominations reject as uncanonical Apocrypha. Also, the translations of even some of the passages regarded by all Christians as Scripture differ from one denomination’s Bible to another. For example, the references to Jesus’s brothers/brethren are interpreted by most Catholics to refer to cousins or more distant relatives of Christ, while Protestants concede the possibility that various brothers may be the sons of Joseph and/or Mary. This ties in with the fact that Catholics take the doctrine of the Blessed Virgin seriously – not only was Mary a virgin when Jesus was born, she remained one all her life – while Protestants may believe she had children the more natural way after Christ’s birth.
Catholics are also under the authority of the Pope (currently John Paul II) whose other duties include serving as Bishop of Rome and Head of State of Vatican City. The Protestant Reformation was impelled by a belief that the laity could know Christ directly, and did not need intercessors of either the heavenly (saints, angels) or earthly (priests, bishops) hierarchies. Only Roman Catholics can be excommunicated by John Paul II – he can’t throw anyone out of a Baptist or Methodist church, in either the “building” or “denomination” sense of “church”.
“Catholic” means universal, and many “old-line” Catholics (my father being one) still fondly remember the days when you could basically walk into a Catholic Mass anywhere in the world and understand most of the service as long as you had learned/memorized enough Latin to follow what was being said and sung. The sermon itself would be in the vernacular (everyday language of the congregation), but the rest of the liturgy was prescribed and followed a year-to-year cycle. The reforms commonly known as “Vatican II” did much to close the gap between worship practices of Catholics and those of other Christians – Catholics were allowed to eat meat on Fridays (except during Lent), permitted to make services more “approachable” and “relevant” to parishioners, etc.
As the Kerry case has pointed up, abortion is opposed by the Catholic Church, while some (but not all) Protestant denominations take a “pro-choice” stance. Hope I’ve given you some help – others will be along, and I’ll probably be back to add more to this thread.
Kerry was not excommunicated. Please learn to read news stories more carefully. What happened was that the Pope said that Catholics who advocated abortion should not be allowed to receive communion. He never mentioned Kerry, and it’s not clear that this statement has anything to do with Kerry. In any case, it would take the decision of Kerry’s local bishop to deny communion to him. And denying communion is not the same as excommunication.
That is exactly what excommunication means.
As far as Kerry, he was never mentioned, but it was pretty implicit that he was one of the pols the Pope was taliking to.
Well, no, not really. One of the effects of excommunication is to deny communion, but what the Pope was saying wasn’t that he was excommunicating anyone. In fact, excommunication is rare, and it’s mostly used when someone continues to teach heresy despite being specifically told that it’s heresy. What the Pope was saying was that abortion is a sin and (since one is not supposed to be taking communication when one is in a state of sin) Catholics who advocate abortion should be forbidden from taking communion. But he wasn’t forbidding anyone specific from taking communion, and he certainly wasn’t excommunicating anyone. To excommunicate someone is to formally announce that they are no longer a representative of the Catholic Church. The main use of it is to let people know that someone who advocates heresy does not speak for the Catholic Church. One effect of this is to deny communion to this person, but that’s not the main point. The Pope was reminding people that abortion is a sin and so is advocating abortion and that therefore people who advocate abortion should not be allowed to receive communion.
Kerry is still taking communion:
http://www.salon.com/news/wire/2004/04/25/kerry/index.html
I was wrong about one thing though. It appears that it was not the Pope who said that people who advocate abortion should not take communion. It was a high Vatican official.
<puts on former-Catholic-school-pupil hat> Listen to Wendell. He’s got it right. Excommunication is a very serious and very rare event; denying communion to someone is barely in the same ballpark. If a RC priest knows someone in his parish has divorced and is now remarried or living with a romantic partner, for instance, he can withhold communion from that person (and spouse).
You really want to know what makes the distinction between Roman Catholicism and Protestantism? There’s a lot, but here’s my best go at a summary of the high points. I’ll leave it to someone else to explain how Eastern Rite/Orthodox Christianity and Anglicanism fit into this, because it’s complicated and I don’t want to screw up.
Salvation: RCism emphasizes a person’s deeds; Protestantism classically emphasized faith. RCs believe that most people, after death, will pass through Purgatory, where they will be purified of those sins they committed in life but did not confess and seek reconciliation for. After Purgatory, they go to Heaven. Those with a heavy weight of sin on their souls will go to Hell. Protestant denominations differ on who goes to Heaven and who goes to Hell but Purgatory is not part of Protestant theology.
Authority: The RC Church has always given both Scripture and traditional teachings approximately equal weight. The Pope is seen as the direct successor to Saint Peter, the ultimate worldly authority on manners of faith and dogma. In some rare, specific situations he speaks infallibly. (Rare enough that the current Pope, in spite of a quite long time in office, has never done so.) Again, there’s variation among Protestant churches, but Scripture is emphasized over tradition, and no single person has ultimate authority.
Communion/The Lord’s Supper: Right, this is one of the big ones. Protestants believe that the bread and wine symbolize the Body and Blood of Christ. Roman Catholics believe the bread and wine become the Body and Blood of Christ. This is known as transsubstantiation. Those who do not believe in transsubstantiation are not welcome to take communion at an RC Mass, because in the eyes of the RC Church a) it is an affront to the Body and Blood of Christ and to crucial RC dogma to say “I don’t really believe it, but I’ll participate anyway”, and b) taking communion implies a unity that does not exist.
As I said, many other differences exist, but I think these are the most important - and explain the most.
Actually, a number of Christian groups who are not Catholic do profess that Jesus is physically present in the Eucharist. This would include the Orthodox, the Anglican communion (which is only “protestant” depending on what histroical trail you are following on a given day) and several of the Evangelische/Lutheran groups.
It is true that only the RCC uses the word Transubstantiation to describe what occurs at the Eucharist, but the belief in the Presence of the Lord is not limited to Catholics or excluded from Protestants.
ELCA Lutheran checking in. Part of our service is an invitation to any visitors to participate in the Communion, to “receive the body and blood of our Lord under the bread and the wine.” The stance is somewhere between transubstantiation, which IIRC insists on an almost-literal transformation, and a purely symbolic presence.
Consubstantiation.
And part of the excommunication/communion is a linguistic problem. The sanction for Catholics living in dissent with Church teaching is denial of what is formally called the Eucharist. “Communion” is just a common name for it.
As for Salvation: Catholicism shares with Protestantism the basic principle that salvation is attained only though God’s Grace (“sola gratia”) – however it does not accept the Protestant position that the Grace is obtained “sola fide”, “by Faith alone”. Participation in the sacraments and rites, and righteous living, all aid in channeling Grace from God towards you, rather than just a matter of a one-time affirmation of accepting Jesus as Savior. In Catholicism there are seven Sacraments (Baptism, Confirmation, Reconciliation/Confession, Eucharist, Annointing-of-the-Sick, Matrimony, Holy Orders) which are held to ALL be divinely instituted channels for Grace, rather than symbolic events. Many Protestants hold to only Baptism and Eucharist being divinely instituted, and the others being instituted by the church.
Purgatory/Hell: Two levels of sin: Mortal Sin and Venial Sin. Those who die in a state of unrepentant Mortal Sin go downstairs. Those who die with a burden of Venial Sins, including those who were in true repentance (“perfect contrition”) of their Mortal Sins but could not make it to a proper Confession in time, get Purgatory. Again this connects with the issue of Sola Fide – if Faith Alone is salvation, then Faith Alone renders you 100% in full Grace and ready to enter Paradise, therefore Protestants have no need to fit Purgatory into the equation.
Which is the reason why most Protestant denominations don’t have priests at all. Here in the U.S., you’ll hear Catholics refer to their priests and you’ll hear (most) Protestants refer to their “ministers” or “preachers.”
People have mentioned what excommunication ISN’T but not what it is: its being cut off from the grace or blessing of the church, which may even include barring one’s path to heaven.
Catholic here: its been done 2 or three times, no more, in history.
I’d like to take an opportunity here to explain why this is, though I’m sure my reasoning will seem clumsy and vastly incomplete compared to a true theologian’s.
To many/maybe most Protestant groups, salvation is a state or status. You get it, bang, you’re done. [Yes this is a vast oversimplification.] In Catholicism, salvation is a dynamic condition - a journey with no necessary end, open to even the most wicked and wrong-headed of men. More to the point, choosing to go through that process saves. Faith has a great place, perhaps even the greatest place. But faith is more than the mere declaration of belief. It contains within it the will to truly carry out that belief into your everyday life.
That said, its also been argued that almost as holy as the truly saintly are the unbeilevers or even evil men who consciously contain their anger and do the right thing even though they do not believe, or actively dislike the people they try and do right by.
No, the OP asked a correct, though exceedingly wide question. Restating it as R.C. vs. Protestant is taking a very narrow scope of Christianity by leaving out Orthodox churches and many, more modern sects like the LDS and JH which really weren’t part of the protestant reformation.
If you really want to get nitpicky Martin Luther’s intention was not to break away from the Roman Catholic church but to reform it from within. Anyway I’m ELCA as well and our congregation says the Apostle’s Creed with the line “I believe in the Holy Spirit, the holy catholic church…” Note the lower case c in catholic. This isn’t universal and my folks go to an ELCA church that substitutes “christian church” in the creed.
If you cut through all of the folderol you will find that the only difference between my religion and all the others is that they are wrong.
Everything else is just window dressing.
Pardon me for interrupting your debate… I had a huge argument with a friend of mine. We were watching a bad movie, wherein the Catholic church was referenced. At one point, she scoffed and said, “That’s so stupid, Catholics don’t read the bible.”
I rolled my eyes and said I found that difficult to believe, but I wasn’t raised Catholic, so I had nothing to argue with.
She then called her father, who apparently claims to be Catholic. He told her to tell me I’d be hard-pressed to find a bible inside a Catholic church and all Catholics are encouraged to study Cathchism and are discouraged from reading the bible. :eek:
I still don’t believe it; and note her father is the kind of person who gets a twisted and very incorrect idea in his head and cannot be convinced otherwise, regardless of hard evidence placed in front of his face. He daughter, sadly, has inherited this trait. (She still thinks Dennis Kucinich is the Green Party candidate and was never a Democrat. :rolleyes: Even after I went to his web site and proved her wrong – she accuses Kucinich’s own web site of lying about their party affiliation. Not enough roll eyes smiley to express how dumb I think this is.)
Please debunk: Do Catholics read the bible? Are you discouraged from reading it? If I wandered into the local Catholic church, would I be hard-pressed to find a bible?
The Catholic position is that divine truth is revealed not only through Scripture, but through tradition and the teaching offices of the Church.
For this reason a Bible is not the ONLY source of truth. However, it’s the primary and most important one. I cannot imagine a Catholic church without a Bible, and I as a practicing Catholic have never been discouraged from reading the Bible.
Your friend’s idea is, therefore, about as daft as her Kucinich speculations.
- Rick
And I hardly need point out that duffer was way off base above – as other posters have ably pointed out, excommunication is a vastly different animal than merely denying communion. A person may not approach communion when not in a state of grace; theoretically, the minister of communion may deny this sacrament to anyone not in a state to receive it.
Excommunication is a legal sanction within canon law that cuts off access to all the sacraments, and must be lifted before any sacraments may be lawfully administered. In many cases, it must be specifically imposed by a court of competent jurisdicition.
A person may be denied communion because he is in a state of mortal sin. He may receive the Sacrament of Penance, and restore himself to a state of grace, and once more receive communion.
An excommunicated individual may not receive penance until the excommunication is lifted.
- Rick
Thank you. I suspected as much.
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I need to make some new friends.
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