(CT) Three Ways Catholic Tradition Bolstered My Protestant Faith

Three Ways Catholic Tradition Bolstered My Protestant Faith

Andrea Palpant
Christianity Today
http://www.christianitytoday.com/women/2014/march/three-ways-catholic-tradition-bolstered-my-protestant-faith.html?paging=off
March 21, 2014


Ulf Ekman, the pastor of a prominent megachurch in Sweden, recently announced his conversion to Catholicism. Some Protestants responded to the news with the kind of intrigue and betrayal we might expect when a man defects from his country. Others of us were left standing on the shore, wondering, Should I go, too? What's my religious heritage and where do I belong?

I sympathize with Ekman's urge to convert, although in my story, I had to leave the church entirely before I could appreciate either Protestantism or Catholicism. Fueled by a faith crisis in my early 20s, I shot myself out into a void of vague theism, floated in dark space for a while, and then eventually got tired of living without gravity, ritual, or community.

When I came back to the church, I ducked through the doorway not in triumph but in defeat, finally understanding what Peter meant when he said to Jesus, "To whom else shall we go?" I felt like a closet Jew—better at waiting for the Messiah than at receiving him. I envied the Catholics for their appearance of unity, even though my Catholic theologian friend assured me that his church is just as fractured as mine. And I called Protestantism my home even as I struggled with aspects of its culture and theology.

In the end, I split the difference by marrying a Protestant who values Catholicism and teaches philosophy at a Holy Cross university. By way of my husband and my Anglican church, I was introduced to parts of the Catholic tradition that helped guide my re-entry and re-assimilation into the Christian faith.

These years later, I'm still not a Catholic. I'm a high church evangelical Protestant. However, I borrow gratefully from the Mother Church. Insofar as the weaknesses of Catholicism were "corrected" by the Protestant Reformation, here's how Catholicism corrects the weaknesses of my Protestant faith:

Sacramental worship

I attend an evangelical church in the Anglican/Episcopal tradition. Every Sunday, I process to the front of the sanctuary for the sacrament of communion. A priest offers a torn piece of bread, which I dip in a chalice of red wine, and then he lays a hand on each of my children and says a blessing. If it were possible to cheat and go through the line a second time, I would. Strangely, communion means the most to me on Sundays when I sit in church and struggle to understand what the atonement even means. At precisely the moment when I can't make sense of it intellectually, I am called forward to physically receive God's redemption from the hands of a priest.

For the rest, see:

http://www.christianitytoday.com/women/2014/march/three-ways-catholic-tradition-bolstered-my-protestant-faith.html?paging=off

Tetzel Anyone? German Roman Bishops Extract Tax by Threats

 

http://www.euronews.com/newswires/1665148-german-bishops-get-tough-on-catholics-who-opt-out-of-church-tax/

German bishops get tough on Catholics who opt out of church tax

 

By Tom Heneghan, Religion Editor

PARIS (Reuters)- Germany’s Roman Catholic bishops have decreed that people who opt out of a “church tax” should not be given sacraments and religious burials, getting tougher on worshippers who choose not to pay.

Alarmed by a wave of dissenting Catholics quitting the faith, the bishops issued a decree on Thursday declaring such defection “a serious lapse” and listed a wide range of church activities from which they must be excluded.

Germans officially registered as Catholics, Protestants or Jews pay a religious tax of 8 or 9 percent of their annual tax bill. They can avoid this by declaring to their local tax office that they are leaving their faith community.

The annual total of church leavers, usually around 120,000, rocketed to 181,193 two years ago as revelations about decades of sexual abuse of children by priests shamed the hierarchy and prompted an apology from German-born Pope Benedict.

“This decree makes clear that one cannot partly leave the Church,” a statement from the bishops conference said. “It is not possible to separate the spiritual community of the Church from the institutional Church.”

Church taxes brought in about 5 billion euros (4 billion pounds) for the Roman Catholic Church and 4.3 billion euros for the Protestant churches in 2010, according to official statistics.

NO RELIGIOUS BURIAL

The bishops said the consequences of leaving the church had not been clearly spelled out in the past. Some Catholics have tried to remain active in their parish or have a religious burial despite leaving the church to avoid paying the tax.

The Vatican gave its approval for the decree before it was issued, the statement said.
Catholics who leave can no longer receive sacraments, except for a special blessing before death, the decree states.

They cannot work in the church or its institutions, such as schools and hospitals, or be active in church-sponsored associations such as charity groups or choirs.

They cannot be godparents for Catholic children and must get a bishop’s permission to marry a Catholic in a church ceremony. “If the person who left the Church shows no sign of repentance before death, a religious burial can be refused,” it added.

The bishops conference said local pastors would invite all leavers to meet to discuss their reasons for quitting, explain the consequences and offer a chance to rejoin the church.

PROTESTANT EXODUS

Germany’s Protestant churches have also seen a steady exodus in recent decades as members – who become registered at baptism – leave because they no longer believe, disagree with some policy or want to save several hundred euros in church tax.

A major departure wave from both Catholic and Protestant churches occurred in the early 1990s, when the government raised taxes to finance ex-communist eastern Germany.

Since the levy was almost the same as the church tax – whose origins date back to the 19th century – Germans could neutralise the tax boost by quitting their church.

Catholics and Protestants are almost equally distributed in Germany, with each at about 24 million, or 30 percent of the 82 million population. There are about 4 million Muslims and 120,000 Jews in Germany which has a total population of almost 82 million. ($1 = 0.7721 euros)

Roman Catholic Church Extracts Tax on Pain of Damnation

http://archbishop-cranmer.blogspot.com/2012/09/roman-catholic-church-extracts-tax-on.html

Sunday, September 23, 2012

Roman Catholic Church extracts tax on pain of damnation

According to the bishops of the Roman Catholic Church in Germany, any Roman Catholic – no matter how pious and devout – who refuses to pay the ‘Church tax’ is no longer a member of the Roman Catholic Church: ie, they are excommunicated. His Grace is loath to talk of simony or indulgences, but the extraction of money for the administration of the sacraments or the assurance of salvation simply isn't very Christian; indeed, it is quite evil

Church giving or tithing ought to be voluntary, from the heart, and with joy (2Cor 9:7). Yet the reality is that around 70 per cent of the German Church's revenue comes from the Church tax, so it is rather useful for paying the bills (and court fees). But you only need to look at who introduced the tax in Austria to see what a thoroughly bad idea it is. Such an inheritance ought to make the vigorous enforcement on pain of excommunication rather unpalatable to Christians. It would appear that the Roman Catholic Church in Germany is serving Mammon, not God.

His Grace received the following email on this matter from one of his Roman Catholic readers. Speaking of her reaction on hearing about this tax, she wrote: ‘...frankly, as a Catholic, it made me vomit’:

As a lifelong Catholic, I thought there was very little that the Church could still do to horrify me. I watched the betrayals of the spirit of Vatican II. I watched the horrors of the child abuse scandals and the unbelievable behaviour of those that tried to cover them up. I watched the routine crack-downs on anything resembling the intelligent questioning of the Church that is actually required of Catholics by Canon Law but punished severely if practised (ask numerous brave Catholic theologians who were silenced or censored).

Why this latest development should have hit me so hard, I have no idea. Unless it's for the sheer stupidity that has been displayed.

If you have the patience, you might wish to take a look at this link. If you haven't the patience, a short summary of it is this:

In the German taxation system, Germans officially registered as Catholics, Protestants or Jews pay a religious tax of 8 or 9 percent of their annual tax bill. They can avoid this by declaring to their local tax office that they are leaving their faith community – and many do. In the past years there has been a massive exodus from the Church, mostly in the wake of the sex abuse scandals. Now Rome has upped the stakes.

On Thursday – with the knowledge and full approval of the Vatican – the German bishops issued a decree stating that Catholics who left the church ‘to avoid paying the tax’ would be excluded from all the sacraments – Communion, confession, Catholic burial. The only exception to this was the anointing of the sick. They may not act as a Catholic godparent, and they must ask their bishop's permission to marry a Catholic.

In other words, a Catholic who withholds their ‘tithe’ from the Church for any reason, even if they donate that same tithe voluntarily to a Catholic charity, is excluded from the sacramental life of the Church.

There is a name for this. And it is simony.

Simony, for anyone unfamiliar with the term, is ‘the act of paying for sacraments and consequently for holy offices or for positions in the hierarchy of a church, named after Simon Magus, who appears in the Acts of the Apostles 8:9-24. Simon Magus offers the disciples of Jesus, Peter and John, payment so that anyone on whom he would place his hands would receive the power of the Holy Spirit’ (source: Wikipedia).

For any Catholics out there who still care enough, it is forbidden under Canon law.

I'm sitting here with my head in my hands. Even now, somehow still a Catholic, I have watched what my Church has done and what it has failed to do, and I have told myself that we are a pilgrim Church. We have had Popes who were adulterers, murderers, heretics, schismatics. The Church has gone on because it is greater than the fallible men who have attempted so many times to run the Barque of Peter onto the rocks.

We'll probably survive this too. But just how, how, how could the men in Rome manage to do something this stupid?

Please don't try to answer that.

Olivia Cook (Mrs)

His Grace weeps for those whose spiritual life is disturbed by this ecclesiastical bullying. "As soon as a coin in the coffer rings, the soul from purgatory springs" is a couplet attributed to Johann Tetzel, a German Dominican preacher who was well known in the 16th century for selling indulgences. Against him, there arose a protestor who wrote 95 theses as a disputation against all clerical abuses. One wonders how long it will be before the Roman Catholic Church in Germany produces another Martin Luther to declaim this evil. It appears there are already one or two emerging in the 'Catholic Blogosphere'.