Yesterday, I got asked what kind of Christian I was by a couple of practicing, kippah wearing Jews. I said Protestant which then prompted the question "What is the difference between Protestants and Catholics?" I have noticed my Israeli-Jewish friends are confused that I am picky about which of the multitude of churches in Jerusalem I will "go pray at". They assumed they were all the same.
Right there I started spouting a history lesson about the reformation and counter reformation and Martin Luther to which one of them exclaimed "I hear of him! Martin Luther King, nahon (right)?" And then I realized I had to find a more succinct way to answer the question.
As a complete outsider to Christianity, what would the most obvious differences between Catholics and Protestants be? I had to toss away hundreds of years of history and ideology about communion, the role of confession, divorce, the Virgin Mary etc. and go for the very basics.
Only a moment later, the next conference talk started, so I had a good 15 minutes of mind wandering to come up with the key the differences in tradition that would make sense in the eye of the Jew. This is what I came up with:
a) The Catholics have better decorations.
b) Catholic priests are always unmarried men. Protestant leaders are allowed get hitched and sometimes they are women.
c) Protestants are really good with peer pressure whereas the Catholics have the Pope.
They don't seem like very important differences for wars to have been fought over, do they? Especially in religion, the devil is in the details.
12 years ago
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