How can you tell a Protestant? (My Conversion to the Catholic Church, pt VI)

For parts one to five of my conversion to the Catholic Church (which let me tell you, is riveting and unmissable stuff), go here to find everything from ‘Love & Hell’ to ‘Death by Diagram’.

***

In October 2011, I went overseas – to the land of dreaming spires and soggy hills and wellingtons and tea and the Queen.

I went to England. And it was glorious. (Happy and glorious, even.)

Admittedly, I didn’t get to meet the queen or convince Prince Harry to give up rowdy ways, find Jesus, and marry me but beyond those two small drawbacks, the trip was a massive success. I was up to my eyeballs in history, which is exactly how I like it.

But as delighted as I was by the castles and the underground and everything in between, I was also troubled. Because everywhere I went, I seemed to bump into the Reformation.

Every historic sight seemed to have some story about a martyr: Canterbury, Oxford, York. It was like the bloody history of Catholic-Protestant relations was stalking me. And for the first time, that bloody history and the questions that it raised were starting to bother me.

The Burning of Archbishop Cranmer from Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, 1572

It had never bothered me before. So what if we had different churches and had disagreements about some things? That was inevitable and we wouldn’t have real unity until Heaven, anyway. In the meantime, it kept us sharp and as long as we all loved and followed Christ – the rest was just details.

But on my trip, my attitudes changed. I saw that our unity isn’t an incidental by-product or a pie-in-the-sky dream, it’s a divine command.

The Bible tells us, again and again, to be united as Christians. (1 Co 1:10-13, Eph 4:1-7, Php 2:1-2) We are to have one mind, one love, one faith – to agree in everything and keep the bond of peace.

The Early Christians knew that; they knew that breaking off from the visible Church was breaking off from Christ and that the locus of that unity was the bishop. That’s why St Ignatius of Antioch wrote to the Smyraneans in c. 110 AD,

Where the bishop is to be seen, there let all his people be; just as, wherever Jesus Christ is present, there is the Catholic Church (Letter to the Smyrneans 8:2)

There is one time in the Bible when Jesus prays explicitly for us, the believers to come (v. 20) He doesn’t pray that we would love each other, that we’d know the truth, that we that we’d be awesome preachers or do lots of nifty miracles. (As great as these things are.)

No. He prays that we would be united.

“I do not ask for these only, but also for those who will believe in me through their word, that they may all be one, just as you, Father, are in me, and I in you, that they also may be in us, so that the world may believe that you have sent me.” (v. 21)

And just in case we missed it, He repeats it.

“The glory that you have given me I have given to them, that they may be one even as we are one, I in them and you in me, that they may become perfectly one, so that the world may know that you sent me and loved them even as you loved me.” (Jn 17:21-23)

Raphael, Disputation of the Holy Sacrament, 1509-1510 (Vatican Museums)

It frickin’ blew my mind. It still does. Jesus prays you and I will have the same sort of unity that the persons of the indivisible Trinity have.

He prays we would be united so that the world would see Jesus and believe. So that.

As if reflecting divine mysteries wasn’t enough, our unity is also how the world is going to know Jesus is for real. Our unity isn’t a pleasant by-product, it’s Jesus master evangelism strategy.

That’s why our unity has to be visible and institutional, I realised. The world has to be able to see it. The Church is called the Body of Christ and bodies are visible. How could I have missed that?

Of course, it must be more than merely institutional, just as it has to be more than spiritual. It has to incarnational: the spirit of loving unity made flesh in the visible, institutional Church established by Christ, built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, and with every part working together. Just as our God is made visible in the Lord Jesus, and our faith made visible in our works, so too our unity has to be visible in the Church.

Otherwise, as James might say, it’s dead.

***

So much for what was going on in my head. But after England, I went to Northern Ireland and that’s when stuff started getting horribly real.

I was on a bus tour around Ireland, including the North. It began in Drogheda with the severed head of St Oliver Plunkett, a Catholic archbishop murdered by Cromwell in the 17th Century… and went downhill from there.

Northern Ireland was formed in 1921 when six Irish counties, with a predominantly Protestant population, chose to remain in the United Kingdom and not become part of the Republic. For years, the Catholics who remained in Northern Ireland were the underclass, the poor and oppressed. Like so many other places in the 1960s, civil rights marches began and then quickly turned violent. Both sides formed paramilitary groups, started killing each other and since 1969, about 3,500 or 2% of Northern Ireland’s population has been killed or injured in political violence. Anyway, that’s my short and probably biased summation.

We went to Omagh, where in 1998 a RIRA (Real IRA) bomb went off in the high street on market day, killing 29 people and injuring 220. The Real IRA was opposed to the fragile Good Friday Agreement and thought indiscriminately killing Catholics, Protestants and random tourists was a good way to deal with that.

Omagh Bombing, 1998

13 years later, there’s a memorial on the spot where the bomb went off. I took a picture, said a prayer, and felt so small in front of such hatred. What are you supposed to do with that?

Omagh Memorial, 2011 (My photo)

From there, we went to a city whose very name is disputed. It’s Derry if you’re a Republican and Londonderry if you’re an Unionist. It’s also one of the more volatile cities in Northern Ireland. It was site of an autonomous “republic” of a couple of streets called Free Derry in the early 70s and where in 1972, 14 unarmed protesters and bystanders were shot dead by the British Army. Half were only teenagers and five were shot in the back. It’s called Bloody Sunday.

Bloody Sunday, 1972

Derry/Londonderry, 2011 (My photo)

And finally, we ended up in Belfast. It’s a pretty grim place, though enlivened by the beautiful, militaristic murals of hunger strikers and paramilitaries.

Though sporadic violence still occurs, much of it is in the past. That uneasy peace is largely possible because Belfast is divided into Catholics zones and Protestant zones and everyone knows not to trespass into the other.

Belfast 2011 (My photo)

Belfast 2011 (My photo)

The zones are surrounded by walls, guarded and the gates are shut at night. We visited one of the walls that keeps the peace. You’ve got to laugh at something like that. Peace Wall. Walls don’t bring peace and if you have to keep a wall between you to get peace, you haven’t actually got peace; you’ve got veiled contempt.

It was all so wrong. The political violence seemed to embody – if in a particularly bloody way – the deeper division in the Church.

The world creates divisions. The world builds walls. The world can’t have two people in a room (or a garden for that matter) without it disintegrating into sin, division, and blame. Did you know our word for sin comes from the same as sunder, meaning to tear apart? That’s what sin does, it divides and conquers.

Which makes unity the opposite of sin, and love the opposite of division. Love longs to be united, not at a distance giving lip service to unity but really, truly united in every way. I was beginning to see that that was the sacred task of all Christians. It was what our Saviour prays for and it’s what our world needs to believe in Him.

I didn’t know what to do. I was beginning to feel the real tug of the Catholic Church but at the same time, I still had so many doubts. And choosing to be either felt to much like choosing sides. How was that supposed to help unity?

So I stood in front of the peace wall. And I prayed.

Let me you, when a conflicted Christian, dissatisfied with Protestantism and scared of Catholicism, stands in front of a wall built to divide Catholics and Protestants in the name of peace…

The irony is so loud you can hear it.

Peace Wall in Belfast, 2011 (My photo)

I finished praying.

And I still didn’t know what to do – about any of it.

But we had to get back into our cabs and drive back into the neutral zone. The gates would be shutting soon.

On the way back, we talked to our cabbie about the division. What was it like living here? Do you really hate each other? How could you tell a Catholic from a Protestant? Our cabbie said you just could. Then he told me that I must be Protestant because I pronounce my h’s as ‘aitch’, not ‘haitch’.

If only it were that simple, I thought.

Gates in Belfast, 2011 (My photo)