Dear Protestants, Here’s Why I Didn’t Sign the Reforming Catholic Confession, and Other Dispatches From Living Among Catholics as a Protestant Priest

Last updated on: May 15, 2020 at 12:35 pm by Lisa

Dear Protestants, Here’s Why I Didn’t Sign the Reforming Catholic Confession, and Other Dispatches From Living Among Catholics as a Protestant Priest 2020-05-15T12:35:37-05:00 Lisa

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My wife said yesterday, “I’d like to post this on my blog, but it isn’t in any way about the theology of work.” I said, “You could put it on my blog.”–Edwin

By Jennifer Woodruff Tait

Yesterday, I got into a discussion about the Reforming Catholic Confession and why I, despite having been given an opportunity to do so, had not signed it. The reasons are several, but one of the most salient is that I am married to a Roman Catholic. In fact, I am a female Episcopal priest married to a Roman Catholic. I can’t imagine that there are that many people in this position, which I find roughly analogous to being in about the third round of a session of youth-group Twister. It is perhaps worth dwelling on what I have learned after five months of playing ecumenical Twister (Edwin was received into the Catholic church in April).

My main acquaintance with large groups of Catholics since Edwin became one has been the blogosphere, which I realize warps my perspective. (Edwin assures me that the average Roman Catholic in the pews knows no more about their faith than the average Protestant, perhaps less.) But here is my #1 dispatch from the front after five months of ethnographic observation:

Dear Protestants, Catholics do not care if you exist.

I don’t mean that they don’t care that you, as individual children of God and rational humans, exist. I mean that they don’t care that you collectively exist. If Catholics disappeared tomorrow, Protestants would notice. Wherever they are on the spectrum from “Catholics are the antichrist” to “Catholics are valued ecumenical partners whom we secretly envy for their really cool hats,” they would notice. (Edwin grew up towards the former end of that spectrum, I the latter. In fact I spent quite a number of years as a ferocious post-Vatican-II liturgist of the “what’s the difference between a liturgist and a terrorist? You can negotiate with a terrorist” joke type.)

But if every Protestant denomination was wiped off the face of the earth, Catholics would go on having the same conversations they do now as if nothing had happened, except that eventually Edwin would notice that I had stopped doing the laundry. Protestants are haunted by Catholics. Catholics are haunted too, but not by Protestants. If I had to put a finger on it, I would say they are haunted by the desire to catch the vanishing tail of unplumbable deep mysteries. But they are not haunted by me.

When Edwin was discerning whether or not to become Roman Catholic, he met with a trusted Methodist pastoral advisor and friend. The friend said “Ask Jenn what you need to do to support her in ministry.”

When Edwin came to me and asked, I knew that it was in my power to say “Don’t become Catholic.” I knew that he is the most honest, respectful, and chivalrous person I know. I also knew I couldn’t take advantage of that. What I actually said was “I need to know that you have my back.”

So Edwin went to the lay catechist in charge of RCIA and then eventually to the priest. He said “I will still consider my wife a priest and I will not break communion with Protestants to be in communion with you.” He expected they would say no. They said yes. Which brings us back to ecumenical Twister.

Edwin will explain his position to people by saying that he is not claiming to believe that what happens in Protestant Eucharists, and in the setting apart for ministry of Protestant pastors, is the same thing that happens when the Roman Catholic church makes Roman Catholic priests and they make Roman Catholic Eucharist. He is only claiming that he cannot deny the presence of grace in Protestant sacraments.

The only place I am not haunted by Catholics is the place you think I would most be, and that is in Protestant sacraments. I became a priest, in large part, out of a devotion to the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist. For this I endured a complex discernment process that took me out of Methodism and into Anglicanism and ultimately took 23 years. (I began discernment in 1992. I post this on the second anniversary of my ordination as a deacon on the Eve of Holy Cross in 2015.)

As a former Methodist, people found such a devotion awkward. Despite a rich history of Eucharistic reflection by the Wesleys, the accepted reason for becoming a Methodist pastor is “Because I want to help people.” I do want to help people, but I have always felt chiefly called to help them by offering the grace of the sacraments and getting out of the way. Someone else can hold hands and sing Kum Bah Yah.

I once got asked by Edwin to bless a tent that had previously had a hard life. I was actually not feeling well, but I went out to our backyard in my bathrobe, placed a stole around my neck, consecrated a teacup full of water, asperged the tent in the name of the Trinity, took off my stole, and went back to bed. So much of being a Protestant in dialogue with Catholics is being made to feel, through benign neglect if not through actual apologetic argument, that you are simply playing church. I was not playing church that day. I was in deadly earnest.

As I am every time I stand at the altar, the table of the Lord, with the bread and wine. Quite a lot of doing the liturgy–especially for someone like me who was raised on Methodist folksiness and has a difficult time picking up choreography–is simply remembering what to pick up, what to set down, and what not to bump into.

But it never fails that when I lift the bread and lift the cup, and when I say “Sanctify these gifts,” that I am caught up in the thought “This is Jesus. This is the vanishing tail of unplumbable mysteries.”

Except for this tiny moment the mystery isn’t vanishing. He’s right there.

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