In the last four to five hundred years, our Protestant brothers and sisters have been separated from us in the common cause to proclaim Christ to the nations. This is a tragedy. The Reformation began as a reform movement in late-Medieval Germany. It was a sincere attempt by a number of men at various points of the sixteenth century that sought to renew devotion to Jesus Christ as our only Savior and Lord, the unique Advocate before the Father; to help Christians know and understand the written Word of God in the Bible; to place greater faith in his power and desire to bring us to salvation, both in this world and in the next. Faith, hope, charity, and the fruits and gifts of the Holy Spirit.
But unfortunately, these righteous ideals promoting the Christian life were also intermixed with a number of errors regarding the freedom of the human person; the way in which God’s revelation is handed down; the way in which God’s favor (or “grace”) is given by Him for our salvation; and the way in which humanity responds to it — manifested in the “three solas.” The Protestants also had errors not only on the number of Sacraments in the Church, but on the Divine origin of the Sacraments and their value as “channels” of God’s divine life. Finally, the Protestants were in error about how the Church governs herself, her authentic sources of authority, and her mandate given by Christ to teach, to sanctify, and to save in His Name.
In this lesson, we have very briefly and in a fairly general way taken on some of these issues in order to consider how we, as Catholic followers of Christ, can reach out in respect, love and peace to our fellow Christians who share our common faith in Christ as our “great God and Savior.” The rest of these issues, we leave to your own personal study.
When we engage in conversations with Protestants, we want them to know how much we genuinely share with them, and at the same time we acknowledge where there are true differences. In the end, we want to extend a warm invitation to them to explore who and what we are as Christians—and in a fair, honest and unpressured way, to open the doors of their minds and hearts to full membership in the one and only divinely established communion of Christian faith, the Catholic Church.