Catholicism is an ancient religion that has numerous myths that surround it. More often than not, these myths cause the Church to scandalize people. I’ve encountered more than one person with false assumptions about what my faith teaches. As someone very passionate about his faith, this is a topic near and dear to me, one I’ve put a great deal of research into.
This essay is about what the Church teaches as official doctrine. I understand that some individuals call themselves Catholic that nevertheless have false beliefs. This post is as much for them as it is for non-Catholics who want to learn more about the faith.
Myth 1: Catholic priests cannot be married.
Surprisingly enough, you can have married Catholic priests! The justification for Catholic celibacy comes from St. Paul’s teaching that married men and women are “anxious about the things of the world” and are “divided” between pleasing God and pleasing their spouse while the unmarried and the widowed are “anxious about the things of the Lord” (1 Corinthians 7:32-34). Because of this, he says that “to the unmarried and to the widows I say: it is a good thing for them to remain as they are, as I do” (1 Corinthians 7:8). However, Paul went on to say that he was just giving advice, not imposing some restraint on them (1 Corinthians 7:35). Thus, priestly celibacy is not an unchanging dogma but a varying discipline with a few exceptions carved out.
Firstly, an exception to the rule of priestly celibacy has occurred in recent decades in the case of certain married Protestant ministers. Such ministers can be ordained as priests as a special pastoral provision that is unavailable to rank-and-file married Protestants. And, following 1 Timothy 3:2, they can only be married once.
Secondly, priestly celibacy is primarily a discipline associated with the Latin Rite. The Eastern Rite has long allowed married men to be ordained. The Catechism of the Catholic Church states that:
In the Eastern Churches a different discipline has been in force for many centuries: while bishops are chosen solely from among celibates, married men can be ordained as deacons and priests. This practice has long been considered legitimate; these priests exercise a fruitful ministry within their communities. Moreover, priestly celibacy is held in great honor in the Eastern Churches and many priests have freely chosen it for the sake of the Kingdom of God. In the East as in the West a man who has already received the sacrament of Holy Orders can no longer marry.
CC 1580
Indeed, this caught me by surprise for a bit. Could this discipline be changed? Of course, but that’s unlikely to happen given the cultural associations between the Catholic priesthood and celibacy. Ultimately, the Church does not want to confuse people by giving them the impression that it can change her teachings on anything and everything.
Myth 2: Catholics believe that the pope is always right.
This comes from a misunderstanding of the Catholic doctrine of papal infallibility. Papal infallibility does not apply to everything the pope says. Rather, it only applies to papal pronouncements about the Church’s traditional teachings on matters of faith and morals. What the pope says has to be consistent with previous church teaching, and it has to be in line with Biblical teachings.
Anyone who has studied the history of Christianity knows that, although there were quite a few saints among the popes, there were also more than a few sinners too. Pope Stephen VI (reigned 896-7) hosted a “Cadaver Synod” whereby he dug up the body of his predecessor, Pope Formosus and displayed his dead body to stand trial for blasphemy. Pope Alexander VI (r. 1492-1503) acted more like a crime lord than a holy man, and his behavior was so unbecoming that his surname Borgia became a byword for libertinism and nepotism. And Pope Leo X (r. 1513-1521) was a wasteful spender who illegally sold indulgences to fund his grand projects.
However, the best example of an imperfect pontiff is found in the Bible: St. Peter (r. 30-64), leader of the Apostles and our first pope. Though his heart was always in the right place, Peter sometimes acted cowardly and hypocritical, much like any of us. In chapter sixteen of Matthew, no sooner did Jesus praise Peter for receiving the revelation from God that Jesus was the Messiah than he went on to do something foolish. As it’s written:
From that time on, Jesus began to show his disciples that he must go to Jerusalem and suffer greatly from the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes, and be killed and on the third day be raised. Then Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him, “God forbid, Lord! No such thing shall ever happen to you.” He turned and said to Peter, “Get behind me, Satan! You are an obstacle to me. You are thinking not as God does, but as human beings do.”
Matthew 16:21-23
Later on, while Jesus was standing trial in Jerusalem, Peter lied about having ever known Jesus:
After arresting [Jesus], [the crowd of chief priests, temple guards, and elders] led him away and took him into the house of the high priest; Peter was following at a distance. They lit a fire in the middle of the courtyard and sat around it, and Peter sat down with them. When a maid saw him seated in the light, she looked intently at him and said, “This man too was with him.” But he denied it saying, “Woman I do not know him.” A short while later someone else saw him and said, “You too are one of them”; but Peter answered, “My friend, I am not.” About an hour later, still another insisted, “Assuredly, this man too was with him, for he also is a Galilean.” But Peter said, “My friend, I do not know what you are talking about.” Just as he was saying this, the cock crowed, and the Lord turned and looked at Peter; and Peter remembered the word of the Lord, how he had said to him, “Before the cock crows today, you will deny me three times.” He went out and began to weep bitterly.
Luke 22:54-63
Even after Peter became the leader of the whole Christian Church, he sometimes faltered. In one of his letters, St. Paul recounts how he opposed Peter “to his face” at Antioch because “he clearly was wrong.”
For until some people came from James, he used to eat with the Gentiles; but when they came, he began to draw back and separated himself, because he was afraid of the circumcised. And the rest of the Jews [also] acted hypocritically along with him, with the result that even Barnabas was carried away by their hypocrisy. But when I saw that they were not on the right road in line with the truth of the gospel, I said to Cephas in front of all, ‘If you, though a Jew, are living like a Gentile and not like a Jew, how can you compel the Gentiles to live like Jews?’”
Galatians 2:11-14
The context here is that St. Peter privately held that the Judaizers – Jewish Christians who insisted that Gentile Christians should follow the Mosaic Law and be circumcised – were wrong yet would behave ambiguously to appease them. St. Paul felt the need to confront his superior because he risked becoming a hypocrite.
The point here is that popes do not need to be morally perfect to be infallible. Papal infallibility applies to their teaching, not everything they say and do. The Catechism teaches that the Magisterium was granted the gift of infallibility “to preserve God’s people from deviations and defections and to guarantee them the objective possibility of professing the true faith without error” (CC 890). “The Roman Pontiff, head of the college of bishops, enjoys this infallibility in virtue of his office, when, as supreme pastor and teacher of all the faithful – who confirms his brethren in the faith – he proclaims by a definitive act a doctrine pertaining to faith or morals” (CC 891). He is not guaranteed to be morally perfect, nor is every utterance he makes guaranteed to be correct. Only in specific instances is our pope infallible. Still, we as Catholics respect him for his office because he sits on the chair of St. Peter.
Myth 3: The Catholic Church places man-made traditions over the Bible.
The Catholic Church greatly values the Bible. Catholic monks preserved it over the centuries for modern readers to enjoy today, and many of the non-biblical works that Catholics promote are Biblical commentaries. Everything that the Catholic Church teaches or practices is based on the words of Sacred Scripture.
The confusion comes, in large part, from the Catholic Church’s valuing of Sacred Tradition as being equal to Sacred Scripture. However, this belief also has Biblical justification. In 2 Thessalonians 2:15, St. Paul commands his followers to “stand fast and hold the traditions which you have learned, whether by word of mouth or by letter.” Time and again, the Apostles appealed to their authority as eyewitnesses. While they taught that Scripture was important, they also knew that the Bible itself doesn’t contain all the truths of faith (see John 20:30 and 21:25). Scripture alone can never tell you what counts as scripture, how to interpret scripture, or how to derive consequences from scripture and apply it to new circumstances. These things are contained in the Sacred Tradition that was passed down from the time of the Apostles.
Myth 4: Catholics are idol-worshippers.
This myth is personal to me. I still remember back in middle school being told by another kid in P.E. that “Catholics worship saints and statues, so they aren’t real Christians.” In truth, nothing further is from the case. While individual Catholics may take their zeal for Mary or icons too far, the Church rejects idolatry. “Idolatry consists in divinizing what is not God. Man commits idolatry whenever he honors and reveres a creature in place of God, whether this be gods or demons (for example, satanism), power, pleasure, race, ancestors, the state, money, etc.… Idolatry is a perversion of man’s innate religious sense. An idolater is someone who ‘transfers his indestructible notion of God to anything other than God’” (CC 2113-4).
Some might claim that Catholics are idolaters because they pray to saints. However, such prayer is not the same as the worship we give to the one true God. Rather, prayers to saints are our way to ask for our older brothers and sisters in faith, who are united with us in Christ through the Communion of Saints, to pray to us to the Lord our God. It’s similar to how we ask other people to pray for us.
Contrary to what some might claim, prayer to saints is not a form of necromancy either. As Jesus argued in Luke 20:38 that God “is not God of the dead, but of the living, for to him all are alive.” So long as we are united with Christ, even if we die, we will live eternally. Now, these saints in Heaven surround us as a “great cloud of witnesses” (Hebrews 12:1), and they pray to God on behalf of those on earth (Revelations 5:8 and 8:4). Now, if intercession among earthly members of the Church is “good and pleasing to God our savior” (1 Timothy 2:1-4), then intercession among her heavenly members should also be pleasing.
An excellent example of such an intercessory prayer is the Hail Mary, which says:
Hail Mary, Full of Grace
The Lord is with Thee.
Blessed art thou among women,
And blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus
Hold Mary, Mother of God, Prayer for us sinners,
Now and at the hour of our death, Amen.
Reading it aloud, it becomes clear that we are asking Jesus’ mother to pray to God on our behalf. Together, we increase the potency and holiness of our prayers through collective participation.
Others make a big deal about the Church having statues of Jesus and various saints as if these were idolatrous. These Christians forget that there were several times when Old Testament Jews were instructed to construct two cherubim of gold (Exodus 25:18-19), a bronze serpent (Numbers 21:8-9), and a temple full of statues and carvings of cherubim (1 Kings 6:23-32). Just having statues and treating them with respect is no more idolatrous than having a Nativity scene in your home during Christmastime. Statues and icons are used as ways to help us Christians focus on what matters most – our faith.
Myth 5: Catholics aren’t Christian.
On its face, this myth seems ridiculous. Catholics hold that Jesus Christ Himself was the founder of our Church and that St. Peter was our first pope, the rock upon which He built the Church (Matthew 16:18). The papacy is an unbroken line of succession that goes back to St. Peter. The people who make this claim have as their founder some man with a Bible and an opinion, whether it be Martin Luther, John Calvin, Roger Williams, Charles Taze Russell, or Joseph Smith. So where do these sects get off on telling Catholics that they aren’t Christian?
When non-Catholics claim that Catholics aren’t Christian, it’s usually over doctrinal issues. For example, they’ll claim that Catholicism isn’t based on Scripture or practices idolatry (both are myths about Catholicism, as I showed above). In terms of doctrine, Catholicism is very much Christian. We affirm the entire Nicene Creed, including the parts about the Trinity, the Life, Death, and Resurrection of Jesus Christ, the necessity of Jesus for our salvation, and so on. Those who claim that Christians are required to believe in the tenets of their particular sect of Christianity must first prove that their criteria are good.
Catholics follow Jesus’ definition of a Christian: “Whoever believes and is baptized will be saved; whoever does not believe will be condemned” (Mark 16:16). To the Catholic Church, a Christian is anyone who professes faith in Christ and who has been validly baptized. “Baptism constitutes the foundation of communion among all Christians, including those who are not yet in full communion with the Catholic Church” (CC 1271). As a Catholic, I hope that one day, all of my Christian brethren are reunited in God’s Church, even those who don’t think that I am a Christian!