Rituals in Comparison

You cannot compare "THE CATHOLIC CHURCH" with a single Protestant congregation or denomination.  If you want to make fair comparisons, you must compare the Catholic church as a whole to the Protestant church as a whole. From that angle you can see that there is much more doctrinal fidelity on the Catholic side.  When the early Protestants established that there was no greater earthly authority then a man's own conscience, they opened the door to what we have today: the approximately 40,000+ denominations which are still multiplying due to the general acceptance of the "let's agree to disagree" philosophy.  So when one takes a swipe at the Catholic church for some scandal or shortcoming, it is easy to do if all you claim responsibility for is your own little crumb of the cracker, your one congregation or denomination which is merely one among tens of thousands.  Try answering for the Protestant church as a whole and you'll be taken aback at what you must answer for.

 

If you want to make a comparison of an equal sized sampling, you would have to compare conservative Protestantism to conservative Catholicism.  In both of these camps you would find doctrinally knowledgeable members who hold fast to traditionally teachings, live morally good lives, and share a disdain for corruption of their respective churches by Liberal ideologies.  It is not fair to compare conservative Protestantism to liberal Catholicism just as it would be unfair to compare liberal Protestantism to conservative Catholicism.

 

Rituals, by the way, are a huge part of any relationship.  A ritual is a set form of communication or a repeated pattern.  We have them in church, we have them with our wives and children.  So when you try to cast off ritual as the opposite of relationship then you are left with a relationship void of many meaningful repeated actions.  Such a relationship would be sorely lacking in depth.  The rituals we have with our families - the consistency with which we communicate with them, the predictable, willful, loving actions we perform for their good - are what causes them to love us, to depend upon us, and to trust us.