Catholic and Protestant Christianity

In the late Middle Ages the Western Church was a single institution under the pope, but calls for reform were widespread. Critics attacked worldly clergy, the wealth of the Church and the sale of indulgences, remissions of the punishment due for sin that could be obtained for a donation. Earlier reformers such as John Wycliffe in England and Jan Hus in Bohemia had questioned papal authority, and the printing press, together with the humanist return to the original Greek and Hebrew of the Bible, spread new ideas quickly.

In 1517 Martin Luther, an Augustinian friar and professor at Wittenberg in Saxony, circulated his Ninety-Five Theses against indulgences. His protest grew into a challenge to the whole system of authority. Luther came to believe that people are made right with God, justified, by faith in Christ alone, as a free gift of grace, and that Scripture stands above popes and councils. Excommunicated in 1521 and condemned at the Diet of Worms, he was protected by his prince and began to organise a reformed church. The name “Protestant” comes from the protest of Lutheran princes at the Diet of Speyer in 1529.

Other reformers followed different paths. Huldrych Zwingli in Zurich and John Calvin in Geneva founded the Reformed tradition. Anabaptists rejected infant baptism and sought churches of committed believers. In England, Henry VIII broke with Rome in the 1530s, and the Church of England developed its own blend of Reformed theology and traditional order. The Catholic Church responded with the Council of Trent, which met between 1545 and 1563, reaffirmed its doctrine, reformed the training of clergy and gave rise to new orders such as the Jesuits. Wars of religion followed, and Europe was divided into Catholic and Protestant lands. The Peace of Augsburg in 1555 allowed each German ruler to choose between the Catholic and Lutheran faiths for his territory, and the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, which ended the Thirty Years’ War, extended recognition to the Reformed churches. Through emigration and missions, both traditions later spread far beyond Europe, Catholicism above all to Latin America and the Philippines, Protestantism to North America and, from the nineteenth century, to Africa, Asia and the Pacific.

Catholics and Protestants share the core of Christian faith: the Trinity, the divinity and humanity of Christ, his death and resurrection, the creeds and the authority of the Bible. Their differences lie in how that faith is received and lived.

For Catholics, God’s revelation comes through Scripture and Tradition, both entrusted to the Church and interpreted by the pope and bishops. For Protestants, Scripture alone is the final authority, though most respect the early creeds. On salvation, Catholics teach that grace is given through faith and the sacraments and that it transforms the believer, who cooperates with it through works of love. The reformers taught that believers are declared righteous through faith alone, and that good works are the fruit, not the cause, of salvation.

The sacraments mark another difference. The Catholic Church has seven, and teaches that in the Mass the bread and wine become the body and blood of Christ. Most Protestant churches keep two sacraments, baptism and the Lord’s Supper, and hold a range of views on Christ’s presence in it. Catholic priests, ordained by bishops, act in the person of Christ; Protestants stress the priesthood of all believers, and their ministers may marry. Catholic devotion gives a large place to Mary, the saints, pilgrimages and religious orders, while Protestant worship typically centres on preaching, hymn singing and Bible reading.

These contrasts are visible in church buildings. A Catholic church draws the eye to the altar and the tabernacle, where the consecrated host is reserved, and often contains statues, side chapels and candles before images of saints. Many Reformed and free churches are plain, with the pulpit at the centre and a simple table for the Lord’s Supper; some reformers removed images altogether. Lutheran and Anglican churches stand in between, often keeping altars, crucifixes, vestments and a liturgy close in shape to the Mass.

Protestants also differ among themselves. Lutherans and Reformed disagreed from the start over the Lord’s Supper. Anglicans kept bishops, while Presbyterians are governed by elders and Baptists by independent congregations. Baptists and Pentecostals baptise only believers old enough to profess faith, while most older Protestant churches baptise infants, as Catholics do.

The Catholic Church counts about 1.4 billion members, roughly half of all Christians. Protestants, counted broadly to include Anglicans, Pentecostals and independent churches, made up about 37% of Christians in the Pew Research Center’s 2011 estimate. Protestantism is not a single church but a family that includes Lutherans, Reformed and Presbyterians, Anglicans, Baptists, Methodists, Pentecostals and many independent congregations. Its fastest growth in recent decades has been in Africa, Latin America and Asia, especially among Pentecostal and charismatic churches.

Relations have changed greatly since the Second Vatican Council (1962–1965), which called Protestants “separated brethren” and opened the way to dialogue. In 1999 the Catholic Church and the Lutheran World Federation signed the Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification, stating that the condemnations each side had issued in the sixteenth century no longer applied to the other’s current teaching. Methodist, Reformed and Anglican bodies later associated themselves with it. In 2016 Pope Francis took part in a joint commemoration of the Reformation in Lund, Sweden. Differences over the papacy, the Eucharist and ministry remain, but Catholics and Protestants now often pray, study and work together.