Today, the marriage of a Catholic and a Protestant can garner reactions anywhere on the spectrum from “What’s the big deal?” to “Your grandmother can never know!”
I grew up Catholic, my fiancée grew up Protestant. In our three years together (and now less than three months until our wedding) we have learned a few key lessons that have helped us thrive in our spiritual life as a couple.
For anyone else specifically in a Catholic/Protestant relationship, I want to pass on a few small tips that made a big difference for me.
RELATED: 4 Questions to Ask in an Interfaith Relationship
1. Realize It’s Not Really an Interfaith Relationship
When I was first getting serious about marrying my fiancée, I called an old professor of mine — a Jesuit priest. I told him I was in a relationship with someone who grew up Christian but not Catholic, and asked for his advice on entering an interfaith marriage.
He stopped me. “First things first, you’re both Christian. This is not an interfaith relationship.”
This was not what I expected to hear from a Catholic priest.
But his point stuck with me. This was a vital first lesson on the path to integrating our faith lives: Understanding that we are of the same faith, just different denominations.
He advised me to consider the number of similarities in our two faiths, and then the number of differences. Of course, I quickly realized there are far more similarities than differences between Protestant Christianity and Catholic Christianity. This fact brought me comfort, and helped me adopt a posture of openness.
I learned that in a relationship, it’s best to start any conversation about faith with the things that unite us.
RELATED: Why I Don’t Pray for My Husband’s Conversion
2. Learn to Admire the Other Person’s Faith
I remember asking my best friend’s parents for advice on this topic. They had a similar situation to mine when they were dating: Mrs. grew up Catholic, Mr. grew up Protestant.
“So,” I asked, “how did you integrate your faith lives?”
Then, they did something I didn’t expect. They each began describing what they loved about each other’s faith tradition. She talked about finding so much value in the focus on the Word, and the inspiring church services led by impassioned pastors. And he admired the longstanding traditions of Catholicism and the participatory nature of the sacraments.
Their response was automatic, and entirely sincere. They each genuinely found the good in each other’s spiritual tradition, and expanded their own based on what they had learned.
This prompted me to examine the ways I value my fiancée’s faith. I realized I admired the way she prays. She’ll talk to Jesus like he’s sitting in the room with us, whereas I was taught to pray in a more traditional way, filled with Our Fathers and Hail Marys. My prayer life deepened by learning from her.
And my fiancée has come to find value in the sacraments — in the way we take our beliefs and make them physical — and in our belief that these traditions have true spiritual power.
My fiancée and I have learned that the differences in our traditions actually help strengthen, expand, and deepen our faiths.
RELATED: 10 Years Strong: How We Built Our Marriage on a Foundation of Prayer
3. Pray Together (No Matter Who Has Home Field Advantage)
This one is age-old advice, but I’ll add an extra layer for our specific circumstance.
My fiancée and I made a rule early on — we pray together. Yes, this means joining hands and speaking to God. But for us, it also means spending our Sunday mornings together. She comes to Mass with me, I go to services with her. We don’t go separately.
We have come to the agreement that, if we are to unite our lives in marriage, this must include everything. Though it’s not exactly orthodox for a Catholic to attend non-denominational Christian service on Sundays, or for a Protestant to attend Mass, that’s what we do, because we find practicing our spirituality together to be more important than anything else. We participate in each other’s faith traditions, with no goal of swaying the other to our side.
The result has been a completely unique and singular amalgam of our two faith traditions — a personal relationship with God which we have developed through an open and honest embracing of each other’s spirituality.
Openness has been the greatest virtue in uniting our faith lives. Embracing another faith, much like embracing another person, has been a process of seeing the good in something different from what I was familiar with. It has come with growing pains, but the true growth has been in my capacity to love.
