As a Protestant Evangelical, if there was one criticism of Catholicism that I heard more than any other, it was that Catholics didn’t have a “personal relationship” with Jesus the way we Evangelicals did. Indeed, this idea of “personal relationship” was at the very heart of my understanding of American Evangelicalism and was what, in my mind, most set Evangelicalism apart from Catholicism, with all of its “impersonal” rituals, hierarchy, etc. The hoopla over the “Why I Hate Religion But Love Jesus” video earlier this year is an exemplar of this. Once I started scratching the surface of the stereotype, though, I discovered that the truth is the exact opposite of what I always believed as an Evangelical, and Catholicism actually emphasizes an individual’s personal relationship with God far more than anything I encountered before becoming Catholic.
The reason for this is actually fairly simple. When, as an Evangelical, I talked about having a “personal relationship with Jesus” and how that set me apart from Catholics, I wasn’t really talking about my ability to pray directly to God or do anything else that might increase my chances of one day seeing God face to face. I vaguely knew that Catholics didn’t really object to that notion of “personal relationship.” Rather, what I was talking about was my own personal ability to interpret the Bible and determine, for myself, what was (and wasn’t) true Christian doctrine. It eventually occurred to me, however, that this had nothing to do with whether my relationship with God was “personal” or not. In fact, it actually made it harder for me to have any kind of relationship with God, as I’ll try to explain.
To start with everyday experience, I think we can all agree that it requires at least two people if there is going to be a “relationship.” For example, no one ever says, “Do you know that guy Joe? He has a great relationship with himself!” If someone said something like that, we’d think they had a screw loose. But, by asserting that Joe has the authority to determine for himself what is and isn’t true Christianity (which would include determining the orthodox understanding of who Jesus is) and then praising him for having a “personal relationship” with that Jesus, Protestantism is essentially doing exactly that when it praises Joe. And this approach just doesn’t work. As Chesterton put it when making a similar point:
I want to love my neighbour [and Jesus] not because he is I, but precisely because he is not I. I want to adore the world, not as one likes a looking-glass, because it is one’s self, but as one loves a woman, because she is entirely different. . . . A man may be said loosely to love himself, but he can hardly fall in love with himself, or, if he does, it must be a monotonous courtship.
Only when I gave up the supposed “freedom” to decide what constituted an orthodox understanding of who Jesus was—and recognized that responsibility rested with the Catholic Church—did I begin to realize what I’d been missing out on and to see what “personal relationship” really meant. As a Protestant, I’d been totally caught up in just trying to figure out who Jesus was. Was he the Jesus of the faith healers who promised me health and wealth? Was he the Jesus of the liberation theologians who promised an end to oppressive political regimes? Was he the Jesus of the white, Anglo-Saxon Protestants in this county who oftentimes seemed to believe that the point of Christianity had been to lead to the founding of the United States? Etc. Once I was released from the futility of these questions, I could see that none of them really had anything to do with how I “personally” related to Jesus.
So, you may ask, what does “personal relationship” mean within the context of Catholicism? I think the answer is this: God, who is wholly “other” from me, desires for me to live with him forever and, because of that, he gives me his grace to help me develop and deepen my friendship with him so that, when I die, I will hear the words, “Well done, my good and faithful servant. . . . Come share your master’s joy.” And I do that, individually and personally, through: praying, reading Scripture and other devotional literature, participating in the sacramental life of the Church, and striving each and every moment to live my life in accordance with the Church’s teachings. Through each of these, I can come to know—and love—Jesus more and more and experience His love for me more and more.
This is particularly true of receiving Our Lord in the sacrament of the Eucharist. What could be more personal than receiving Christ Himself—Body, Blood, Soul, and Divinity—in the consecrated bread and wine of the Mass? Each time I receive, and the priest or Eucharistic minister holds up the host and says, “The Body of Christ,” I’m blown away by the fact that I am literally beholding Christ with my own eyes and that He has humbled Himself to become His people’s very food. Nothing could possibly be more personal.
The same is true of the sacrament of Reconciliation. Once I understood that the priest can only speak the words of absolution because he is acting in persona Christi (in the person of Christ), I saw that going to Confession is an encounter with Christ himself, working through the priest. As with the Eucharist, the Confessional is an extraordinarily personal thing. When done correctly, you are out loud baring your soul–all the worst things about yourself–and then, in response, hearing out loud that you are forgiven. Nothing I experienced in Evangelicalism came close to being as incredibly personal.
So, if all of this is the case, what is it that Evangelicals are criticizing when they take Catholics to task for not having a “personal relationship” with Christ? Well, I think it’s actually two things, neither of which has anything to do with the personal-ness of a Catholic’s relationship with Jesus: (1) Evangelicals’ perception that many Catholics don’t take their faith seriously; and (2) their sense that much of Catholic practice is ritualistic and repetitious. On the first of these issues, it would undoubtedly be a good thing if everyone who calls themselves a Catholic knew their faith and practiced it consistently. But that has no bearing at all on whether the Church calls her children to a “personal relationship” with Our Lord. The simple fact of the matter is that she does. And, on the second issue, I can only say that, as a Protestant Evangelical, I was only too quick to judge the hearts and intentions of Catholics participating in the Mass or reciting the Rosary (for example), both of which are admittedly repetitious. But Scripture never says that there’s anything wrong with repetition, in and of itself. It’s only vain repetition (or, in the words of a more modern translation, “babbl[ing]“) that presents a problem. And, as I’ve discussed before, our day-to-day life—including our most significant human relationships—is full of repetition so it’s quite natural for our faith lives to be as well.
The bottom line to all of this is simple: on this issue of “personal relationship,” as with all of the others I struggled with in the process of becoming Catholic, my objection was based on a completely wrongheaded notion of what the Catholic Church really taught and utter confusion regarding the meaning of the terms I was using. So when I finally woke up to the fact that what I really wanted was a “relationship” with God, not the ability to define God for myself masquerading as a relationship, the choice was easy, and Christ’s Church was waiting for me with open arms.
 Indeed, in my more Reformed moments as a Protestant, I would have denied that there was anything that I personally could “do” that was beneficial to my salvation. Rather, it was all up to God. And that makes for a pretty one-sided “relationship,” so what does it matter if it’s particularly “personal” or not? Saying that a person has a “personal relationship” with the Calvinist God is like saying a robot has a “personal relationship” with the engineer who programmed it.
 And the fact that another human being–the priest–is involved in Confession doesn’t make Confession any less a personal encounter with Christ. If we have a problem with God using matter and human, tangible things to convey grace to us, then we have a problem with Christ Himself–who was fully human in addition to being fully divine.