Can you name anything that Catholics can claim as their own since, say, the 1600′s? Let’s take a look at the list:

• Bible covers. If you are Protestant you can find a cover that fits your personality, lifestyle, weather, outfit color, Bible size and probably even your perfume if you look hard enough. And you don’t really have to look that hard. Go into any Christian store and the selection of Bible covers is probably only overshadowed by the variety of Bible translations. Leather cover with a “Heaven’s Angels” motorcycle on the front? No problem. A stone-washed, lightly bleached, pre-worn, acid-baked with fake jewels denim cover? What color do you want that in? A plush Noah’s Ark cover for your kid’s Bible so your children can always keep the almost total annihilation of mankind at the forefront of their minds? You bet. How about a cover that has so many pockets and pen holders that a Trapper Keeper would turn green with envy. Oh, yeah.This market has been so dominated by the Protestants that I’m not aware of any Catholic company that has even tried to enter the business. But can you really blame Catholics for staying out? For the most part Catholics don’t need Bible covers since the Bible is usually still in the box they got it in as a Confirmation gift. And I don’t know anyone who makes a cover big enough for a Family Bible.
• Clever T-shirts. It was probably the Lord’s Gym “Bench Press This” t-shirt that really got the whole Christian t-shirt craze started. Now there are numerous companies on that bandwagon producing everything from clever take-offs of company logos and mottos to the “I want to look like I’m in a gang” shirts. This industry has been around for so long that one t-shirt company is celebrating its 25th anniversary. So where are the Catholics in all this? How about 20 years behind. Right now there are several companies that make Catholic t-shirts but none of them is anywhere near the size of its Protestant counterpart. There is a Protestant store here in town that has a t-shirt section that is bigger than some entire Catholic stores! Still, there are some good companies out there including Nelson Wood (and tshirts, and mugs, and bumper stickers, and polo shirts and posters and Christmas ornaments) craft and Lionheart Apparel which was started by a fired contestant from the Apprentice.
• Trendy worship music. Not being Protestant, I’m not really sure how long they have been producing hip music for their services but it has got to be longer than Catholics. The Catholic Church didn’t really get into trendy music until the 1960′s when the Vatican II document on the Sacred Liturgy was intensely debated,  solemnly promulgated and promptly tossed in the trash can by “expert” liturgists who new better. The result? Fifty years of the St. Louis – we’re not all priests anymore  -  Jesuits, GIA and Oregon Catholic Press producing trite, doctrinally questionable hymns that have stood the test of time – If you think we are still in the 1960′s.Unfortunately, even when many of the hymns in Catholic hymnals are written by Protestants, we just can’t seem to produce music on the same professional level as that found at Protestant services. Can you imagine anything that you sing, or don’t sing, at Mass actually being played on the light rock radio station in your town? Somehow, and this may have been a nefarious plot, the Protestants gave us all the Protestant songs that they don’t sing at their own services.I’m not saying that we should be playing Jars of Clay and Casting Crowns at Mass; it just seems that if we are going to try and copy Protestant worship music, we might as well do a good job of it.
• Bible variations. As with Bible covers, Protestants have the corner on Bible variations. Variations can include the cover, intended audience, translation, size, red letter, concordance, indexed, with maps or with apocrypha (those are the books Luther removed from the Bible hundreds of years after the Bible was finalized). In the Protestant world there is a Bible for every possible market niche – teens, women, couples, grandparents, the girl next door and I’ll bet someone out there has produced one for pets. How many are there in the Catholic world? Four. Yep, that’s it. Just four different Bibles like that. One for women, one for couples and two for teens. Catholics are also far behind in their variety of translations. There are really only seven translations in Catholic circles – New American, Revised Standard, Jerusalem, Douay Rheims, New Revised Standard, New Jerusalem and Good News.  In the Protestant realm there are at least two hundred thousand.

The only thing I can think of that Catholics have been the first to the scene on since the Reformation is Pope John Paul II’s Theology of the Body. You know that there is something going on when Protestants like Dr. James Dobson have the evangelist of TOB, Christopher West, come to Focus on the Family to speak. I’ve even had a couple of Lutheran pastors come into my store and ask if I thought they could get Christopher West to speak at their parishes!

So there you have it, Catholics are playing catch-up with Protestants and have been since Protestants first existed. It is even now in vogue for Catholics to protest the Faith but instead of doing the sensible thing like their Reformation counterparts – leaving, they stick around and start looking really foolish.

Savor this, if you will:
“But what was it that delighted me save to love and to be loved? Still I did not keep the moderate way of the love of mind to mind–the bright path of friendship. Instead, the mists of passion steamed up out of the puddly concupiscence of the flesh, and the hot imagination of puberty, and they so obscured and overcast my heart that I was unable to distinguish pure affection from unholy desire. Both boiled confusedly within me, and dragged my unstable youth down over the cliffs of unchaste desires and plunged me into a gulf of infamy.” (Augustine’s Confessions, trans. Outler, Book II.2)

Whew.  I’ll bet Augustine wrote those lines, put down the pen quill with satisfaction, and thought “Dang, I’m good.”  Or would have if he was not such a humble Catholic Christian.

Although there are certainly many skillful Protestant theologians–devoted to God through Scripture, prayerful people, and intellectually very sophisticated–theology is a field at which Catholics excel. There is a devotion to craft, best expressed in the scholastic understanding that faith and reason, properly understood, do not work against each other but with each other for our growth as Christians. Understanding is not essential to salvation, but could indeed help form our faith, conscience, and spur us to holiness. There is a healthy respect, even embrace, of rationality. This keeps the intelligentsia in university cultures perpetually perplexed. It’s rather fun.

The other reason Catholics have a secret yen for theology has to do with liturgy. You can’t live through a Catholic Mass without getting the equivalent of a super-soaker in theology. You know all the ink and worn blogger fingertips debating the extraordinary vs. ordinary form of the mass? This proves how theological Catholics are. Protestants would say, eh, so have a contemporary and traditional service, whatever. But liturgy isn’t about blocking or entertainment or even much about preference. Whatever “side” you’re on, it is about living out a particular understanding of who God is and who we are. So theology–through the Mass, whether you have studied it formally or not–sinks into your very bones as a Catholic.

As two friends of mine cheerfully debated in grad school (well, in a bar, two beers in, after class…hence the “cheer”):
Baptist friend: “…See, that’s the problem with you Catholics. You have the cold, distant Christ while we Baptists have the warmth of Jesus.”
Catholic friend: “Yeah, well, we Catholics have theology and you Baptists have choir practice.”