Marie C. Cassandra

One thing that I always found a bit puzzling as a Catholic was why there are so many differences between Judiasm and Catholicism. Because after all, Catholicism is just a branch of Judiasm that chose to believe that Jesus of Nazareth was The Messiah all Jewish people are waiting for, while the rest of the Jewish people said “Nah, we’re not convinced, we’ll keep on waiting”.

So why are there so many differences in traditions and observations? Jesus was a devout Jew and followed all of the practices of the faith, so why don’t we follow in his footprints and do the same? The simplified answer is shrewd recruitment tactics of The Church to adapt to other cultures to make it even easier to convert. But while I was enjoying an Easter Sunday brunch with a Jewish friend, we started on a couple of the most major schisms and I was inspired to finally get to the bottom of them:

Why does Catholicism allow images when they are forbidden as one of the 10 Commandments?

Let’s go to the source material Exodus 20 2-17. Here is the translation the Catholic Church uses.

“You shall have no other gods before me.
You shall not make for yourself a graven image,
or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above,
or that is in the earth beneath,
or that is in the water under the earth;
you shall not bow down to them or serve them; “

(Source: http://www.vatican.va/archive/ccc_css/archive/catechism/command.htm)

So while both Judiasm and Catholicism have the same 1st Commandment “You shall have no other gods” Catholicism decided to conveniently drop the 2nd Commandment so that they could  incorporate pagan beliefs which allowed for such images and statues. But since this is Biblical text and they couldn’t just white out this inconvenient truth, part of the catechism was to teach that we are not “worshipping” these statues and images, but that they are simply meant to be visual aides to prayer.

This leads me to the obvious next question:

Wait, do we not have the same 10 Commandments?

I mean, Moses – the burning bush, the mountain, the tablets – that’s all in our common history, right? Is it not (quite literally) set in stone?

As you see above, Catholicism dropped 2nd commandment. So then how do they still have 10? Well, they split the 10th Commandment into 2 :

You shall not covet your neighbor’s house;
you shall not covet your neighbor’s wife,
or his manservant, or his maidservant,
or his ox, or his ass,
or anything that is your neighbor’s.

From this, Judiasm has simply the 10th Commandment “Thou shalt not covet” whilst, errr while, Catholicism split this into

9. You shall not covet
your neighbor’s wife.
10. You shall not covet
your neighbor’s goods.

Had enough? Well I haven’t. One of my other pressing questions was always:

Why do we observe different Sabbaths – Saturday vs Sunday?

To make a long story short, The Catholic Church edited the 4th commandment from 94 words down to 8 to hide the fact that they changed the day that the Sabbath was observed because they had their political reasons. Really leads to the questions of well if they can do that why didn’t they just white out the part about images of heaven above?…

But speaking of calendars, one thing that always drove me nuts was why Good Friday didn’t align with the Passover every year. After all, the Last Supper was Jesus observing the Passover meal.

Why do Judaism and Catholicism have different calendars?

There was a famous meeting of the early Christian church leaders in 325 AD called the First council of Nicea to try to get signed consensus on the early church leaders on some beliefs. One of the things they wanted to get some clarity on was this whole “God the Son” vs “God the Father” situation….but this is a whole other can of worms. One of the outcomes of this gathering was that “Nicene Creed” which is recited during Catholic mass which basically just sums up and reinstates the common core beliefs of members of the Catholic Church.

But I digress. One of the other pressing issues they also wanted to sort out was that everyone was celebrating Easter at different dates and since it’s the most holy holiday, it seemed like a good thing to figure out when it should actually be. This is when it was agreed to switch over from the Hebrew calendar to the more accurate Roman (Julian) one.

Sources: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Council_of_Nicaea; https://www.timeanddate.com/date/perfect-calendar.html

Then in the 1500s Pope Gregory decided he really needed to fix the calendar because it was 10+ days off sync. So he introduced, you guessed it, the Gregorian Calendar. This was actually a genuine improvement based on science. However, even though his calendar is indeed objectively more accurate, the fact that it was a Pope that introduced the change meant that there were some (like the British) who refused to adopt it simply on principle. So for 150 years of history, England and the rest of the countries were a full 10 days off from each other. Sounds like a logistical nightmare.

England finally switched over in the 1700s and of course this is now the calendar used most widely throughout the world (at least some Pope did ONE good thing! Very interesting and I suggest you read more at http://mentalfloss.com/article/51370/why-our-calendars-skipped-11-days-1752