I was very fortunate to have a Catholic mother and a Baptist father, but what I invariably find when having discussions about religion at holidays or family reunions is that there are still a lot of misconceptions about the Roman Catholic Church and Catholic beliefs in general.
Now, I have always heard that if you want to avoid arguments at such gatherings, you should avoid the topics of religion and politics, but that is not really practical in my family. I often find that I play the part of the Catholic apologist to explain beliefs or practices that have been misunderstood for centuries.
The first question I am almost always asked is, Why do Catholics pray to the Virgin Mary? What some people seem to think is that Catholic beliefs dictate that the Virgin Mary is held on the same level as Jesus. This is not true.
Catholics recognize the fact the Mary was chosen out of all the women who ever lived to be the mother of Jesus Christ, the Messiah in Christianity. When we say the prayer, we are asking for us to pray for us; we are not likening her to God.
Another thing that I am commonly asked about is confessing sins to a priest. Most of my Protestant relatives believe that one should confess their sins to God, and Catholics actually believe the same thing. Catholics also believe in the social nature of sin, however, and when we confess our sins to a priest, we are asking for forgiveness in order to be welcomed back into the church community.
I also find myself explaining the reason that saints are so important within the Catholic Church, and why we say prayers to them as well. This, once again, is asking for an intercession from people that Catholics recognize as having lived very devout lives. Again, Catholics are not praying to these saints as if they are God they are asking the saints to pray for them.
It is sometimes difficult to explain Catholic beliefs, because it is so foreign to the nature of some faith systems to carry out their beliefs the way we do. Some people, of course, just don't want to understand.
One of the things that I always try to do when defending Catholic beliefs is to remind my family members that, as Christians, we all believe basically the same thing. We have the same underlying beliefs when it comes to how to achieve eternal salvation and the laws by which we should try to govern our lives we just have different ways of carrying out our religious faith.