I DON’T REMEMBER MUCH ABOUT CHURCH AS A YOUNG BOY. My mother, grandparents, aunts and uncles were all Roman Catholic. We even had a priest in the family whom I met in the late ’60s.

Naturally, then, my first act in the church was to be baptized as an infant.

My biological father abandoned us when I was still a baby. So my mother met, and eventually married, a U.S. Marine whose parents transplanted to the Midwest, from Croatia, after the First World War. I recently learned the Slavic country is the most Catholic nation in the world.

I recall entering cathedrals, walking past holy water, kneeling, standing and sitting. Invisible signs of the cross were made by hands of the “faithful,” and monotone prayers and chants traveled the walls in acoustic unison, prefabricated and repetitive in nature.

I recollect parishioners attending Mass in a stoic, almost robotic fashion, in an environment that was strangely solemn. And though an external beauty was present in the exhibition of ceremonies, architecture and fine art, I felt like we were on a tour of a religious museum instead of in a church service.

When I was 8 years old, mom abruptly but discreetly took my brother and me back to her roots in the Bay Area. I later learned the truth I tried to forget, that mom was caught up in an abusive relationship. Divorce — and remarriage to a non-Catholic, non-churchgoing man — was next on the agenda.

A few years later my mother committed a grave sin that brought her to attempt suicide. I was 13. The next thing I knew, we were are invited to a Christian church where my mother had a “born again” experience, the kind Jesus said was necessary to enter into God’s kingdom (John 3:3). It was then that mom shared with me how the Roman priests didn’t have satisfactory answers to her questions about life and death, but an unassuming man from the Protestant church was able to answer her questions, and answer them from the Bible. This preceded her conversion.

Soon afterward, our family began regularly attending the new church, something we never did consistently in the Roman Catholic system. The experience was noticeably different. In the Catholic Church I was exposed to ceremonies and tradition, symbolism and robes, statues and pictures of people who allegedly resided in heaven. It was foreign and meaningless to me.

I soon noticed a conspicuous reality in the new church — it seemed everyone brought their Bibles with them. The predominant characteristic of the service was that the pastor taught directly from the pages of the written word of God, and the congregation followed along in their own Bibles. Some even took notes.

The Bible’s presence in one church, and its absence in the other, is the predominant distinguishing factor that separates the Christian church from the Roman Catholic faith. The disturbing reality is that Papal authority and church tradition have come to supersede the scriptures — in other words, the Catholic Church doesn’t need the Bible. And sadly, when all is said and done, God’s word interferes with the Church, her dogmas and traditions.

Alarmingly enough, the most obvious implication of not having God’s word as the sole authority in the church, as the Lord intended it to be, is that throughout the centuries Catholic leadership has created a multitude of erroneous doctrines and unbiblical traditions.

With all due respect to Roman Catholics, all one needs to do to investigate this accusation is pick up a Bible, read it, and compare the pages of God’s word in contrast with Rome’s doctrinal decrees and practices.

What would happen if Catholics started to bring Bibles to church? What if parishioners began to hold leadership accountable for accurately preaching and teaching the scriptures? What would they discover if they regularly read, studied and meditated on God’s word?

Most likely there would be another Reformation in the church. Consider the 16th-century Protestant reformer William Tyndale, who was hunted down by Rome, convicted of heresy and treason, imprisoned and finally strangled and burned at the stake in England.

One might ask, what heinous crime did Tyndale commit? Why was he outlawed by pope and king and forced to live on the run for 10 years in Europe? He was accused of treason because he dared to translate the scriptures from the original languages into English without papal authority (which he was denied).

Tyndale’s passion was that all of England should possess God’s word. And regarding the scriptures, he was revolted by the biblical ignorance of his fellow priests. On one occasion, a spiritually profane clergyman declared to Tyndale that the populace would be better off with the pope’s laws than God’s. To this blasphemous assertion, Tyndale responded: “I defy the pope, and all his laws; and if God spares my life, ere many years, I will cause the boy that driveth the plow to know more of the Scriptures than thou dost!”

For Catholics to discern between biblical truth and religious error in the church, they must become thoroughly acquainted with the Bible, especially the New Testament. And they must be participants rather than spectators in matters of faith — because as we have seen, one’s accurate understanding of the gospel found in God’s word, or lack of it, proves a deciding factor in one’s relationship with Christ in this life, as well as eternal destiny in the next.

Robert Michaels is a long-time Benicia resident. He can be reached at robert.eagleswings@yahoo.com.