Different branches of Christianity

Maria is a Christian. She thinks maybe she wants to be a priest when she grows up. But you’re a girl! Girls can’t be priests! Well, there are various traditions in Christianity, different denominations, and they have different opinions about this.

After Jesus’s death the apostles and the first Christians spread the message of Christianity. And within a few hundred years, large parts of Europe and the Middle East were Christian. But eventually Christianity became too large to be controlled by one church. It split into two denominations: The Orthodox Church in the East, and the Catholic Church in the West. In Greek, Orthodox means the true path and Catholic comes from the Greek word for universal.

Today Catholicism is the largest denomination, with over a billion Catholics. The Catholic church is organised like a pyramid, a hierarchy: At the top is the Pope, then come the bishops and then the priests. The Pope has more power than anyone else in the Catholic church. Catholics believe that Jesus’s apostle Peter was the first bishop of Rome. And therefore each pope is Peter’s successor.

That’s why in Catholicism the Pope is often thought of as a direct link to the Apostles… and to Jesus too. And because Jesus’s apostles were only men, the Catholic church says that only men can be popes, bishops, or priests. Also, they’re not allowed to have sex; they have to be celibate. They can’t even get married. Is this written in the Bible?

There are different opinions about that too, but in Catholicism, traditions are often as important as what is written down in the Bible. Within Catholicism there are also seven especially important, or sacred, ceremonies that are called sacraments. The seven sacraments are: To bless someone with water: baptism. To ceremonially confirm the baptism: confirmation. To tell a priest the bad things one has done, to confess one’s sins.

This is called penance. To get married: matrimony. To be treated, or anointed, with oil before death: the anointing of the sick. The ceremony where one becomes a priest: the Holy Orders. And the ceremony where you eat bread and drink wine that is believed to be Jesus’s flesh and blood: the eucharist or communion.

The Orthodox church has the same sacraments, but they’re called mysteries. The Orthodox church is organised slightly differently from the Catholic church. Instead of a Pope who is the head of the whole church, every country has its own, independent, church. The person in charge of each country’s church is called a Patriarch. Within orthodoxy the Patriarchs together share the highest rank.

In the Orthodox church, celibacy only applies to the bishops. And only men can be patriarchs, bishops, or priests. In the 16th century there was a new denomination, which started as a protest against the Pope and the Catholic church: Protestantism. There isn’t just one Protestant church, but thousands of different ones. But one thing that most of them have in common is that they don’t follow the hierarchies and traditions of the Catholic and Orthodox churches.

Most Protestant churches claim that one should only believe what’s in the Bible. Also, they don’t have seven sacraments, usually only two: baptism and communion. In most Protestant churches the priests don’t have to be celibate, and they don’t have to be men either. So I can be a priest!