If you're crossing the street and a car's bearing down on you at 60 miles an hour, wouldn't you want someone screaming to get your attention?

Over at the Catholic Report a couple months ago, a number of Protestants were using this metaphor as a defense for obnoxious street preaching geared towards bringing people out of the Church. These preachers were on the defensive because they showed up during a mass at a Chaldean church (I think they had a procession outside or something), and made enough noise to distract some of the people inside.

Most of them say they're motivated by love, not hate, and I won't claim to know any differently, but some are so obstinately incredulous that I do wonder. A lot of the specifics are pedigreed Jack Chick, so I won't spend any more time on that point.

I just wanted to address people who use the "speeding car" rationale:

It doesn't work.

We get that if you saw someone standing in the street about to get run over, you would be desperate to try to save him, even if it seemed heavy-handed or even embarrassing to him at the time. Unfortunately, you're screaming and waving your arms so much that you're further distracting him; you're making such a spectacle out of yourself that we can't even tell what you're really trying to say, that we are even less likely to notice the oncoming car.

To Catholics, your desperate zeal just sounds like misplaced anger, especially when your impassioned pleas and criticism don't make a lot of sense.

I hope you can forgive our skepticism, since about half the time when a Protestant (and you're a Protestant if your tradition, or ecclesial lineage if you like, surfaced in the aftermath of Luther, no matter how convincingly you can draw a line back to Christ) tells us he's studied Catholicism, it means he's cribbed some notes from Lorraine Boettner or from a sermon given by one of Boettner's intellectual offspring.

That deer-in-the-headlights look you sometimes get from us? It's not shock and awe at the Holy Spirit humbling us through your strident proselytizing; it's bewilderment at your array of claims that hardly have anything to do with what we actually believe, especially in light of your insistence that--despite the clunky application of Protestant jargon to tiny snippets from the Catechism--you've really done your homework and understand the Catholic doctrines in any meaningful way.

We don't blame you entirely--sure, if our doctrines were just as you described, we'd be repulsed as well. These days, we often do get instructed poorly, so we often can't help you understand many of the more rarified teachings when you criticize them, which we also regret.

We just sometimes wonder how well saying "Read the Bible for yourself! Except Maccabees, and Tobit, and Judith, and parts of some other books we accept, and then a few others" really works. We also wonder about sola scriptura when people who rely on it have been finding irreconcilable differences in what Scripture means about once a week since Luther discovered the idea, retaining only two things in common: (1) everything the Catholics believe that must be wrong, like purgatory (2) every doctrine they all have in common is also shared with the Catholics, like the Trinity and the dual nature of Christ and His virgin birth.

Seems like a funny way to decide which doctrines are too tenuously extrapolated from Scripture, especially when so many others--so many no less nuanced--aren't debated at all.