Cathy,

Your husband is asking you to violate your conscience to please him. That is not a loving demand.

True love would respect your conscience. He may have been only semi-educated in his faith, and fell victim to zealous anti-Catholics who have grave misunderstandings of Catholicism. Many such anti-Catholics have come into the Church in the past several years, and have explained how easy it was to capture Catholics who were ignorant of their own faith.

As for you, it is very wrong to leave the faith since you know it to be God's truth and God's will. Yes, other Christians love God, have many good things, and they have much to teach us, but they do not have what Christ wanted His Church to have: the fullness of truth and the fullness of grace in the sacraments.

If you apostatized (that is the term for someone who abandons the faith knowing it to be true), then your salvation would be endangered. Many Catholics in former times gave their lives rather than go to Protestant services. Just since the sixteenth century alone, many Catholics suffered greatly for their faith in:

• England and Ireland
• Korea
• Japan
• France
• Spain
• Mexico, and
• now in Africa and Arabia.

If your husband will not allow you to peacefully practice your faith, St. Paul said that you can be freed from the marriage. You can consult a Catholic priest about that, should you wish. I am not recommending that, of course, because I am sure that you love your husband.

Perhaps you could persuade your husband, as a favor to you, to read one of the works of the converts who have come into the Church from fundamentalism or from another religion.
The Surprised by Truth series edited by Patrick Madrid has many such stories.

Mary Ann