Of course I don't know what your own experience amounted to. Maybe in recent years, now that many Catholic teachings are changing and the explanations given are being changed even more, the difference may seem blurred somewhat
I couldn't say. I left the RCC a decade ago and don't look back.
but the description of the two opposing sides is accurate.
I highly doubt that the complaints of western Protestants against the RCC are really all that relevant to Middle Eastern converts to Christianity. In his book
The Crescent Through the Eyes of the Cross, Syrian Protestant author Nabeel T. Jabbour says that when he was in Egypt and he fasted during Ramadan to show solidarity with local Muslims, they were confused and asked him "Why are you fasting when you are Christian? Is this the
Orthodox fast?" (i.e., a period of fasting in the Coptic Orthodox Church that they are unaware of; he then explained that, no, he is Protestant so such things do not apply to him, etc.)
Is it not much more likely that they then know the kinds of Christianity that are local to them best, and hence consider them first (and these may not have the same hang-ups as Protestants against the RCC specifically), and hence a Saudi may consider Protestantism if most of the Christians he knows or comes into contact with are Protestant? I have no doubt that concerns about praxis and ecclesiology and so on are in there eventually, but to present them as though the conversions are a rejection of RCism in particular is a little bit ridiculous. The Protestants quite simply get to them first (particularly if the convert is in a majority Protestant country; I notice what appears to be a British flag in the man's Twitter, so I assume he is in the UK).
Apparently we had a Saudi woman convert to Orthodoxy in our church of St. Bishoy back in New Mexico shortly after I left it (almost five years ago now). I didn't get a chance to meet her, obviously, but everyone tells me that she is lovely and very committed to Christ and to the faith. I have no idea how she got there (it was just her; she didn't marry a Coptic guy after coming to the West or whatever), but to me it makes sense because we often had visitors from the other Middle Eastern countries who were interested in our church, even though they had their own. We had two Catholics from Jordan who attended our liturgies consistently for the better part of a year before moving out of the area. Someone asked them why they came to our liturgies so much, and they said it was the "most eastern" that was available in the city. I don't know what that means, but I know what it
doesn't mean, since they never voiced any specific grievance against the RC way of doing things. (And that makes sense, right? The Coptic Orthodox Church is far more liturgically conservative and elaborate than the Roman Catholic, so they probably wanted as much of that to antiquity and physicality in worship as they could get in Albuquerque. "Smells and bells" are a
good thing to many.)
So I am guessing that this may account for the phenomenon we were told about in the OP, just like everyone else has his own guess.
Maybe, but I have reason to think that's overly simplistic and importing problems/objections that aren't there organically. I also worshiped with, in addition to Egyptians (obviously), Iraqis, Sudanese, Ethiopians, Eritreans, Mexicans, Jews (one of the local Copts had married a Jewish woman, but still came to liturgy when HG Bishop Youssef was celebrating it), etc., and none of them but the Mexican ever said that the RCC factored into anything they do, or was anything that they even thought about. In fact, if anything, according to my Ethiopian friend Helen, it was a
good thing to have been formerly Catholic before converting to Orthodoxy, because you likely wouldn't have the problems with intercessory prayer, venerating the Theotokos, etc. that Protestants often have (not all of them, of course, but many). My memory is a bit fuzzy by now but I believe her words (after finding out that I was Roman Catholic, as I still technically was at the time) were something like "I thought you were Orthodox already, because you did everything just as we do it, and you didn't hesitate to kiss the priest's cross and the icons." (And there is reason for this that is unrelated to the RCC or its practices: the RC way of making the sign of the cross, for example -- while it is a evolution away from how they used to do it according to some of their own sources -- has for several centuries now matched the way the OO have
always done it: left-to-right, not right-to-left as the other Chalcedonians still do it, though the explanation as to why it is done that way is different in the OO case than in the case of the modern RCC.)
So I don't know that the average Middle Eastern person, simply looking to join
Christianity out of their love for Jesus Christ and desire to follow Him as the Word of God, the Only-Begotten Son of the Father, necessarily pays all that much attention to the kinds of issues you have raised. I don't know a 'nice' way to say this, but I think that the level theological education concerning Christianity among many converts matches better with the level of theological education of the Protestant missionaries than it does with the indigenous Christians who have 2,000 years of Christian history to impart to any who come seriously wishing to join the Church. After my first liturgy, Abouna Marcos sat me down and gave me a quick lesson covering about 2,000 years of Coptic history in about a half an hour. I could see that being very intimidating and off-putting to some people, and it could very easily prove too big a stumbling block if you'd first been exposed to Protestantism, which doesn't have 2,000 years of
anything, doesn't have this, doesn't have that, etc. I know which one I would choose, if I were in such a situation. It is very easy to tell someone "Here's a Bible; read it; everything is in there", assuming they can read and want to read it. It is much more difficult to say "Yes, read the Bible, and
also read the Agpeya, the Synaxarium, the Desert Fathers, the Acts of the Three (or Seven, or whatever) Ecumenical Councils, the works of St. Athanasius the Apostolic, St. Cyril the Pillar of Faith, etc."
The Muslims are used to one book having the answer to absolutely everything (even if they they can't actually understand it and must rely on interpretations given to them in their particular Islamic tradition), and no central theological authority, and many other things that are in concert with
certain forms of Protestantism. It seems much more likely that they latch on to these similarities rather than explicitly rejecting other churches which we have no reason to think they ever had the chance to seriously consider, due to a lack of exposure to them.
