Conversion Stories

New Age Convert: Cari Donaldson

Sun, 04 Nov 2012 22:54:15 +0000

Cari Donaldson

After being raised Presbyterian Cari became involved in the new age movement while attending Michigan State. Cari Donaldson is a wife and homeschooling mother of six residing in Connecticut.

There are parallels between conversion stories and birth stories. Both start with a tiny seed, planted in darkness, result in the birth of a new creation, and involve blood, sweat and tears. And while I resisted writing the story of my conversion to Catholicism for a long time, it seems fitting that when I finally did so, it would be toward the end of my sixth pregnancy.

While writing this has involved slightly less blood than the birth of my children, it was accompanied by yelling and tears. There is nothing more frustrating than trying to convey your experience with the Word when it refuses to fit nicely into any words. So I ask you, like all mothers presenting their newborn to the public for the first time, please overlook defects of style and appearance, and focus instead on the potential, the innocence, the love that created, sustained, and labored to bring the finished product into the world.

______________________

I was raised, in no particular order:

· With both mother and father, who modeled what a strong marriage can look like

· With one sibling, my brother, who used to be younger than I am, but since I’ve stopped aging, he’s now older

· In a suburb of Detroit, in a dark brick ranch my grandfather helped build and my mom grew up in

· Going to the same Presbyterian church my mom went to when she was a child

We went to church regularly, and I attended both Sunday school and youth group. Any other religious expression was an individual pursuit. I don’t remember reading the Bible as a family, but I do remember my gold foil “Good News Bible”, with stick figures and crinkly onionskin paper. I don’t remember praying much as a family, outside of grace before Thanksgiving dinner, but I do remember, from a very early age, talking to God.

Specifically, I remember talking to God every night and asking Him to “put my Grandpa on”. I’d wait, imagining God going to get my Grandpa Bob, who had died when I was five. I’d sit patiently in silence, until I imagined Grandpa coming to the prayer line, and we’d chat for a bit. Then God would get back on, and we’d say our goodbyes for the night.

I remember my childhood religious formation being strong enough to forge that vital element- a prayer life, something I never ever lost.

I remember the rest of my childhood formation being tenuous enough that I had slipped it off by college.

My best friend in high school gave me a book to read right before I left for Michigan State. It was called Judas My Brother, by Frank Yerby. Briefly, it is a book that strives to strip Jesus, and by extension, Christianity, of anything Divine or mystical. It has footnotes and endnotes galore, and to a 17-year-old girl with little grounding in theology, it was a revelation. With no education in Christian apologetics to help me critically consume the book, I was happy to embrace the whole thing. The ability to toss aside some Bronze-age set of patriarchal ethics all while spouting off quotes from a historical novel is extremely attractive to a new college student. So, convinced that at its heart, Christianity was nothing more than a monstrous tale of a monstrous God who sacrificed His own Son to Himself to appease His monstrous anger, I chucked it all.

More or less.

I still prayed. Every night. There was that remnant of my childhood faith that I couldn’t even begin to shake. Even if the prayer was nothing more than, “Thank you for this day, goodnight,” I still said it. I didn’t think too hard about who was on the receiving end of my prayer, but I always knew that there was Someone to whom I was grateful for another day of life.

Atheism or agnosticism were never serious considerations. At no point during my spiritual wandering did I contemplate either of them very long. Where I was, at this point, was a theist. Nothing more.

I think that when a person says, “I believe in God, but I don’t believe in religion,” there are only two options left for her. The first is slip off into profound lukewarmness and to begin viewing God like a magic lamp, taken out when there is a wish to be granted. The other option is to keep looking for a deeper relationship with God, which means you have to keep coming up against the one thing you’d rather avoid.

I wasn’t looking to distance God even further. I wanted more. And so, like someone who keeps checking out the window to see if their family is pulling in the driveway yet, I kept returning to the subject of Religion. What was God? Who was God? What was the relationship between religion and God? Did we need religion? Did we need God? All the typical questions that we humans ask ourselves, and, like many others, I had no objective method to use in finding answers. I just knew there was something missing, and that something was God. I also knew that I didn’t want to run the risk of finding Him in some religion that was going to tell me things like “right” and “wrong”.

Pride is fun, isn’t it?

So, looking for a deeper relationship with God that didn’t attempt to burden me with annoying lessons on morality, I found myself becoming more and more enamored with the New Age movement.

Since the only experience I have with universities is limited to what I lived out on Michigan State University’s campus from 1993-1998, I will make sure that I don’t paint all universities with the same brush. So when I say that I found college a very hospitable environment for New Age influences, please understand that I mean this only for a particular place during a particular time.

From the occult “Triple Goddess” bookstore a little ways off campus to the pagan student alliance on it, there was a world of New Age, pagan, occult information at my fingertips. Now, keep in mind that this was the early 90s, and the Internet was more or less limited to telnet and Gopher. So when I say “a world of information at my fingertips”, know that my fingers were much shorter 20 years ago than they would be now. In other words, if I wanted to learn about it, I had to do so through a book or a real live person.

At first, I kept my searches confined to books. Not quite ready to actually talk to another person, I would spend time at the campus library, reading poorly researched works about ritual prostitution in ancient Babylon, or information on the Celtic pantheon derived from source information of conquering invaders. I had as little concern for scholarly integrity as many of the authors of these books did, and information derived from New Age novels was viewed as reliable as that from non-fiction.

In other words, at this stage of my spiritual quest, critical analysis was not part of my vocabulary.

Eventually, my one-track reading theme caught the attention of a friend, who had grown up in the area. She introduced me to the occult bookshop in town, “Triple Goddess”. Here I was able to get more contemporary literature on all manner of New Agey topics, and for an almost unlimited amount of new material, all I had to do was part with both my money and any desire for responsibly researched, verifiable information.

The hallmark of the New Age movement is a do-it-yourself mentality. Whatever whim, interest, or fancy strikes you, there is some way to incorporate it into your customized belief system. Drawn to reincarnation? Find yourself a past life reader who can tell you who you were previously. Want to cultivate a friendship with your animal totem? Grab a book on guided meditation that will take you on a vision quest to do just that. As the signs posted prominently in the bookshop reminded customers, “Following Your Bliss” was the prime directive. There was no evidence that apologetics was an area of concern.

Conceivably, a person could continue like this for the rest of their lives, happily moving from one metaphysical practice to another, or from one deity to the next. Certainly this is what I did for a long while, stopping somewhere until the gnawing sense of emptiness grew unbearable and I started looking for something new to fill it. I was searching for a way to establish a firm relationship with God, yet paradoxically, the more options I was given to do so, the weaker that relationship became.

Finally, I grew desperate enough to seek out other people; to set down the books to go see what I could find in the fellowship of fellow New Age/pagan/occult/notmembers of Organized Religion. I went to a meeting of the campus pagan support group, where I met half dozen or so people who should have been my kindred spirits. I should have felt some connection with them, these folks on a similar journey as I was. Maybe if we weren’t exactly on the same road, we’d at least be able to shout at each other across the distance.

What I found were six people with six wildly different ideas on everything remotely connected to God. One woman worshipped an obscure Egyptian goddess who had a name, but which I’ve since forgotten. This was in stark relief to the only male in attendance, who worshipped a trio of Norse gods, the names of which he insisted were so sacred they could only be revealed to those who had been properly initiated. There were a few women who worshipped a vague sort of Earth goddess type, and someone who was an atheist, but came to the meetings because no one else would believe that she was in communication with alien life forms.

I was immediately struck by the fact that I wasn’t going to find spiritual guidance here. What I found was a hodgepodge of religious beliefs not substantially different than what I’d find while waiting at the dentist’s office, or while grocery shopping. Plus, like payments expected at the dentist or the grocery store, the pagan support group wanted me to cough up money, $20 to cover membership fees.

However, the whole thing wasn’t a wash. The experience got me thinking about the nature of worship. After all, to worship something is a pretty big deal. Even the constant misuse of the word in popular culture can’t water down its meaning completely. To worship something means to view it in a profound sense of admiration. You admire the object of worship in a manner that you admire nothing else. Once I articulated this, fatal cracks in the New Age façade formed. The nature of pantheons, to which most of the deities in pagan religious structures belong, is a familial one. That means individual gods and goddesses were created from previous gods and goddesses. Think about all the Greek myths you learned in school. There was a family tree there, and you could trace Athena back to Zeus, back to Cronus, back and back, and what you had was a series of creatures. It seemed foolish to me to admire a created deity in a manner that I admired nothing else, since that deity owed its existence to another entity. It would be like admiring the Mona Lisa above all other things, even the person whose skill created the painting. Worship, to make any sense at all, had to be directed at the original source.

Most of the pagan gods and goddesses that have any historically documented pedigree can trace their lineage ultimately to some deification of the Earth. I didn’t need to be a geologist or an astronomer to know that the Earth was a created object as well, and so the trail couldn’t end there. Where to look next, however, I couldn’t even begin to guess.

My unquestioning love affair with all things New Agey ended at the same time my stint in college did. I left MSU with a bachelor’s degree in English and a certificate to teach middle and high school students, and I left the New Age movement with a vague set of metaphysical philosophies and a weaker grasp on the nature of God than what I started with.

I left college in May of 1998. By the next month, I had a teaching position in the same school district I went to as a child. The man I’d loved since I was 14 proposed to me in October of that same year, and we moved in together in February of 1999, with the wedding date set for August of that same year.

To say that it was a busy time in my life would be, in retrospect, an understatement.

Moving from the extended adolescence that college allows to something resembling responsible adulthood meant that I could, for a while anyway, shelve the whole search for a resting place in God. I did so with relief. I still maintained a set of holdovers from my pagan years- a belief in reincarnation and a vague pantheism being most notable. Unable to figure out how God wanted us to relate to one another, I gave up trying.

But then time for serious wedding plans came. My first choice was an extremely small wedding of no more than 50 or so people, held entirely in my parents’ backyard- it was a beautiful setting, and full of comforting memories; I couldn’t imagine having it anywhere else. My parents, sensibly concerned about a number of logistical and potential problems a home wedding brings with it, encouraged Ken and me to come up with another option.

We couldn’t think of one. Neither of us wanted to elope, and the thought of the actual ceremony taking place in a dreary, municipal setting was depressing. Lack of options meant that when the Presbyterian church of our childhood was suggested, we couldn’t think of anything compelling to counter it with. What it lacked in religious significance for me, it made up in sentimental ones. After all, Ken and I had both gone there growing up. And while we went to the same school, we were in different grades, so it was the church’s youth group that was the stage for our fledgling romance. Marrying in that church seemed a sweet nod to the physical location that brought us together.

The pastor who had worked there when we attended had since gone to another church, but Ken and I thought we’d see if he’d be willing to come back to officiate the wedding. We met with him in his office at his current church and he agreed to do so. He handed us a packet of common wedding vows and said that we could customize the ceremony however we felt comfortable.

I took him at his word and spent the next several nights sitting at the coffee table with scissors and glue, cutting one phrase from one version of the wedding ceremony, and another phrase from a different one. In every version, however, I made sure to remove the name of Jesus from the proceedings. I was fine marrying in a church. I was fine having our childhood pastor officiate. I was fine mentioning God in the ceremony, but I would not allow Christ to be mentioned. It was too religious, too Christian. A non-specific “God” could be invoked and that was as far as I was willing to go.

Both the pastor and Ken agreed to my editing job, and so we were married in a Presbyterian church in a ceremony that banned any reference to Jesus.

Despite the changes in my life, I found my thoughts returning with increasing frequency toward God. Having found nothing particularly useful in New Age teachings, absolute desperation turned my attention to organized religion. After all, I reasoned, if a religious institution was going to have staying power and a sizable audience, two things it needed to fall under the “organized” category in my mind, it probably had something logical and useful to say.

With summer vacation staring me in the face, I figured I’d start learning what I could. Since at the time I believed in reincarnation, I thought I’d start with Buddhism and Hinduism.

A brief study of Buddhism quickly revealed to me that it was more of a philosophical system, and in its purest form, not concerned with the existence of a deity at all. Since it was my clear experience that there was a God, and the whole point of this excruciating search was to grow closer to Him/Her/It, I left Buddhism to its own devices and turned to Hinduism instead.

The problem I found with Hinduism stemmed from its origins. The majority of world religions have a particular individual as the founder. Buddhism had Siddhartha Gautama, Islam had Mohammed, Christianity had Jesus, and Judaism had Abraham, Issac and Jacob. For each of these groups, there is a way to find what the original intent of the religion was. You can read what the founders themselves had to say and glean information about the theology from that.

Not so with Hinduism, which grew from the religious practices of immigrating tribes. Hinduism wasn’t “founded” so much as it “evolved”, and so tracking down the original vision of its theology proved impossible, because there wasn’t one. What there was was a muddled sense of accepted confusion about the nature of God that I couldn’t wrap my mind around. I didn’t need my understanding of God to be more obscure. Additionally, Hinduism presented the same problem to me as did paganism- namely so many of the deities were created creatures and therefore unsuitable to me as an object of worship.

Islam presented a problem almost immediately. Even before 9/11, there was a tone to discussions about Islam that made it difficult for me to know what was theology and what was politics. Additionally, I kept running into the insistence that unless one was reading the Qur’an in its native Arabic, the translation was invalid. Something about all this struck me as almost Gnostic in its secretiveness, and I put aside Islam as a serious consideration.

Judaism was next. But besides the obvious fact that the form of Judaism practiced in the Bible didn’t exist anymore, it felt too close to Christianity. It was like declaring your independence from your parents, but going to live rent free with your grandfather. I spent time reading the Old Testament and feeling more and more resentful about the whole thing.

Around this time, three significant things happened. The first was one day, in a fit of exasperation over having to listen to the spiritual whining of his wife for the millionth time, Ken said, “Why don’t you just pick something to believe and believe in it?” Bear in mind, Ken never said anything like that to me in regards to my religious angst. So when he finally could take no more, his words sunk in even deeper. What was wrong with me? Why couldn’t I just pick something that fit with my world-view and settle in there? Why did I have to make everything so damn complicated? Surely there were enough people in my acquaintance who insisted that all one needed to do in life was be a good person and that would be enough. Why couldn’t I just do that?

That was the kick in the pants I needed to convince me that something beyond myself was spurring this search. Left to my own devices, I would have tossed the whole God question to the curb and followed a path that offered maximum good feelings with minimum work on my part. But I’d tried that, and it didn’t work. It didn’t make the gnawing sense of something missing go away. So as much as I wanted to chuck the whole thing, Ken’s words made me realize that there was no rest for the wicked, and I couldn’t stop this search until I found truth. It was this realization, that I couldn’t give up searching even though I wanted to, that shaped some of my more embarrassing religious experiments of that time period. Things like “baptizing” our infant daughter ourselves at a local park one weekend. My heart was in the right place, but I can say that it was a great relief, years later, to learn that since I hadn’t used the Trinitarian formula (of course I hadn’t. I think the actual wording called her “a child of the Universe”), she wasn’t validly baptized, but would be, the actions of her hippy dippy mother notwithstanding.

The next thing was we moved into our first house, which was half a block away from a Catholic church. There was a statue of Our Lady outside, next to a playground, and I found myself staring at the statue when I’d take Lotus to the park to play. Whenever I went for a run or a bike ride, I always made sure my path crossed that statue, and I’d pause for a moment, and stare at that image, the thoughts of my heart and mind a mystery even to myself.

The final thing that happened during that period of my life was Ken got his first transfer. We would move away from suburban Detroit, a place I’d lived all my life, to Mississippi of all places. Mississippi! The absurdity of the whole thing was almost too much to comprehend. What on earth would a good Midwestern girl do in the Deep South?

Although the move from Michigan to Mississippi was sought after, welcomed, and wanted, I did not adjust gracefully. What I did do was suffer from major culture shock for the first year or so.

Major. Culture. Shock.

Of course, now that I’m writing this from a distance of 1227 miles and seven years, I have a different perspective, one that is too colored by nostalgia to probably be entirely accurate. But I can remember one thing with laser-like precision that drove me frantic about my new Southern neighbors.

And that was their open, unabashed practice of religion.

This, coupled with the notamyth reality of Southern hospitality, meant that I was confronted with my religious agonies on a daily basis. Within a week of moving in, we had met every single family on our street. They came with flawless charm and goodwill, bearing some housewarming gift, and the conversation went the absolute same every time:

“Hi! I’m So-and-so, your neighbor two doors down on the left! It’s nice to meet you!”

Here I would accept the baked good and/or poinsettia (we moved into the house in December of 2004), tell them my name, and invite them into my house, which was in shocking unpacked shambles. The neighbor would politely decline to come in, to my extreme gratitude (see what I mean about Southern hospitality?), and would continue The Script:

“So have you found a church yet?”

No. I am not kidding you. This was the second question from everyone. Hi, what’s your name, by the way, have you found a church yet? As if they could see right into my heart and knew the one question that would cause me the most discomfort.

Normally, I would mutter something vague and start opening the door wider, just so one of the dogs would escape and I could end the conversation by chasing after it. If this failed, the new neighbor/torturer would press on, asking what kind of church I went to back home. When I had no answer for them, they’d invite me to their church. Repeatedly. With printouts of service schedules for me to reference later.

I remember calling my mom in a tizzy one day over this affront to my Midwestern sensibilities. She wisely advised me to tell them that Ken and I were married in a Presbyterian church and play the odds that the neighbor was either Baptist or Pentecostal, who would then assume I’d found a suitable replacement in Mississippi, and leave me alone.

Brilliant! I did just that, and it worked like a charm. Until I met the last neighbors, who were (of course) Presbyterian. Who then offered to have the pastor of their church over one day so we could meet him. Who started calling every few days to see if I’d checked with Ken to figure out a good time to do so. Backed into an absolute corner, I remember that Ken’s parents, who lived 20 minutes away, were also Presbyterians. In a fit of blind panic one day, I told the well-intentioned neighbors that we were going to my in-law’s church and thanks for the offer, but we were good.

That got them off my back. But hell. Now we needed to go to my in-law’s church once, so I wasn’t lying.

Now I had to do some serious- something. Something. I didn’t even know what. All I knew was that I had this giant chip on my shoulder regarding all things Christian-related, and it was starting to get very heavy.

I thought that it was time to apply my non-negotiables to Christianity and eliminate it from consideration like I’d done all other organized religions so far. It seemed fair. So, starting with the notion of not being willing to worship a created object, I turned the powers of the Internet to the question of Christ. Christ, who I’d firmly shut out of our wedding, was, as far as I understood Him to be, a created creature. After all, He was the Son of the Father, and sons are creatures, so this should be pretty cut and dry.

The search engine helpfully directed me to the first chapter of John, specifically the first few verses. Then it helpfully directed me to a website where I could read these verses in about a million different translations.

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.

You know the phrase, “my blood ran cold”? And when you feel it, you’re so scared that it’s like your blood has actually turned to ice water?

There is an opposite feeling, but I don’t know if there’s an idiom for it. It’s when you’re so suddenly overwhelmed with a sense of safety that your blood feels like it’s made of sunlight. That’s what I felt when I read those words in John.

Oh, I didn’t understand it. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not a bible scholar, and I’m certainly not a theologian, but I was able to glean one thing from that passage: Christianity didn’t teach that Christ was a created thing. He was in existence from before time, with God, God Himself.

Immediately following on the heels of that discovery was one even more meaningful for me. Christ was a Word. A Word.

He was the conversation God wanted to have with me about Himself, a conversation He had waited so patiently to have while I flailed about like a three year old on a Halloween sugar crash temper tantrum, kicking the kitchen floor and sticking my fingers in my ears and alternating screams about “Talk to me!” and “I don’t want to listen!”

I sat there for a while, staring at the computer screen. All this time I wanted God to talk to me and then I went around doing things like censoring His Word from my wedding.

Christianity had cleared the first of my ridiculous hurdles. I was interested in seeing what it revealed to me in a church service, and so the next Sunday, I found myself stepping foot in a church for the first time since Ken and I were married.

My first church experience in more than three years was lovely. The people were welcoming, the pastor’s sermon insightful, and the surroundings tasteful and reverent. Even the choir, who performed traditional hymns, was pretty, and I’m not much of a music lover.

Looking back now, I’m not sure what I expected to experience there. There were no extremes in response; I didn’t burst into flames upon arrival nor have divine revelations during the service. Ken and I were both willing to visit again, and I found nothing there to send me running from Christianity.

But my heart still wasn’t settled. So at nights, when the baby was asleep, and Ken at work, I continued my obsessive searching on the Internet. I wanted to know more about Christianity. I wasn’t even sure what it was that I wanted to learn, that’s how little I knew about it.

One night, my searches led me to a picture of a Bouguereau Madonna that made me stop dead in my tracks.

Growing up, I distinctly remember a Bouguereau painting in the Detroit Institute of Arts that I loved. It was called The Nut Gatherers, and it reminded me of my cousin and me.

I had a print of that painting for a large portion of my childhood, and so when I saw the same artist's Madonna, it struck me as particularly meaningful and intimate.

And the painting! Many images of Jesus’ mother I’d seen portrayed her as something so meek and simpering that she almost looked feebleminded, but this one! This Madonna was regal. She seemed fierce. She kept a laser-like focus on Christ. She was not a Mary you wanted to mess with.

(just look at her. She's ready to lay the smackdown on John the Baptist if he messes with her Son.)

I stared at that picture and then realized what it was that I wanted. I wanted to have the same laser focus on God that Mary had in that painting. I wanted that iron will, unshakably fixed on God. I wanted a faith that was, like Mary’s, epic. And once I’d articulated this in my own heart, I knew somehow, that Mary herself would lead me there. I was filled with complete trust that if I followed her example, she would show me how to love God, and how to establish that relationship with Him I’d been longing for my whole life.

Now, finally, I had a focus in my search. I just had to copy Mary long enough to figure out where I was supposed to go. I thought of it a bit like shadowing someone on a job.

I started with the only place I knew to go to see what Mary did- the Bible. I started reading for the first time with an eye for instruction, rather than a way to pass childhood sermons by looking for “the weird parts” in the Old Testament. The more I read, the more I became comfortable with Christ. He stopped being a sticking point with me, something that I viewed as “standing in the way of my relationship with God”. He started being Someone who loved me- Someone who demonstrated in a way that a weak and limited human could understand what God’s love meant. Until I saw God as a human, I never appreciated how impossible it is for humans to grasp the enormity of God’s commitment to us.

I read everything I could get my hands on. With only one child at the time, and a husband whose work schedule ran from 3 p.m. until 4 a.m., I had lots and lots of time to do so. When I couldn’t get to the library, I ran Internet searches, trying to follow Mary’s footsteps and walk a path as close to Jesus as I could get.

And then the path began to get bumpy. And poorly marked. And populated with lots and lots of people telling me contradicting directions.

In my reading, it soon became clear to me that there were about seventeen bazillion different theories, opinions, doctrines, and teachings on Christ and what He wanted His followers to do. One group claimed that the Trinity was an idolatrous creation, and it was Jesus alone running the show, yet I could easily find half a dozen groups denouncing that teaching. Another group insisted that drinking and dancing were hell-worthy offenses; other groups didn’t seem so bothered with it.

I vividly remembered a conversation I’d had with a loved one a few years previously, who was agonizing over officially joining a church she really connected with. The problem arose from the fact that this new church only accepted full immersion baptism as valid, and although she’d been baptized as a young adult in another church, it wasn’t through immersion, and so this new church wouldn’t recognize it.

I marveled at that and grew steadily horrified about its implications. If something as necessary and fundamental as baptism couldn’t be agreed on, how could we humans know that we were getting any of it right? It seemed to me that anyone with an opinion about God and an audience willing to listen to it could start his own church. And all these churches teaching contradictory things certainly made it difficult to reconcile Jesus’ promise to Peter, that the gates of Hell would not prevail upon the church He was clearly establishing.

As I puzzled through that, I was also trying to get a clear answer about why even go to church at all? When Christ said He was establishing a church, did He really mean an actual, physical structure? Couldn’t I spend Sunday out in nature, giving thanks for God’s creation, and be engaging in worship? After all, what did I find at church that was found exclusively there? The Internet made accessing a multitude of pastors and their sermons a cinch, so I didn’t have to go to church to hear instruction on the Word of God. There were plenty of Bible study groups in the area, so I wasn’t dependent on a church to connect me with fellow believers. Those who very much associated worship music with their church experience could find it on the local Christian radio station every time they got into their car. Even things like marrying in a church, as my own experience showed, weren’t dependent on attendance. So what did church offer that I couldn’t get anywhere else? And even if I could find an answer to that question, there was still the 5,000 pound elephant in the room of which church?

As I start what I hope is the last installment of this story, I realize how much is missing.

There is so much more that I could say and chew over and analyze, but hopefully it's enough for now that I'm getting the bones of it down.

The wall right in front of me is covered in that chalkboard paint. And in a series of scribbled numbers, I've figured out how long it was between standing in a church at my wedding ceremony, which firmly ignored Christ, and that Easter Vigil when I stood in front of another Church and first received Him in the Holy Eucharist.

2,444 days. 6 years, 8 months, 9 days.

Don't ever doubt the power of prayer or the absolute fact that there are a multitude of souls on Earth and in Heaven who unceasingly desire a soul's return to God.

And here, the story moves along so quickly that I know I will skip things, either on purpose or accident. In my desire to get to the happy ending, I have the urge to, in the words of Prince Humperdink, "skip to the end", and thereby gloss over some pretty important, but pesky details.

I won't.

I'll pick back up where I left off in part V.- with two overwhelming questions that were gnawing away at me:

1. Why bother going to church at all? Why not just take my newfound comfort with Christ and Christianity and just be at peace with it? What did the act of going to church provide that couldn't be obtained in other, less organized, areas?

2. If there was a reason for consistent church attendance, which church should it be? Which one was right?

With growing misery and irritation, I returned to the intergoogleweb to try and find answers. I started with the denomination of my youth, Presbyterianism, but immediately came up against not only the issue of Predestination, but the fact that Presbyterians themselves couldn't agree on what it meant.

More confusion.

I halfheartedly sifted through what the Lutherans and the Methodists and the Baptists understood about themselves and God.

It just got worse.

One day, I ran into the first Chick Tract of my entire life (a happy little number called Are Roman Catholics Christians?). I'd never seen anything like this. Flipping through the pages, I remember feeling both repulsed and physically dirtied by contact with that thing. The reactions were so strong and so unexpected that the incident is firmly fixed in my mind.

Growing up, I had friends who were Catholic. My godfather is Catholic. Our neighbors were Catholic. I'd been to Catholic funerals and Catholic weddings.

None of it was enough to inspire me to learn about Catholicism. In fact, I had myself a nice, smug little set of preconceived notions about the Church that I summed up in one of my favorite phrases, "The Catholic Church is going to crumble under its own bloated weight. Maybe in our lifetime."

Oh my gosh, readers, can you imagine what it takes for me to admit this? How vicious and gleefully ignorant I was about an institution that I never bothered to learn about? I figured I knew everything I needed to know- the Church hated women, sex, non-Catholics, and science. In fact, despite my growing appreciation for Mary's faith, Catholicism never even appeared on my radar during my spiritual searches. How could it? How could I possibly consider a religion that was so out of touch with the world, so angry, so patriarchal?

And yet, reading through that ugly little tract, which vomited a level of hatred for the Church that exceeded my own stupid complaints, my reaction was one of indignance. I was offended, on behalf of a Church I knew nothing about, but still cared nothing for. For no other reason than to disprove the wild accusations of a poorly executed religious comic, I found myself turning my Internet searches to Catholicism. Not to explore the possibility that it held answers to my questions, but simply to stick it to Chick Publications.

The first thing that comes to mind was learning that the Catholic Church understood two things about religions in general and itself in particular: one, that all religions contained some aspect of the Truth. Even if it was nothing more than a memory of a shred, there was still some Truth there. Two: that the entirety of what God has revealed about Himself to human beings has been entrusted to the Catholic Church. They even had a phrase for it; "the Fullness of the Truth".

Clearly, these were not people who were going to mince words.

At first, I was astounded by the boldness of that concept. The Fullness of the Truth? Everything that God has revealed to us stupid humans, all in one place?

Impossible.

I rejected it. Maybe those Catholics weren't as horrible as the Chick Tract would draw them, but they were clearly insane.

I couldn't let the concept go. Because if Catholics believed they held the fullness of the Truth, then there would be a Truth, right? There would be clear answers on things that Protestant denominations couldn't agree on- even within their own denomination, right?

The thought was so radical, so foreign to a mind soaked in moral relativism, that I couldn't grasp it. If these Catholics were going to make a claim like this, they'd better prove it. There had better be absolutely undeniable proof that what they were teaching was God's Truth.

And so I started reading what the earliest Christians understood about Christ and the church He founded. I started down the path that is familiar to all Catholic converts- who decided what writings were Divinely inspired and meant to be included in the Bible and which writings were not? How was information on this new religion passed along to the first adherents when literacy and books were not the common things they are now? I learned about the concepts of Sola Scriptura and Sacred Tradition. I was introduced to the Early Church Fathers. I figured I'd follow the history of Catholicism from the beginning until I found something I could use to discount it- a journey I expected to be a short one.

But then I learned about the Eucharist.

For me, growing up with the grape juice and spongy bread, passed from person to person along the pews, once a month at most, the concept of Communion was a muddled one. On the one hand, in the church of my childhood, there was a sense that Communion was expected to be something outside the ordinary, but there was nothing displayed to back that up. The grape juice was Welch's, poured out into small shot glasses right before Communion services. The bread was actually Wonder Bread, cut into cubes by volunteers, and heaped into the centers of the passing dishes. When I learned that my best friend's grandmother made the communion bread for their Methodist church, I was astounded. I couldn't believe that someone would think to take the time to specially make the ingredients for Communion, and as my best friend and I snacked on leftover bread one Sunday after church, I couldn't help but wonder why our church didn't do the same.

Growing up, Communion was an odd mixture of stated solemnity coupled with the casually indifferent. Take this bread. Drink this cup. Remember Me.

Just….remember.

So when I learned that the Catholics understood that they were doing something more than remembering, that they were actually coming into direct contact with the Body, Blood, Soul and Divinity of Christ Himself, I didn't believe them.

I figured they were making it up. No one could believe that.

Right?

But as I kept reading the writings from the early Church, I realized that this understanding was there from the beginning.

And, if what they understood was True, then I had my answer for "why do I need to bother going to a church?" If Christ Himself were actually there, actually, physically there inside Catholic churches, then that was reason enough for a person to drag their sorry, slothful, sinful butt to church. It wasn't for the Bible readings, or the sermons, or the music, or the fellowship. While I could certainly see where all those things could contribute to a person's spiritual growth, none of them were exclusive to a church setting.

But the Eucharist? That was a Game Changer.

And with that, I did what any sorry, slothful, sinful person would do: I stuck my fingers in my ears and pretended like I couldn't hear anything.

This was late winter, early spring of 2005. The nation was watching the final days of Terry Shiavo unfold, and you couldn't turn on the radio without hearing something about some bishop or other speaking out against the impending death.

I didn't want to hear it. I didn't want to hear anything else about Catholics and their loudmouthed bishops who were sticking their noses into something that, as far as I could tell, didn't even involve them.

Then she died.

Then, three days later, so did Pope John-Paul II.

Ken, Lotus and I were in a Cici's pizza when the news of his death broke. There were TVs mounted all over the ceiling of the restaurant, and even though the sound was off, the news came across on the ticker at the bottom of the screen.

I started to cry.

For a man I didn't know who was the head of a church I didn't want to think about.

I went to the bathroom and tried to get control of myself. What the hell was wrong with me?

Chalking it up to the hormone cocktail courtesy of my 7th month of pregnancy, I went back to finish lunch with my family. But I couldn't shake the sense of overwhelming sadness. Back in the car, on the way home, the news was on the radio, and I teared up again.

The entrance to our neighborhood was directly across the street from- you guessed it- a Catholic church: Queen of Peace Catholic Church, to be exact. I would tell myself that the only reason I even noticed it was because it had a bright turquoise tin roof and who can overlook something like that?

That day, the parking lot, which had been unsettlingly full during the days leading up to the Pope's death, was full to overflowing. Cars were parked all the way down the street, and somehow, the thought of all those Catholics, mourning the loss of their Pope, made me tear up again.

I couldn't get past it. I couldn't get past the feelings of mourning that would come over me in the following days.

One night, not long after, I was on the Internet again, and found myself at a website explaining the Miraculous Medal. Too perplexed by this newest revelation of Catholic oddity to keep my guard up, I accepted the website's offer to send me a free medal.

Whatever. Weirdo Catholics and their weirdo medals and the weirdo claims of miracles and graces for people who wore the stupid things with devout trust in God.

Mumbo to the Jumbo.

I promptly forgot about my momentary lapse in good reason and went to read about Galileo and all the ways the Church hated science and reason.

Oops. Somewhere along the way, I got sidetracked by a list of famous scientists who were priests and all the other scientists the Church had encouraged, cultivated, and supported.

The end date of my second pregnancy sluggishly approaching, I went in to the doctor for a routine checkup. I walked out of the appointment in a complete daze, having learned that the baby was breech, the doctor wouldn't deliver breech babies, and an appointment for a C-section having been scheduled.

I called my mom both sobbing and terrified. In true motherly fashion, she talked me off the ledge, reminding me that a healthy baby was a healthy baby, no matter how he made his entrance into the world, and it was going to be ok as long as I didn't get into a wreck on the way home due to hysterics. I calmed down, agreed with her, and got a hold of myself.

A week or so later, I went to the mailbox and discovered an envelope from the folks at the Miraculous Medal place. Overcome with embarrassment that I'd given them my real name and address, I opened the package. Inside was another envelope, with the words "Blessed Objects Inside" printed in blue ink, for all the world to see. I opened it, and held the oval piece of cheap medal in the palm of my hand for a long while. It was so Catholic.

But right there, front and center, was Mary. The same Mary whose faith and trust I so admired and sought to catch hold of. Ok, Mary. I'll put this on, but only because I want to remind myself to stay as close to Jesus as you did. I'll put this on as a sign of my trust that you'll lead me to the place where I'm going to be closest to Him, ok?

And I put the thing on.

May 31st was the date of my C-section. My mom flew in. I was admitted to the hospital, and sat there miserably, surrounded by Ken, Lotus, my mom, and my mother and father-in-law while I was prepped for surgery. The doctor came in one last time to feel where the baby was, so he could judge where to make the incision. As his hands were on my belly, he shot me an odd look. He left. He came back, wheeling in a machine.

An ultrasound.

He quickly scanned my abdomen, flipped the machine off, and looked at me again.

"Why didn't you tell me that the baby had turned?" he said.

I stared at him, uncomprehending.

"What?" the best I could manage.

"The baby. It's turned. When did it happen?"

I kept staring at him. He grew the tiniest bit exasperated.

"You would have felt it. The baby's large. It would have been very painful. Painful enough for you to remember it."

I shook my head.

"The baby's…turned?" He nodded. "So I don't have to have a C-section?" He nodded again. "I can go home?!?!"

"You don't want to have the baby today?" He said, clearly confused by my reaction.

"Hell no! I want to go home!" I shouted, halfway into my clothes already.

And so we all went to Bob Evans and had breakfast instead of having a C-section.

I didn't immediately connect the incident with the promises of the Miraculous Medal, though I certainly considered it miraculous. I didn't connect my increasing admiration of Catholic theology or my growing attraction for the Eucharist with the promises of the Miraculous Medal, though they certainly were miraculous. It was as if Mary and Pope John-Paul II were some sort of background radiation, praying for me constantly, constantly.

My second child, Joaquin, was born 17 days after the C-section that wasn't.

One day, driving home from somewhere, the baby started fussing. I got into the backseat to soothe him as we pulled into the neighborhood, passing the turquoise roofed Queen of Peace Catholic Church.

Time slowed. I know this sounds ridiculous. But it did. It slowed, and everything around me felt different. The air felt different.

I looked at Ken's eyes, reflected in the rear view mirror.

I opened my mouth to speak.

"So. I think I want to become Catholic." I said. Out of no where. Apropos of absolutely freaking nothing.

Ken glanced at me in the mirror.

"Yeah. Ok." He said.

And we went home.

And eight months later both he and I stood in that turquoise roofed Catholic Church, and receiving Holy Eucharist for the first time, came home.

And there are great patches of missing story here, which I apologize for, because I probably won't come back to fill them in for the time being.

But I want to end here- 2,444 days after I said "I do" to the human love of my life, with me saying "I do" to the Divine love of my life.

________________________________

Cari Donaldson is a wife, mother of six, and resident crazy lady who lets her chickens sneak into the neighbor’s yard. She blogs at Catholic Exchange ( http://catholicexchange.com/category/blogs/clan-donaldson/), at her personal website (www.clan-donaldson.com) and spends vast swaths of time on Facebook (http://www.facebook.com/clan.donaldson).

If you have found this story helpful in your spiritual journey we hope you will consider sharing it. Have feedback or would like to share your story? Email us at

Evangelical Convert: Mindy Goorchenko

Mon, 01 Oct 2012 21:20:38 +0000

Mindy Goorchenko

Mindy Goorchenko is a Catholic convert, mother of five, and nurse in Alaska.

My journey toward Catholicism began when I attended a small, intimate prayer session led by a group of college students in our evangelistic Protestant congregation. The talented young leader guided us in prayer amidst electrifying contemporary worship music. A wave was rippling through our church~~one which may have been present since ever there were youth in a church congregation. These beloved kids invited us old folk to be a part of something deeper, more authentic~~to have a true encounter with the Holy Spirit.

My children were welcome and I brought them along, dubious not so much about my own fate in the area of deep and authentic worship (I knew that it was unlikely I’d give myself wholly to the Spirit while peeking out from one eye at them the entire time) but whether anyone else would be able to with my several young children present. Indeed, as I lifted my own arms in praise of God, my opportunistic six year old immediately reached up and tickled my armpits. This consequently distracted me, and I decided to take my dancing, whooping youngsters out of the room. We played for an hour in the gymnasium at the church~~to simply engage in our vocations called motherhood and childhood.

My heart laid itself bare. How often had I left my children behind so I could experience “authentic worship”? My tendencies bordered on escape at times~~desiring to have my authentic worship happen alone or with others who wouldn’t need me to make them food or change a diaper. Going to church with my children safely tucked away in Sunday school was a wonderful opportunity to get some time with God and~~be free. The freedom for which Christ set us free? (Gal. 5:1) Not exactly. Rather, freedom the way I defined it~~from the daily toil of my housework, chores, and child-rearing responsibilities. From my obligation to maintain a cheerful countenance with my children and husband and to keep my complaining~~and my long-suppressed yet award-winning and formidable skill called sarcasm~~in check.

In short, I had fallen into a mindset that God was there to entertain me, and as my church was also very entertaining, this mindset found a place to flourish each Sunday. I began to doubt whether the answers to my spiritual life would be found so clearly on my own terms~~wrapped up in the heights of a formulated Pentecostal-like experience alongside the rest of the “in-group,” as Henri Nouwen put it. Nor would I find it on the outskirts of my “ordinary” life as a mother and wife.

I began to pray to God in the gym that night, while my children leaped around me like wild banshees, to change my heart. I prayed that I would be able to find Him right there, everyday, alongside those precious charges~~and not just when they were well-behaved. I prayed that I would find Him and love Him through the many small and repetitive acts of my day. I declined to attend the next event and determined to stay at home and find God there instead of falling into that emotional bliss that occurs so effortlessly in the presence of great music and pretending like that was me being close to God.

I don’t want to downplay the reality of the Pentecost~~it did happen, after all, that the Holy Spirit rested upon God’s people, a “violent wind” with “tongues of fire,” rendering them able to speak in tongues and heal people. Nor do I want to be lumped in the category of those who said at the time, “They have had too much wine.” (Acts 2:2, 2:3, 2:13) My experiences with the Holy Spirit have not always been tame and quiet, and I have experienced sudden healings, like deep and undeniable injections of love, which have left me capable of nothing but intense and joyful weeping. My escapist attitude at this event was not the default position of everyone there, I’m sure. Rather, I was questioning seriously whether this “style” of worship, if you will, was the way God was calling me to be with Him at that time.

From that point forward, I began to experience my worship time in our church as emptier and emptier each Sunday. I longed for quietude, to be on my knees in reverence before the Lord, to have silence in which to pray and hear His voice, yet our church was so loud. By the time a space would occur in which to pray, it would be gone again and we would be flooded with the terrific sounds of the band members. I connected my former enjoyment at church with the types of emotions I would have at a musical concert, when everyone experiences emotional communion with one another because of the common appreciation for the song. Yet this was as far away from “authentic” as I could be at the time. The very aspects of our church which had excited us as beginning church-goers were becoming less and less attractive, even while we still enjoyed it on one level.

My desire to kneel received a brief response from God: Catholics kneel.

My response was equally brief, and accompanied by a raised eyebrow. Seriously, God?

I acknowledged there were certainly places to kneel in a Catholic Church, as well as the custom of genuflecting. Each pew has a bench that folds down where one can kneel before the crucifix. I thought that was a little bit strange, kneeling before the crucifix, although it was a hope of mine that I would have something other than a screen with words and graphics on it before me during our church services. If nothing else, it could symbolize Jesus for me and I might be able to render my heart more humble and reverent before the Lord. But just for the record, God, there is no way I’m becoming Catholic. We have a good thing going here. Strong friendships, intelligent and engaging pastors, awesome music. The kids are happy. My own reversal on my dissatisfaction as I pondered the seriousness and reverence of the Catholic environment amused me.

Catholics, as every committed Protestant knows, don’t have it right exactly. They’re too serious, too boring, too routine-oriented. Everything is the same each Sunday. The crucifix hangs down from the front of the church as though that were the final word in the story of redemption. What about the resurrection? What about the Holy Spirit? What about all those repetitive prayers, prayers to the saints and Mary? We are saved by faith alone, and only by faith in Jesus, at that. It shouldn’t take a full year or two to join a religious faith, and it’s rude to deny Communion in the meantime. The priests have no idea what “real” life is like (marriage, sex, and all that messy stuff) and the Pope thinks he’s God. All these protests ran through my head as I opted to attend a midweek Mass at my husband's encouragement. He was raised Catholic and knew that Mass was celebrated every day.

I picked a Wednesday Mass. I showed up. I felt bored. I didn’t understand it. I didn’t know what to say when or how to respond. I didn’t know anybody. The echo was dreadful and I couldn’t hear very well (I have hearing problems anyway). I left halfway through and determined that there was no way I was Catholic or ever going to be Catholic. I let my husband know that, in spite of the many conversations I had had with him while sharing my struggles about our church, I felt certain I was not Catholic and was quite happy to stay at our Protestant church where life was easier, the acoustics better, and the prayer more spontaneous. Deep down, I felt scared that this strange, new life was actually God’s will for me when the current one had been so entertaining and comfortable.

In spite of my fervent intentions, this failed first attempt at Mass did not deter the inner desire, which grew stronger every day. I believed God was calling me to the Holy Catholic Church, and my readings and prayer convinced me that this universal Church was God's desire for Christians. I began to pray daily that God would change my husband’s heart~~he still wasn't entirely on board with my desire to become Catholic and had a lot of reconciliation to do with the Church he had left as a teenager. I gave myself wholly to the prospect that I would convert as soon as he wanted to, God willing. While he agreed with me about all of my concerns with our Protestant church at the time, he didn’t have a compelling interest to return to the church of his childhood that I could see. Yet underneath the surface, God was also acting on his heart to turn it back in that direction. This was a huge grace.

I started to think of myself as a closet Catholic. A friend supplied me with books about the Church, as Catholics did all sorts of downright strange things that I didn’t entirely understand. They prayed to the saints and Mary. They baptized infants. They prayed for the dead. Many of these “strange things” began to make perfect sense, as though my perspective was being systematically changed. My readings confirmed my new understanding rather than the other way around, and my husband and I would have long discussions and pray about it.

But one doctrine, the most audacious of them all, had already been drawing me closer to Catholicism from the time I first learned about it years before, and I was just now beginning to recognize my longing. Transubstantiation pertains to the Eucharist, more commonly known as communion—the eating of bread and drinking of wine in remembrance of Jesus. I remember our initial church service at our Protestant church—my very first as a Christian. “When’s communion?” I whispered to my husband. I learned that this would occur once a month during Sunday services. It involved standing in a circle with other believers and eating a piece of bread dipped in juice. I paid close attention to this monthly event. Eating the bread and juice seemed to serve as symbols, which imparted to us a tiny understanding of what communion in Jesus Christ means. Yet this dissatisfied me from the first time I participated.

A major doctrinal issue between Catholics and Protestants is this belief in transubstantiation. Rather than a symbol, transubstantiation teaches that the consecrated bread and wine during Mass become the Body, Blood, Soul, and Divinity of Jesus Christ in actuality. Catholics celebrate this at every Mass and it is professed to be the “sum and summary” of the faith (Catechism 1327). The doctrine has divided Christians since the very time it was instituted. In John’s account of the gospel, after Jesus fed five thousand people with five loaves of bread, He stated,

Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up at the last day. For my flesh is real food and my blood is real drink. Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood remains in me, and I in him… On hearing it, many of his disciples said, "This is a hard teaching. Who can accept it?"

~~John 6:54-56, 60

Simultaneously, many Jews were arguing “sharply among themselves, [asking] ‘How can this man give us his flesh to eat?’” (John 6:52) Jesus went on to ask them, “Does this offend you? ...The words I have spoken to you are spirit and they are life.” From that point on, many disciples turned their backs and ceased to follow Him~~hardly the response of those understanding His words to be purely symbolic. I started to see how the Catholic Church holds up the words of Jesus Christ~~the Word of God~~as the Living Truth, the very means by which our redemption occurs in an ever-present and abiding way.

Within a short time of committing in my heart to conversion while hoping to receive my husband’s blessing, he too began to acknowledge more honestly the emptiness that had come to characterize our worship time. The pain of being out of communion with the Lord was too great to make up for the many positive aspects of that church. It no longer mattered to us that the children were so comfortable and that we had strong friendships. The reality was that it had been a long time since we had felt able to worship God there in a meaningful way.

I wept tears onto the floor at the first Mass I attended as a believer~~to be witness to my Savior’s physical presence in my midst finally, face to face. What wonderment to realize I am not genuflecting or kneeling before a wooden model of the crucifix~~it is the true Bread of Life within the Tabernacle Who deserves our reverence and praise. Participating in Perpetual Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament has been intensely fruitful and my love for Him and relationship with Him has been growing the most during those quiet times of sitting in His presence. I have marveled along the way at how I can believe that He is actually there in the Sacrament~~it defies reason~~and His answer is so simple~~“My Word is true.” It is the gift of faith. He is always with us.

To learn more about Mindy and her ongoing journey in the Catholic Church please visit her blog The Devout Life.

If you have found this story helpful in your spiritual journey we hope you will consider sharing it. Have feedback or would like to share your story? Email us at

Lutheran Convert: Ron Doub

Mon, 03 Sep 2012 23:40:08 +0000

Ron Doub

Ron Doub was a life-long Lutheran but after 15 years of trying to convert his Catholic wife to Lutheranism, the tables got turned. Now Ron, a former computer-industry professional, evangelizes the faithful organizing parish pilgrimages to Catholic shrines in the US and throughout the world. In addition to his pilgrimage ministry, Ron also promotes Lighthouse Catholic Media CDs and the EWTN Media Missionary program in parishes throughout the Archdiocese of Baltimore. He is also a member at both the Legion of Mary and a Catholic men’s group at St. Mary Catholic Church in Hagerstown, Maryland.

Why Am I Catholic? Well, it was never my intention but I always tell people that the Holy Spirit has a great sense of humor and I’m living proof! Here’s my story!

PART I – A LUTHERAN’S JOURNEY TO THE CHURCH

I was born and raised in a wonderful Lutheran (ELCA) family in Williamsport, Maryland, a small town in western Maryland. My parents were very active in the Lutheran church teaching Sunday school, confirmation, vacation bible school and more. In fact after my father’s death, my mother went to Gettysburg Lutheran Seminary and was ordained a Lutheran pastor in 1985.

I was also very active in the Lutheran church throughout my high school years, which culminated in me being confirmed and becoming the president of the church youth group, the Luther League, for two years.

During college and my young adulthood years, although I still considered myself a Lutheran, I didn’t attend church regularly; my faith took a low priority in my life. Enter my wife-to-be Theresa, a cradle but, at the time, a non-practicing Roman Catholic. We were married in the Lutheran church. For the next few years we attended a small mission Lutheran church in the area, but my wife had already begun her return to her Roman Catholic roots. Shortly before our first child was born I reluctantly agreed to have our marriage blessed in the Catholic Church so she could return to the sacraments. However, when our son William was born he was baptized in the Lutheran church.

It was a similar story with my son William. He attended church and Sunday school with me until he was seven years old. But my wife and I also decided it would be best to send him to the local Catholic elementary school because we wanted the best education for him. Then when he was in the 2nd grade he informed my wife and I that he wanted to receive First Holy Communion and join the Catholic Church.

So, I was 0-for-2! Both my wife and son had chosen the Catholic faith. But I knew I would never be Catholic, I was Lutheran through and through…famous last words!

This is where EWTN entered my life. My wife would watch EWTN from time to time and initially I would usually leave the room when she switched it on. But then I started to listen to the shows and actually started to enjoy them, though I would never admit this to my wife! EWTN cleared up many misconceptions and misunderstandings I had about the Catholic faith, and it got to the point where Mother Angelica, Dr. Scott Hahn, Marcus Grodi and other EWTN personalities were becoming my favorite TV stars.

However, I was still attending my local Lutheran church during this period of time (late 1990’s) and was very involved with the congregation. I was Superintendent of the Sunday school, ran vacation bible school for many summers, and was active on the Church Council. But a few times a year I would attend Mass with my wife and son and some miraculous things started to happen. Sporadically during the Mass I would become overwhelmed with joy! And it was never at the same point in the Mass. One time it was during a hymn, another time a prayer, another time at the consecration, another during a homily. Initially I dismissed the experiences but soon I had to admit that: a) I had never had an experience like this in a Lutheran service and b) the Holy Spirit was trying to tell me something!

This caused me to delve even deeper into the Catholic faith through EWTN and other materials. One resource was a Catholic bookstore that was close to my work office. I’d spend my lunch hour a few days a week researching the faith. I’ll never forget one day reading Tim Drake’s ‘ There We Stood, Here We Stand’ book of Lutheran-converts with tears in my eyes. I couldn’t put in down. I purchased the book and finished it that evening. Every story drew me closer and closer to the Catholic faith.

During my research, I discovered the Real Presence, Mary and the Saints, the Rosary and the Divine Mercy Chaplet and all my Catholic objections were melting away. However, I didn’t tell anyone about my journey, not even my wife.

In the spring of 2002 I was to the point where I knew “spiritually” (through my revelations in the Mass) and “intellectually” (through my research of the Church) that I was “Catholic”. However, even though my wife and son were both Catholic, most of my family was Lutheran and of course my mother was a Lutheran minister. The “social” consequences of telling my family and church friends that I was converting to the Catholic faith “scared me to death”.

Then one evening my son informed me and my wife that he wanted to start a Rosary prayer group at his Catholic middle school. When we asked him why, he simply stated, “He knew that God wanted him to do this.” My wife and I were both pleased but shocked! Our son was a great kid, but generally a very low-key boy who avoided the limelight. He understood that a boy starting a Rosary group for 7th and 8th graders would not be regarded as a very “cool” thing to do among his peers, but yet he felt he had to “answer the call”.

But soon the pride I felt for my son’s courageous choice dissolved into shame for my predicament. My 12- year- old son was willing to face ridicule for proclaiming his faith, yet I was afraid to profess the faith that I knew in my heart was the truth! I needed a plan to hurdle my “social” impediment to the Catholic faith. My term on the Church Council at my Lutheran church expired at the end of 2002, but as the spring of 2003 approached I was still reluctant to take my “leap of faith”.

Then one day, out of the blue, I received a letter from Sr. Jude Cianfrogna, the Pastoral Associate at my wife and son’s parish. The letter was an invitation to RCIA! Once again, in a not too subtle way, the Holy Spirit was trying to tell me something. The letter sat on my desk for a month but finally I told my wife of my journey. She couldn’t believe it!! The Lutheran was coming home! I also told my mother and even though we agreed to disagree on some points of theology, she was happy for my new found religious fervor.

So after a year, I finally followed my son’s example and “answered the call”. I enrolled in the RCIA program at Sacred Heart, Glyndon parish and entered the Church at the 2004 Easter Vigil. It was glorious evening I will never forget! And neither will I forget my son’s faith example that moved the Holy Spirit in me.

By the way, my son started his Rosary group with few other kids and he led the group for two years until he graduated to high school. The group grew to over 40 children under his leadership and now ten years later the group he named “Beads of Strength” still exists and prays the Rosary every week.

PART II – THE JOURNEY CONTINUES

After an incredible spiritual journey into the Church, I thought things would settle down for a while but the Holy Spirit wasn’t done with me yet. A few months later in 2004, I was at a Dr. Scott Hahn talk and I happened to pick up a flyer about an upcoming Italy pilgrimage with Dr. Hahn. At first I didn’t think much about actually going on the pilgrimage, but the more my wife and I discussed it we finally decided it would be a great way to ‘celebrate’ my entry into the Church. So in June 2005, my wife, son and I went on a pilgrimage to Rome and Assisi with Dr. Hahn. Having never been on a pilgrimage before I thought it would be like a normal vacation with a few church visits added throughout…it was so much more. The entire pilgrimage was glorious! All the churches were glorious, all the sights were glorious, Dr. Hahn and all the speakers were glorious, everything exceeded expectation, but the things that really ‘blew me away’ were that the ultimate spiritual high points of the pilgrimage: the Mass, prayer and fellowship! It was a life-changing experience and set in motion an amazing series of events.

A few months later, a work friend of mine lost his battle with cancer and I attended the funeral at St. Joseph Monastery Parish in Baltimore. I had ever heard of or been to the church before, but when I walked into the sanctuary I was overwhelmed by its beauty. The thought hit me, ”More Catholics need to see and worship in the beautiful and historical churches we have in the Baltimore area.” Of course many thoughts have popped in and out of my head over the years but this one would linger.

One evening in the fall of 2005, I was reflecting on our Italy pilgrimage and decided to research other pilgrimage offerings of the company that had arranged Dr. Hahn’s pilgrimage. The company was Wendt Touring in Steubenville, Ohio, and I knew nothing about them other than they had arranged the wonderful pilgrimage my family had enjoyed a few months earlier. Well, low and behold, I found them on the internet and discovered that they not only offered European pilgrimages, but also offered many pilgrimages to US shrines and churches including shrines and churches throughout Baltimore and Maryland! I bookmarked the site, looking forward to a future pilgrimage. Little did I know just how many pilgrimages would be in my future.

As the end of 2005 approached, we got hit with a bombshell when the computer company where I worked for over 20 years had massive layoffs, which included me. In the subsequent job search, a crazy idea occurred to me: I knew that Wendt Touring organized group pilgrimages primarily with parishes in western Pennsylvania and Ohio…would they want to expand to the Baltimore/Washington area? Well after many phone calls and lots of prayer I started the Wendt Touring office in Maryland. And since November 2006 I have organized nearly 100 pilgrimages, escorting most of them to Catholic shrines and churches in the US and abroad. I’m most proud of the fact that our pilgrimages have made over 100 visits to churches and shrines in Maryland, DC & Philadelphia, donating over $10,000 to these historical places of worship! And I can honestly say that - more Catholics HAVE seen and worshiped in the historical and beautiful churches in Baltimore – and throughout the world!

To learn more about Ron Doub and pilgrimages offered by Wendt Touring, Inc you can contact Ron Doub at 877.222.1849 or via email at . Wendt Touring is on the web at www.WendtTouring.com.

If you have found this story helpful in your spiritual journey we hope you will consider sharing it. Have feedback or would like to share your story? Email us at

Evangelical Convert: Renée Lin

Sun, 12 Aug 2012 00:25:34 +0000

Renée Lin

Renée Lin joined the Catholic Church in 2003 after a lifetime in Evangelical Protestant. Renée currently works in research at a medical practice in central Virginia.

“The Bible says it…. I believe it…. that settles it!”

If Thomas Road Baptist Church had an unofficial mantra back in the 1990s, that probably would have been it. Dr. Jerry Falwell was fond of saying that, and I enjoyed hearing it. I took the Bible seriously, very seriously, and if Scripture made a pronouncement on an issue, it seemed only reasonable to me to take those verses as literally as possible and to act upon them. If a Christian couldn’t base his life on the Word of God, then what else was there?

One Sunday morning when Dr. Falwell proclaimed that “everything we believe and do here at Thomas Road comes straight from Scripture,” I took that seriously, too. Everything we believe and do…. Everything?

My mind began to wander as some obvious exceptions came to mind. Asking people to receive Jesus Christ into their heart as their personal Lord and Savior? I knew that Peter and Paul certainly had never read someone the “Four Spiritual Laws” and invited them to ask Jesus into their heart as their personal Lord and Savior. “Repent and be baptized” was actually the approach taken by the apostles.

There were other discrepancies. Altar calls – we had one every Sunday. I really couldn’t imagine a first-century altar call . Sunday school? Unheard of in Bible times as far as I knew.

Not that I felt that this was important. The practice of asking someone to receive Jesus as their personal Lord and Savior was simply our way of helping the modern-day, semi-pagan, self-enthralled culture understand that one’s relationship with God must be personal – nothing wrong with that. Certainly I could find nothing sinister in the Baptist practices of altar calls or Sunday School. But I knew of at least one deeply held belief that I could not square with Scripture – the belief that children go to Heaven if they die below the age of reason. I could find no verse in Scripture that taught this doctrine, yet it was the conviction of every Christian I knew, and I believed it myself.

“Everything we believe and do here at Thomas Road comes straight from Scripture….” What I came away with that day was a new-found understanding of our Evangelical outlook on our faith. We at Thomas Road were certain, despite the lack of any objective evidence, that our beliefs and practices all came straight from Scripture….

On the Richter scale of my soul, this incident was a mere 1.8. But there had been other, more impressive tremors in the past, most notably when I was teaching overseas. In the mid 1980s I taught English as a second language at a Christian college in Taiwan, and was an honorary member of the Taiwan Missionary Fellowship (honorary in that I had not been sent by a missionary organization, yet was employed at a Christian school). I loved my job, I loved my students, and I loved my fellow teachers. However, I was not interested in leading Bible studies as all my colleagues were doing, the reason being that I had no formal training in theology, and to me the Bible was not an easy book to understand. I knew that different Christians understood various passages to mean different things. I really didn’t want to take the responsibility of possibly teaching error to unsuspecting students.

A small group of students finally talked me into holding a weekly Bible study on the book of Acts. I figured I couldn’t stray too far from the orthodox path in a book which basically chronicles the beginnings of the Christian church. I was also encouraged by the fact that the school library boasted three or four massive theological commentaries. If I started to get in trouble, I reasoned, I could read what the experts had to say. I was determined not to lead the students astray.

And we were fine, as long as we stayed in the book of Acts. Unfortunately, we all enjoyed the Bible study so much that we decided to hold a second one. I chose the book of 2 Corinthians for that study, a personal favorite, beginning as it does with Paul’s poignant description of the comfort he received from “the God of all comfort.” Studying that first chapter of 2 Corinthians, we all became enthusiastic about learning more on the topic of suffering. We looked up other New Testament verses that deal with this subject. Eventually we came to Colossians 1:24:

^“ Now I rejoice in what I am suffering for you, and I fill up in my flesh what is still lacking in regard to Christ’s afflictions, for the sake of his body, which is the church. “

What???

I will never forget those faces staring at mine in perfect trust, waiting for me to elucidate that verse to them. I fill up in my flesh what is still lacking in regard to Christ’s afflictions? That verse appeared to be contradicting what I understood of orthodox theology. I told the students that I would have to look into the subject, and that I would get back to them.

I spent a lot of time in the school library trying to better understand that verse. Imagine my surprise when I realized that the Protestant theologians I was counting on to answer my question had questions themselves about this verse. No one gave me an answer. I knew and found reasonable that there are passages in Scripture that we don’t understand, but this verse seemed so straightforward. I fill up in my flesh what is still lacking in regard to Christ’s afflictions – there don’t seem to be too many ways to understand that. The problem was that it contradicted our Protestant theology. As a Protestant, you simply can’t say that when you suffer, you fill up in your flesh what is still lacking in regard to Christ’s afflictions. And yet, that’s what Paul said. I was baffled, and I eventually had to tell the students that I just couldn’t account for the theological implications of that verse. Another theological earthquake – 4.3 on my Richter scale.

I married while in Taiwan, and when my husband was accepted as a student at Liberty University, we moved to Virginia, joining Thomas Road Baptist Church. I had never been a Baptist before, having been raised Methodist, and then attending Pentecostal, non-denominational, Lutheran and Presbyterian churches over the years. But I liked the fact that Baptists were so bold about their faith, and I believed that all the Protestant denominations were merely different facets of the same beautiful gem of Christianity. When my husband and I had children, they were “dedicated to the Lord” at Thomas Road, and later attended the Christian school affiliated with the church.

It was in Lynchburg that I first encountered the Jehovah’s Witnesses. They came to our door telling us that we needed to reject conventional Christianity and embrace their belief system. Since I had previously read the Koran and the Book of Mormon in an effort to better understand and evangelize Muslims and Latter-Day Saints, I decided to engage the Witnesses. Two of them came to my house once a week for a year. They presented their beliefs to me, and I presented mine to them.

Understanding their belief that Jesus is not God, it seemed to me that if I could prove to these ladies from Scripture the doctrine of the Trinity, they would be forced to accept the truth of the Christian belief system. I bought The Doctrine of the Trinity by Dr. Harold Willmington, a Liberty professor who often spoke at Thomas Road. The book was full to bursting with verses proving that Almighty God was the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. I could not wait to present this information to the Witnesses.

To my surprise, the ladies sat patiently through my presentation as if biding their time. Then, it was their turn. The conversation went something like this:

JW #1: “Let’s read John 17:3, Renée. These are the words of Jesus: ‘Now this is eternal life: that they may know You, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom You have sent.’”

JW#2 (smiling): “The truth is right before your eyes. This is what the Bible teaches in a nutshell: There is only one true God. Jesus Christ is the one sent by the only true God – he himself is not God.”

Me (stammering): “I have never heard this verse explained that way before…..”

JW#2: “Well, let’s hurry on to John 8:17, where Jesus chides the Pharisees when they claim that he appears as his own witness and therefore his testimony is not valid. Jesus’ argument that his testimony is valid is based on the fact that there are two witnesses, ‘I am one who testifies for myself; my other witness is the Father, who sent me.’”

Me (clueless): “So what?”

JW#2: “So once again we see that Jesus and his Father are separate – therefore, Jesus cannot be God.”

Me: “Well, yes, no one says that Jesus and the Father are one and the same… I mean, that they are the same Person… – we believe that they are two Persons but both God!”

JW#1 (unperturbed): “Renée, can you explain John 20:17? Jesus is saying that he is returning ‘to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.’ How can Jesus talk about ‘his Father’ and ‘his God’ if he is God? And John 14: 1 – ‘Trust in God; trust also in me.’ That means Jehovah God and Jesus are two separate beings, right?”

Like rabbits out of a voluminous theological hat, the verses kept coming – 1 Timothy 5:21, 1 Timothy 2:5… verses that the Witnesses claim show that Jesus is not God. And 1 Timothy 1:17 topped it all off:

“Now to the King, eternal, immortal, invisible, the only God, be honor and glory for ever and ever. Amen.”

JW#1: “Renée, do you take that verse literally?”

Me: “Absolutely! How else could I take it?”

JW#1 (smiling broadly): “You’ve just proved that Jesus cannot be God! That verse tells us that God is eternal, immortal and invisible. Yet as we all know:

1. Jesus is not eternal – Proverbs 8:22 says concerning Jesus ‘Jehovah brought me forth as the first of his works!’ Colossians 1:15 tells us that Jesus is the ‘firstborn of all creation!’ In Hebrews 1:5 Jehovah God says to Jesus ‘Today I have become your Father!’ Revelation 3:14 calls Jesus ‘the beginning of the creation of God!’

2. Jesus is not immortal – We don’t have to list all the Bible verses that tell us that Jesus died! That means he was mortal!

3. Jesus is obviously not invisible – and yet the Bible tells us that no one can see God and live!

“So, Renée, according to I Timothy 1:17, which you say you agree with absolutely, there is only one God – and He is not Jesus!”

Me (in desperation resorting to verse-slinging): “1 John 5:7!”

JW#1: “Mark 10:18!”

Me: “Titus 2:13!”

JW#2: “John 14:28!”

Me: “John 10:30!”

JW#1: “1 Corinthians 8:6!”

Me: “Matthew 28:19!!”

JW#2: “1 Corinthians 11:3!!”

Me: “John 5:18!!!”

Both JWs in chorus: “Philippians 2:5-11!!!”

Fortunately, by this point it was time for the ladies to leave. I don’t know if they learned anything from that encounter, but I certainly did: While the case for the doctrine of the Trinity can certainly be made from Scripture, it cannot be proven from Scripture. The verses the Witnesses showed me sounded like a reasonable alternative viewpoint. I was horrified. The doctrine of the Trinity is the core belief of Christianity – it tells us who God is. How could it not be self-evident from Scripture alone?

7.9 on my theological Richter scale….

I providentially found a book called Jehovah’s Witnesses on Trial – The Testimony of the Early Church Fathers by Robert U. Finnerty. I had never read anything penned by a Christian in the centuries between the writing of the book of Revelation and the 95 Theses, but Dr. Finnerty advocated using the writings of these “church fathers” to witness to the Witnesses. His reasoning was that:

“… the Bible, which can be a challenge to understand, is easily misinterpreted by those who rend its parts out of context to ‘prove’ their doctrinal presuppositions. This approach has been raised to a fine art by the followers of Charles Russell…. The church fathers… make it clear that the deity of Christ was at the heart of the Christian faith, and their writings are more difficult to twist in support of erroneous theological formulations.”

I scurried to the bookstore to buy a copy of the Apostolic Fathers, and scoured the writings of Ignatius of Antioch (c. 107 A.D.) to find references to the deity of Christ. To my delight there were plenty of them, and I shared them all with the ladies when they returned the following week. Their printed materials instructed them that when Ignatius said “yes,” what he actually meant was “no,” and vice versa. It was around this time that we decided to discontinue our weekly meetings. To tell the truth, I had other fish to fry. My husband had left, and though we did not divorce, I was raising our two children alone with no family in the area.

One day while substitute-teaching, a sixth grader asked me what Catholics believe. My mind was a startling blank. I mumbled something about Catholics believing a lot of things that aren’t in the Bible, and how we mustn’t do that – everything we believe and do must come straight from Scripture. She seemed satisfied, but I wasn’t. Had she asked me about Muslims or Mormons or Jehovah’s Witnesses, I could have given her an earful. But I had never looked into Catholic beliefs. It had simply never come up.

Determined to remedy my knowledge deficit, I bought a book called Catholicism and Fundamentalism by a lawyer named Karl Keating. The author was Catholic, and that suited me fine; I like to hear it “from the horse’s mouth.” When I began reading his chapter on “The Holy Eucharist,” I could see that Mr. Keating was going to base his argument on John 6. I decided to read my Bible first and Keating’s explanation of the text second. It seemed to me that he would have to distort the text of John 6 to fit Catholic preconceptions, so I stuck with Scripture. I picked up my NIV, found John 6, and began to read it… over and over. This was of course not the first time I had read John 6; as an Evangelical I had read through the New Testament several times, but I was not finding what I thought I would find there. Jesus states in John 6 quite clearly that He expects us to eat His body and drink His blood. I knew the standard Protestant treatment of these verses (I had believed it all my life), but as I read the text I could not for the life of me see how anyone can claim that these verses should properly be taken figuratively rather than literally. Why not take Jesus at His word? After all, Jesus’ words are quite clear:

“I am the living bread which came down from heaven; if anyone eats of this bread, he will live forever; and the bread which I shall give for the life of the world is my flesh.’ The Jews then disputed among themselves, saying, ‘How can this man give us his flesh to eat?’ So Jesus said to them, ‘Truly, truly, I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of man and drink his blood, you have no life in you; he who eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up at the last day. For my flesh is food indeed, and my blood is drink indeed. He who eats my flesh and drinks my blood abides in me, and I in him. As the living Father sent me, and I live because of the Father, he who eats me will live because of me. This is the bread which came down from heaven, not such as the fathers ate and died; he who eats this bread will live forever.’

Protestants would have us believe that the “eating and drinking” in these verses means “believing in Jesus” or “feasting on the Word of God,” but at that moment that approach to John 6 struck me as ludicrously weak. It occurred to me that we Evangelicals might be doing exactly what we accused more liberal denominations of doing: reserving the right to take figuratively the parts of the Bible that we don’t believe….

This earthquake was off the scale. And returning to Keating’s book, I was in for an aftershock. Keating pointed out that the earliest Christians took John 6 literally, producing as proof a quote from Ignatius of Antioch, the same Ignatius I had begged the Jehovah’s Witnesses to accept as a reliable witness to the beliefs of the first Christians. In this quote Ignatius is talking about the Docetist heresy, the folks who believed Jesus didn’t really die in the flesh on the cross. He writes:

“Now note well those who hold heretical opinions about the grace of Jesus Christ which came to us; note how contrary they are to the mind of God…. They abstain from the Eucharist and from prayer, because they refuse to acknowledge that the Eucharist is the flesh of our Savior Jesus Christ, which suffered for our sins and which the Father by his goodness raised up.”

That was all it took. I looked up from my reading and said to myself, “I have to start attending a church that takes John 6 literally.” The Bible says it - I believe it – that settles it.

Actually, it wasn’t as easy as that. It took months before I was brave enough to cross the threshold of a Catholic church, and months more before I got up the courage to enroll in RCIA. All the while I was studying, dissecting Catholic doctrine, comparing Protestant explanations of the “errors of Romanism” to the actual beliefs of the Catholic Church. I had done this before with Mormon beliefs and Jehovah’s Witness beliefs, and I had found the Protestant apologetic materials to be reliable guides. However, this time a disturbing trend emerged. The Protestant argument against a particular Catholic teaching would seem rock-solid at first glance. But when I persevered in my investigation, the Catholic answer to the argument would make a great deal of sense, and many times the Protestant argument would fall apart completely. I began to see that our Protestant apologetics against Catholicism were based on a strategy of “downplaying, denigrating, distorting, and denying” key portions of the Catholic argument.

- We downplayed the importance of the writings of the early Christians. Since no Church Father agreed with us Baptists on the issues of justification by faith alone, sola Scriptura, once-saved/always saved, baptism, the Eucharist, church governance, etc., we ignored their writings. We downplayed Protestant disunity, pretending that we agreed on “the essentials.” We downplayed the importance of the question of the origin of the canon of Scripture, a question that can only be answered by recognizing the authority of the Church which discerned the canon.

- We denigrated the holiness of Catholic saints. While rightly proclaiming the fact that all of history is “His-story,” we were willfully blind to the “His-toric” importance of the lives of John Paul II and Mother Teresa, just to mention two examples. Although I have known several godly Protestants (most especially when I was associated with the Taiwan Missionary Fellowship), I know of no 20^th- century Protestant examples of the saints that the Catholic faith produces. We also denigrated Protestant converts to Catholicism, routinely implying that no one without an ulterior motive would leave the “truth” of Evangelicalism for the errors of Rome.

- We distorted Catholic beliefs when we presented them, so that they would be easier to refute. The classic examples, of course, are the Protestant arguments against “Mary worship,” or “works-righteousness.” By raging against two Catholic doctrines which do not actually exist, Protestant apologists are able to turn their readers against a hypothetical evil, rather than addressing and refuting actual Catholic teaching.

- We denied the development of doctrine, the key to understanding why the doctrine of the Trinity cannot be proved from Scripture and yet is the valid interpretation of the teaching of the Apostles. As a Protestant, I was relying on development of doctrine as the basis of my Trinitarian beliefs, and yet I ignorantly claimed that “the Bible alone” was the source of what I believed and practiced.

I sadly came to realize that these “four D’s” added up to a fifth – deceit. We were deceiving others in our arguments against the Church that Jesus established, and sadly, we had deceived ourselves as well.

Most Protestants investigating the Church never persevere past the initial Protestant apologetic arguments, taking them at face value and assuming that there is no Catholic answer to Protestant objections. Protestants claim the high ground by advertising their belief system as “faithful to Scripture” and condemning Catholic theology as “unbiblical.” Yet so very many Bible verses are “explained away” in the Protestant system rather than letting them say what they actually say, among them 1 Timothy 3:15 and 2 Timothy 3:16 (we grossly exaggerated the latter verse to support “Scripture alone,” and utterly ignored the former), John 17:20-21, Ephesians 4:11-13, 1 Corinthians 1:11-13, Luke 11:2, John 6: 25-70, Luke 22: 19, 1 Corinthians 11: 27-29, James 2:24, Philippians 2: 12-13 (if I had a dime for every time we explained this passage away), Galatians 5:4-6, 1 Corinthians 13:13, Ephesians 2: 8-10, Matthew 25:31-46, John 15:1-10, II Timothy 2:19, Hebrews 5:9, Hebrews 12:14, John 15: 1-5, 1 John 2:6, 1 John 3:10, 1 John 5:13 (how we twisted that verse!), Revelation 2-3 (the NIV actually translates “works” as “deeds” here, in order to avoid the obvious implication of the necessity of works), Revelation 19:6-8, Romans 2: 12-16, Matthew 10:22, Hebrews 6:4-6, Colossians 1:24 (TRBC’s “Liberty Journal” published an article on suffering in response to a local tragedy, listing numerous New Testament verses with no mention made, of course, of Colossians 1:24 – it contradicts Protestant theology), Romans 11:22, Hebrews 3:14, Hebrews 10:26-27, Hebrews 13:17 (a nonsense verse in a Protestant context – we obeyed our leaders till we disagreed with them….), Matthew 16:13-19, II Kings 13:21, Acts 19:11-12 (I found this passage especially distasteful – it sounded so Catholic!), John 20:22-23, 2 Corinthians 5:17-21, 1 John 5:16-17, I Corinthians 11:2, 2 Thessalonians 2:15, 2 Timothy 1:13-14, John 3:5-8, John 3:22-23, Mark 16:15-16, Acts 2:38, Acts 22:16, Titus 3:4-7, 1 Peter 3:21, Luke 1:46-49, Genesis 1:28, Psalm 127:3-5, Matthew 19: 6-9, 1 Corinthians 7:10-11, Matthew 19:12, 1 Corinthians 7:32, Proverbs 3:5-6 (leaning on one’s own understanding was the basis for the formation of the Protestant denominations), Nehemiah 8:7-8, Zechariah 14: 20-21, and Acts 8:30-31. The Bible says it – I believe it – that settles it!

I was reconciled to the Church at the Easter Vigil of 2003, bringing my two children into the Church with me. They chose to continue attending their Baptist school, although we discussed that it might be hard for them when they identified themselves as Catholics. And sometimes it has been hard. My daughter has recently written about the joys and sorrows of being Catholic at a Baptist school in a guest blog at Sententias.org. One episode she did not recount was the time her high school teacher stopped her in the hallway to ask, “Shoshana, do you believe everything the Bible says?”

“Of course!” she answered.

“Then you’re a bad Catholic!” was his arch reply.

Funny, that’s the very reason her mom became Catholic. The Bible says it – I believe it – that settles it!

You can learn more about Renée and her journey in the Catholic faith on her blog Forget the Roads.

If you have found this story helpful in your spiritual journey we hope you will consider sharing it. Have feedback or would like to share your story? Email us at

Evangelical Convert: Jaymie Stuart Wolfe

Mon, 16 Jul 2012 23:44:22 +0000

Jaymie Stuart Wolfe

Jaymie Stuart Wolfe is a convert to the Catholic faith who entered the Church in 1983. Her apostolate, Loaves and Fishes, is dedicated to teaching, evangelism and prayer through word and song.

I was baptized Catholic, but raised, Confirmed and Communicated in the Episcopal Church because my parents had both been divorced and remarried. My mother and I attended a Billy Graham Crusade the summer before I entered the 6th grade. That event introduced us to a personal relationship with Jesus which led to our joining an Evangelical Free church with a choir, Bible studies, and a dynamic youth ministry. I graduated from a Catholic girls' High School. Then, I left home for college.

When I became a Roman Catholic, I became the unimaginable—at least what had been up until that point, unimaginable to me. There was no reason to make a drastic move like that. After all, I had Christ. I certainly didn't need anything else. Both faith and Scripture were in my back pocket. Aside from my ambitions and goals, Jesus was the focus of my life. In my teens, it was easy for me to believe that even my unquenchable drive for success, somehow, served Him. Freelancing faith seemed like the best of this world and the next. But a series of experiences over the course of five years added up to convince me otherwise, so much so, that on the Vigil of Easter in 1983, at St. Paul's Church, as a senior at Harvard, I came into full communion with the Roman Catholic Church.

When I look back at how that happened, I see a tremendous amount of orchestration that was not at all apparent to me at the time. Experiences that seemed quite disconnected from each other, were strung together by a Divine current of grace— running fast enough to carry me along, but beneath the surface of my consciousness enough to keep me blissfully unaware of where that stream was taking me. If I had even slightly suspected that I was swimming in the Tiber, I would have immediately stepped onto the banks and hightailed it into the woods. Rome was the antithesis of where I saw myself going. Catholic was the very last thing on earth I wanted to be.

Yet when I walked forward to receive Eucharist and Confirmation, I did so freely and with joy. Grace had led me all along. Grace unseen, but all-seeing. Grace to change my path, and even my identity. Grace to step out into the dark and stay there long enough to find that I was home. The struggle, in some respects, wasn't that interesting. I lost every battle I fought. What won out in the end was redirecting grace, almost manipulative, almost deceptive, desperately trying to convince—dare I say "seduce" me.

Coming into the Catholic Church was my unconditional surrender. It involved my waving my white baptismal gown, laying down my arms, and relinquishing my personal papacy. The experience of conversion felt as if I was allowing God to pull a fast one. Now, more than twenty-five years later, I can see His presence backstage in every scene of my life. These poems are my attempt to bring you into the wings with Him.

Mother Theresa

They made one of those PA system announcements at my Catholic girls' high school that Mother Theresa was coming to speak at the Catholic university down the street. I figured that maybe my mom and I could go and see what she was like.

None of the other girls seemed to care much,

maybe because it was before she won the Peace Prize, maybe because they were more concerned

with earrings, and nail polish,

and boys.

I think Mother Theresa was just another nun to them.

I wasn't sure what she was to me,

but I remembered the movie I saw about her work when I was nine or ten or so. They showed it at the Episcopal church I went to—

the one that was so very comfortable with the 60's;

the one that struggled through Services for Trial Use;

the one where I sang in the choir;

the one that had a "drop in;" (I was never really quite sure what a "drop in" was.) This was the church where a kid in Sunday School drew a picture of a cat with a mustache when we were told to draw a picture of God.

Anyway, the movie was called "Something Beautiful for God."

My mom remembered it too, and so we went to see Mother Theresa speak.

I can't remember a single word she said,

but I remember what I saw because it scared me.

Entering the auditorium was long line of men in academic robes. They wore their colors,

their stripes,

their anachronistic hats

with great solemnity.

Dignified music played

and dignified men processed in order of ascending honor.

Behind them all, completely obscured —almost invisible—

walked Mother Theresa, so small,

so plain,

so poor,

in sandals,

her hands folded in front of her,

her head bowed down as if to shelter herself from what preceded her.

Men of honor had gathered to honor her, But in her presence they seemed so empty, so false, so proud without cause.

Walking towards the stage,

it seemed as if she was the only one not somehow out of place. Real humility has that effect;

it shames the honorable;

it calls to the conscience;

it jars the achiever;

especially if you've never seen it before.

Everyone stood up.

My seat was on the center aisle.

As she approached my row my heart beat faster.

And as she passed by I couldn't stop myself

from stepping into the aisle to touch her hands.

When I looked into her face,

she smiled,

and I cried.

I dreamed about doing important things,

about being recognized,

and respected,

even famous.

She did little, menial, things;

and cared less about the things she did than about Whom she did them for. And while everyone

in that room called her "Mother,"

not one was really her child.

Pope John Paul

I'd been at college for less than a month.

I was living my dream,

at the top of the heap,

pretending I wasn't afraid to fail;

hoping I wasn't the one really bad mistake the admissions office had made the previous April.

The Pope, I heard, was coming to Boston— the young,

Polish,

multilingual Pope.

The two of us Protestants decided to go. Our Catholic roommate decided not to.

We imagined there would be thousands of people, that the T would be crowded,

that if we wanted to get a good vantage point, we'd have to get an early start,

especially since we were outsiders, non-Catholics,

schismatics,

maybe even heretics.

So we did something kind of strange:

we spent the night at the airport.

It was too cold to go to the Common overnight, maybe that was why we did it.

While the hours passed we talked a lot, about this Pope,

about whose Holy Father he was,

about the old divisions that separated us, that kept us apart from him and his.

We found a large piece of cardboard around the baggage claim, and begged a marker and tape from one of the ticket agents,

and noticed some long wooden sticks lying nearby. We decided to make a sign,

one that would make the Pope smile,

one that would tell them all why we had come. "Protestants for the Pope" it said.

We got there at the break of dawn,

early enough to set up camp on the grass right behind the rope that was the great divide

between the crowd and the chairs that were set up for people with some kind of ticket, or pass,

or arrangement.

It wasn't long until the ground filled in behind us,

behind our sign so that it looked as if

"Protestants for the Pope" was a sizable organization, even though it was just the two of us Freshmen.

All of those arriving crowds were Catholics, of course, at least the ones around us were.

They asked us about the sign.

They shared their blankets,

and their snacks,

and excitement.

They told us how happy they were that we had come.

We had to wait all day.

The people around us sang to pass the time, and we sang too,

because we knew their songs.

The Pope arrived and cheering voices rose from Boston Common like incense, like smoke

climbing to form the dark gray clouds that covered the sky.

Mass began,

and then

it started to rain.

This was not a normal rain.

It was icy cold,

and wind driven,

and rhythmically torrential.

Everyone took what cover they could find,

putting on those old fashioned rain hats that old ladies used to carry in their purses; huddling

under umbrellas that were turning inside out in the wind;

even sharing a garbage bag.

We just stood out in the rain,

because we were young;

because somehow it renewed us; because we wanted our sign to be seen.

When the Pope spoke the sun came out, and the rain stopped mid-air.

His voice echoed off the buildings;

and though he addressed tens of thousands, I felt like he was talking just to me.

I was too far back to see him at all,

but it was as if his eyes were on me;

like he and I were sitting in a room somewhere,

just talking, like a new acquaintance that doesn't feel new at all, but strangely,

inexplicably connected.

"Be not afraid," he said.

And even though I didn't think I was afraid of anything,

He said it again

and I took new courage.

Just before Communion

the sky opened

and rain came pouring down harder than before. The Lord's Prayer thundered on every tongue.

An army of priests waded into the crowd— past the people with tickets and chairs—

with mud staining their white robes; with mud splashed up to their knees; soaking, shivering,

carrying covered bowls filled with bread I knew I could not take—

Bread for Catholics,

not for me.

But I watched them come,

and come,

and people moving forward in the mud;

and thought

that no one would do this for a piece of bread, unless he was very, very, hungry;

unless, in fact, he was starving,

and it was the very last piece of bread on earth.

Our sign finally collapsed,

but more than a few news photographers had taken our picture with it during the day, before the rain,

before they had what they came for

and left.

We didn't talk much on the T. We were too wet,

too cold,

too amazed;

and it was hard to tell if the numbness I felt was from the rain or not.

We climbed up the stairs to the fourth floor,

and walked straight into the showers,

clothes and all.

I turned the hot water on full blast, knowing that no sprinkle could warm me, only total immersion.

Ec 10

I found the lecture hall and took my seat.

Ec 10, Introduction to Microeconomics.

I was the first one in my family to go to college, and it was my very first class.

It felt as if I was doing something historic.

The professor collected his notes and began to speak.

He spoke,

and spoke,

and cleared his throat, and spoke some more.

At first I heard the sound of pens upon paper,

the pages in notebooks being turned,

the rapid fire of terminology

being written in chalk on boards half cleared by old erasers. And my mind could not have been

further from economics, because in those sounds I heard a different Voice

lecturing on a different subject, and He was louder.

"This is what you've been doing on Sunday mornings." That is what I heard,

again,

and again,

resonating in my mind.

"You come with your text and your notebook and pen,

to your bible believing church,

your evangelical church,

where people ask what God is doing in your life,

and where people mask their pain with a smile.

And this is what you have been doing on Sunday mornings.

You come to class, to hear,

to be educated,

But not to worship,

to pray,

to be changed.

You come to master, and not to be Mastered." And in Ec 10 that day

I learned nothing about economics.

Much Study

Ancients,

moderns,

left and right,

black and white,

virtue,

value,

the noble lie told around a fire in a cave.

Man is a political animal

whose life is

poor,

nasty,

brutish,

but not short enough.

He is

a hunter in the morning,

a fisherman in the afternoon,

but always the critical critic

and so he smashes the mirror.

He gets what his free development demands

from every other "each"

who found himself at the edge of the horizon

with a totality of equipment he didn't know how to use. He awakens to find that he is choking on

a serpent, conscious long enough to wish

that Zarathustra would just

shut

up.

Historicism,

revisionism,

nature,

nurture

exegesis,

isogesis,

a weariness to the flesh.

Real intellectuals are skeptical.

Truly brilliant minds don't believe. There is a place where

Machiavelli and Montesquieu,

Plato and Rousseau,

Hegel and Homer,

and Buddha,

and Marx,

and Moses,

and Socrates,

and Jesus,

are indistinguishable;

A place where if there is a difference, I have lost my ability

to tell it.

Theory after theory,

all a conspiracy

to convince me that I didn't care. (But I did.)

Homeless Again

My evangelical church was too small for me, too narrow,

too conformist,

too uncomfortable with women.

And so I went back to another, bigger one I knew before,

one that was home to me as a child, one that had sacraments,

and liturgy,

and hymnals

instead of overhead projectors,

and even a few monks.

The priest there told me that sometimes a crisis in faith was just an indication that

your God was too small,

or your Me was too small.

That sounded good to me,

but when I went to him to ask

about how it was that some of our bishops didn't believe in the virgin birth;

or miracles;

or somehow thought that they could reconcile

priesthood with

active homosexuality;

he suggested to me

that underneath it all,

I was secretly a lesbian.

I knew I wasn't gay,

but in that conversation

I realized

that my Church

was still

too small.

Mass confusion

For no reason

my fiance's roommate invited me to Mass, and for no reason

I said I'd go.

I sat there mesmerized

for no reason,

by something I had seen enough of before to be able to dismiss. But for no reason

I could not dismiss the student Mass,

that Sunday night,

in the basement of the Church,

especially when,

for no reason,

the choir sang

One Bread, One Body

during communion,

and for no reason,

I broke down in tears

because I couldn't receive

what I didn't believe in at the time.

And it was the lack of a reason that confused me.

So when the priest announced a series of talks

called Basic Belief,

and said that this week's topic would be Eucharist,

I decided,

for no reason,

to go.

Setting them Straight

I knew my stuff,

and all this hocus-pocus

pie-in-the-sky

mystical mumbo-jumbo

wasn't something I could just let stand.

So when I went to hear what Catholics believed, I figured I would set them straight

on a few things,

anyway,

because you can't do it all in one fell swoop.

It takes time.

I had four years of religion at the Catholic girls' high school, and got mostly A's even though I wasn't Catholic,

probably because I wasn't Catholic,

because not being Catholic,

I knew more

than the other girls,

and even more than at least some of the nuns.

But listening closely to what The Church taught about Eucharist,

I was shocked.

In four years of religion at Catholic school

I had never heard what that priest was saying, and that made me mad.

It made me mad to think that all this time I had been deceived

by the evangelicals,

and the episcopals,

but even more by Catholics about what Catholics believed— or were supposed to.

It infuriated me to no end

that they had kept their truth

to themselves;

that they had found a way to keep me from finding out

what they really thought,

and taught,

and believed

when push came to shove.

And so,

when the priest was done,

I introduced myself,

protecting my Protestantism,

but confessing that I had been sorely misinformed about the Catholic Church;

and that after what he said,

I had to admit

that Catholics were Christians after all—

a kind I did not understand—

but thought

I ought

to make peace with.

He asked me how serious I was

about making peace,

and when I told him that I was serious indeed, he got out his appointment book,

and I got mine.

The Crossing

I went with the intention of making peace,

not finding it.

But when I sat down in that priest's office,

in the basement of the Catholic student center, I told him much more than I intended

about being homeless,

and not knowing if I could believe any more.

I confessed Plato,

and Machiavelli,

and Nietzsche,

and how I had come to the notion

that every myth and philosophy

was interchangeable.

But what I meant was that none of them no longer fit the ever widening canyon inside me.

I told him how I had wandered through denominations; how I hadn't found a real home in any of them,

at least not one that lasted long

after I revealed

my true self.

I felt as if I was at the edge of an abyss,

on the verge of unresistable atheism.

I could no longer simply believe.

I could not leap across the gulf that stretched wider with every question, nor could I go back the way I came.

Without saying a word,

the priest got up, took a crucifix down from the wall, and put it on the table between us. Looking into my eyes,

he leaned forward,

and asked me to tell him

that the cross didn't mean more to me than Plato, or Homer,

or all the philosophers I had read

until I could no longer think

or even breathe.

Finding that I could not do so, I made the crossing;

and sailing on tears,

landed safely on the other side of the abyss

that never

was.

Lumen Gentium

The priest asked if I was willing to read for the sake of the peace I said I wanted with the

Catholic church.

I took it without hesitation,

with no secret agenda,

without intentions other than what I had stated.

The book he handed me was the Vatican II documents. He told me to read Lumen Gentium,

the Dogmatic Constitution on the Church.

So when I got to my room, I opened it

instead of my other work; instead of Latin,

or Greek,

or political philosophy.

I thought I could afford forty pages of diversion,

But I didn't really know what those forty pages would cost me.

The words I read were startlingly familiar. They rang with the same Truth

I had encountered only when reading the Bible. The Mystery of the Church,

The People of God,

The Universal Call to Holiness;

every word flowed from Scripture

interpreted as I had never seen it:

fresh,

whole,

deeper than deep.

I inhaled each successive line with excitement,

and joy.

And when I finished the final page, I closed the book,

not quite sure

what to do next,

because

I had not found

a single thing

that I could argue with,

or look down upon,

or shrug my shoulders about.

Everything was plain,

and clear,

but the plainest

and clearest thing was this: I was no longer

a Protestant.

And when I went back to the priest I told him so,

and to my surprise

I asked him what I had to do

to become

what I already was: a Roman Catholic.

Epilogue

I never knew where I was until I had moved beyond it. I never intended to be what I was becoming.

I never suspected that the mountain had become a stair, and that I had been climbing step by step

for years

before I found myself above the tree line, above the clouds,

where I could finally see

where I had been going

all along.

And now that I am here,

I don't mind saying I was tricked. I had to be,

or still I would not know

the Bread that feeds

and leads me

home;

or the Grace

that will not let me stay

alone.

Jaymie Stuart Wolfe is an author, singer-songwriter, and lay evangelist. A 1983 convert to the Catholic faith, Jaymie is a wife and mother of eight. She has written a biweekly column in America's oldest Catholic newspaper, The Pilot, since 1995. Experienced in parish faith formation and music ministry, Jaymie currently serves full-time as a Children's Editor at Pauline Books & Media. Find Jaymie on Facebook, or learn more about her ministry at www.loavesandfishesministry.net.

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Baptist Convert: Brett Farley

Mon, 11 Jun 2012 22:42:51 +0000

Brett Farley

Brett grew up and was baptized in a traditional First Southern Baptist Church in the Heartland. But a chance invitation from his grandmother to Christmas Mass 1998 sparked a 13-year struggle and journey that resulted in his acceptance, along with wife of 15 years, Jessica, into full communion with the Church on the Feast of Christ the King, 2011. Brett is active in the parish of St. Monica in Edmond, Oklahoma, and serves in various conservative Catholic organizations and institutions.

Approaching the Water

I was born and raised in a more or less Southern Baptist home. As a young boy my first recollections of church were at First Southern Baptist of Guthrie, OK, where I ultimately accepted Christ and was baptized at the age of nine. From there we moved to Clinton, OK, where we were very active at FSB-Clinton and I was among the 'Youth Leadership Council'. It was there that I had my first taste of legalism as I thought my debt to God for his mercy was to lead a holy life...and to impose holiness on those around me.

My family later moved back to Edmond, OK, in my eighth-grade year, but we did not immediately re-engage in a church. It was not until my college years that my parents rejoined the Community Baptist Church after it had split off from the FSB Guthrie due to internal conflicts. But that was well after I had met Jessica (my bride-to-be), and I was already in deep introspection about faith along with my involvement in Campus Crusade for Christ. Shortly thereafter in the winter of 1998, I learned my paternal grandmother had converted to Catholicism. I was livid.

I remember very vividly attending the Christmas Mass at St. Mary's in Guthrie at her request, but I did so very begrudgingly because my father had implored us to attend out of respect for my grandmother. I left the Mass spewing criticisms and vituperation all the way from the front door to the car. I was so negative and vocal that my father had to call me down for it. Now, mind you, I had never taken the time to actually study Catholic doctrine or to learn specifically what it was my grandmother believed. But we will get to that later.

At some point in the following year I learned that Ambassador Alan Keyes, whom I adored and still do, was devoutly Roman Catholic. It did not shake my honor and respect for him as a moral crusader and guiding light in America, but it left me really questioning things. In the summer of 1999, we moved to Virginia Beach to begin my graduate studies at Regent University. As God would have it, I immediately jumped into the political fray in volunteering for the reelection campaign for then-Del. Bob McDonnell (now Governor of VA), also a graduate of Regent University Law School. I soon learned while on his campaign that he was Catholic as well. It was then that the question sparked: "How is it that these awesome men of God and very well-educated conservative stalwarts could belong to the Catholic Church? How could they be so right on everything else, but so wrong on the faith?" This boggled my mind.

But as fate would have it, it did not stop there. The commencement speaker at my graduation from Regent was none other than Father John Richard Neuhaus. I was familiar with him and his brilliant scholarship. And it struck me as odd that Pat Robertson, a strident Evangelical Protestant, would ask an eminent Catholic–and a man of the cloth no less–to speak at my graduation. What a conundrum. My admiration for Neuhaus grew because his leadership in the midst of the moral vacuum of America was well known among us at the School of Government.

What's more, I had scanned the entire east coast looking for quality Ph.D. programs in Political Theory. Of the dozens of excellent universities along the eastern seaboard, the best program by far was at...The Catholic University of America. So I applied, and to my surprise they accepted me. So here I was, a Southern Baptist Evangelical who was a former staffer for the newly-elected Majority Leader of the Virginia House of Delegates (a Catholic), Bob McDonnell, now running the presidential campaign for a former U.S. Ambassador (a Catholic), Alan Keyes, while studying political theory at a Catholic University in which I was soon to be mentored by a high-church Anglican (quasi-Catholic), Dr. Claes Ryn, who himself was the apprentice of one of the greatest conservative minds of the 20th century (a Catholic), Russell Kirk.

I marveled at how odd this was. Could all of this have been a mere coincidence? I know I had not consciously sought these things because in most cases I did not know about the Catholicism until after the fact.

Enter my time at Catholic University. It might sound a bit strange that my progress in this journey was as important outside the classroom as it was inside. My study under Dr. Ryn was some of the most challenging I have ever experienced. He challenged me to think on a higher plane than I ever had before. So much so that I am still reflecting on many of those things and coming to new insights as I continue to mature.

But I recall as well very vividly on a regular basis the solemnity and reverence that surrounded that place. It was as if the entire campus was a sanctuary...a sanctuary to Christ. And it was that solemnity and reverence that drove me to wander almost daily over to the Basilica. No matter how often I went there, the sheer majesty of the place struck me each and every time as a holy place consecrated to Christ and to His worship. I found myself often walking toward the altar with a profound sense of conviction that I should be on my knees before that altar of Christ, that I had no business standing on my feet before Him in His House. But I was torn because, after all, Baptists, nay, Protestants (with some very few exceptions) do not traditionally genuflect in the presence of God. This troubled me greatly. Should I submit to what I felt was the Holy Spirit bidding me to submit in worship of Him or should I rely on the traditions of men that I had come to understand through my upbringing?

I recall, too, watching the movie Amistad with great fanfare when it was released in the theaters. It is still one of my most favorite movies. There is a scene in which the young judge (a Catholic) goes to the church on the day before the big court battle, over which he would preside, in order to pray for wisdom and prudence. As he approached the altar alone in the dark, dimly-sunlit sanctuary, he knelt and prayed. I was envious of his humility and piety and genuinely troubled that I had never had an opportunity nor even an expectation by the church to perform such a profoundly simple act of worship and devotion.

But with the tumult of our lives in DC and with the birth of our first daughter, Rebekah, along with our move back home, it was easy to put all of this in the back of my mind. I had no time or patience to delve any further into such matters when getting back on our feet and paying the bills were so pressing.

Wading in the Surf

As our time back in Oklahoma settled down and we got our feet on the ground, I had time to rekindle relationships with old friends. And the group with which I have remained closest are the pals with whom I helped found the first conservative newspaper at the University of Oklahoma. We have been as close as brothers and though we all moved away for school and work, we have all come back home and remained close-knit.

We're a group that is as much an accountability council as any are. We challenge each other to resist the tide of secular culture; to hold fast to the call that Christ has placed on us; to lead our wives and raise our families to fear God. We are iron forever sharpening iron. It is within this group of men that my intellectual sword is constantly sharpened. We challenge each other never to become idle, to stay on the leading edge of the mandate that is on our lives. And chief among these things is our spiritual lives.

Within this group are men who represent several denominations: Catholic, Lutheran, Methodist, and Baptist. Though we have differences of opinion on non-essentials, we are all unified in the centrality of the Gospel and the truth of the Apostles' Creed. And among all the deep conversations that we have–on politics and family and economics and politics and faith and marriage and politics and culture and politics–one thing continued to goad me as a thorn in my side. Whenever the conversation turned to doctrine, the Reformation, and church history I always fell silent. I had nothing to contribute because, though I have always had a deep love and understanding of history, I had never delved specifically into the history of Christianity and the development of the Church over the last 2000 years.

This troubled me greatly because my one fear in life is not knowing, not having an answer. But I kept pushing this to the back of my mind. Finally, one night almost exactly one year ago from the writing of this post, four of us men went on our annual camping trip to Eufaula. This is an iconic manly expedition in which we pitch some cheap tents on the shore of the lake and lounge around a small bonfire drinking various malted libations, eating fish we've caught and other fire-roasted meats while talking all things politics, culture and religion. On that night my three comrades launched into a two-hour conversation about the differences between con-substantiation and trans-substantiation. I had no clue what they were talking about, so I sat in conspicuous silence. I was ashamed that my knowledge of the doctrine and of its history in the church was dismal. That night I drew a mental line in the sand and committed to myself that, come what may, I would no longer rest in ignorance of the history of my faith. I knew what I had learned in church, but I had no clue about where our faith came from and who had played critical roles throughout history in addition to the Apostles.

So, I began to dive into church history and began reading like a madman...

But I must stop there and roll back a bit. After my father died in 2008, I began writing my book about his legacy and our family's history of service to our nation. And as I began to lay out the book and conduct research on our family's history, I discovered (which should not have come as a surprise) going back well over 300 years that our Irish family in America was overwhelmingly Catholic.

But this was true, of course, of all the Irish that came to America and of those over the preceding thousand years. And what I discovered as well was that the Irish Catholics were not just Catholic, they were the culture that saved Europe from the brink of self-destruction in the late first millennium. Through the leadership of St. Patrick, Irish culture led the way in establishing new universities and families and culture that revivified Christianity when the occult threatened, first in France, and then throughout Europe to take over. This deep-seated faith in Christ and close-knit, family-oriented culture was brought to America at a time when it was needed most.

But something struck me as odd. How could these devout Irish Catholics, so many of whom migrated through the South into Georgia, then Louisiana, and finally to Oklahoma end up becoming Baptist and Methodist and Disciples of Christ and Church of Christ and so many other various denominations? So I dug for more information. What I discovered was that the poverty that was so rampant in the South after the Civil War and moving westward, combined with the lack of parishes, forced people to do precisely what we had done after our move from DC...to pay attention only to putting food on the table. So faith winnowed and flagged until it was no more because there was no institution to support it. When finally communities had sprung up in the rural south, including Oklahoma, the later generations had no memory of their family's faith. So they gravitated to congregational denominations that offered a place, any place, in which to worship.

This reality answered another pressing question that had plagued me: why was I Baptist or even Protestant? I did not choose this tradition; rather I practiced it merely because it was all I had known. But confronted with the reality of our family's history through so many hundreds of years, the Baptist trend was a mere novelty, a new thing. I started to yearn to return back to the things that made our Irish culture what it was. Not just religion, but family, food, education, marriage, child-rearing, everything. As John Quincy Adams' character is quoted in Amistad, "Who we are is who we were."

So back to my research into church history...

Swimming Full Stride

The more I dug and read, thousands of pages in fact (more than I had ever read in undergrad and grad school combined), written by titans of the faith (on both sides of the Tiber), I began to discover the real history of the Church of Christ, and it was this truth on which so many of my questions about Catholicism were finally answered. I learned that Christ had charged Peter–the head of the Apostles–with founding His Church on Earth, the visible, unified Body and Bride of Christ. To Peter were given the 'Keys to the Kingdom' and that, aided, encouraged and educated by the Holy Spirit, the 'gates of Hell would not prevail against it'.

Peter and the Apostles set out quickly in establishing new churches all over the Mediterranean region, Peter founding the church in Rome. Each of them took charge over these churches and the subsequent churches founded by their leaders in those respective regions. I learned that these Apostles have become the first bishops of the churches. When they grew too old and frail to continue their leadership, they handed over their authority to the next generation of bishops, giving them charge to teach and train all that they had learned from the Apostles who had been with Christ and had been taught by the Holy Spirit. Thus began an apostolic succession.

Peter, I discovered, had always been the head of the Church, the 'rock upon which Christ founded His Church'. All bishops looked to Peter for final authority on doctrine and Church matters. Thus began the Papacy, which continued on in Peter's line of succession. It was this succession of leaders who continued the teaching and authority given directly to the Apostles by Christ that formed the authority charged with finally canonizing the Bible, with the aid of the Holy Spirit, after nearly 400 years. But until that time, the Gospel, the doctrine of Christ, had persisted consistently and authoritatively as an oral tradition. Christianity was not the written word but rather the Gospel of Christ writ on the hearts of the leaders of the Church and nurtured by the Holy Spirit. I learned further that this authoritative oral tradition both informed the authority of Scripture and legitimized it. Thus the Tradition of the Church fathers, handed to them by Christ through the disciples, rested alongside the Bible as the basis of all faith...precisely because they both were the Word of God writ on the hearts of the leaders and on the pages of the Bibles they translated and transcribed. Together they were the Gospel.

This Tradition, both oral and written, remained consistent and unchanged for 1500 years. What I found was that for a millennium and a half, Catholics did not often refer to themselves as Catholics. They were simply Christians. To call oneself Catholic was to state the obvious. 'Well of course we are', would have been the response. Save for periodic heresies, there was no other kind of Christian. Then I discovered that the Reformation, haplessly begun by Martin Luther, was as much a political revolution as it was a doctrinal fight. And what resulted from it was as far from what Christ had charged the disciples with as anything could be. He charged them with unity, 'above all things'. And yet this new movement declared that the individual was the final authority and could decide for himself what the doctrine of Christ was. And so they did, and new churches with new versions of Christianity began springing up all over Germany and then Switzerland and England. And it was on this basis that Henry VIII declared the Church of England to be free and independent of Rome. And the story goes on and on and on into America where the splintering of denominations runs into the tens of thousands, all fighting with each other over this doctrine or that. Is this really what Christ wanted? I knew it surely was not.

So, I had to ask myself the fundamental question. If the Church that Christ charged Peter and the Apostles with founding and growing and spreading, which ultimately became the official religion of the Roman Empire under Constantine, had the authority and wisdom and guidance of the Holy Spirit to give us the final, canonized Bible and to be sure that the letters and books floating around that were not inspired remained out of the canon, then when did those Church leaders lose that authority and inspiration from the Holy Spirit? If the Reformation, which resulted in so many feuding denominations, had been justified, then I should be able to find a point in history when the leadership of the Church renounced or lost its authority and inspiration from the Holy Spirit. I searched for that point in history. Alas, I could not find it. I asked so many knowledgeable Christians where and when it was that this had happened. No one had an answer.

I was in a quandary. How then could the Reformation have been justified? Why was the authority given to Peter and passed down through the ages to the men who canonized the Bible suddenly gone in 1517? There was no credible explanation.

If I could not absolutely trust that Luther was justified and correct in his assertions about Rome, then how could I trust the authority of the denominations that had built their doctrines and traditions on Luther's words? An interesting aside: I also found ironically that much of what Luther preached was still in agreement with Rome (as were John Calvin's teachings) and that most of modern day Protestant faiths do not believe what Luther believed. So where did all of this modern Protestantism come from and where did the authority come from for these men to start their own movements with so many various contradictions among them? The Reformation clearly was a disaster for Christianity.

So I had to dig back into what the Fathers of the Early Church (in the first 100-200 years after Christ) believed. These leaders in many cases had been taught personally by the Apostles or in other cases taught by those who succeeded them. What I found was ground-shaking. They revered Mary and ask her to pray for them, just as they might ask a living Christian. They regarded Peter, and his successors, as their Holy Father, the Pope. They believed in infant baptism, the Eucharist and the Real Presence of Christ in it, the perpetual virginity of Mary, and that God the Father had created all things through Christ, given His only Son to die for the penalty of our sins, and sent the Holy Spirit to sustain and guide us in all salvation unto the end that we may run the race to the finish.

This was the faith of the earliest Christians...in their own words. So I was perplexed. I had either to conclude that I had been wrong all this time or that the Christianity that began from the very outset under the leadership of the Apostles was wrong, that it was wrong for 1500 years (despite that these men who believed the wrong things somehow maintained enough inspiration to correctly canonize the Bible) until finally some very odd fellows in Germany stumbled onto true Christianity. I have my prideful moments, but not so much to think I know better than 1500 years of brilliant Christian scholars, many of whom are cited and admired by Catholics and Protestants alike (Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Cyprian, et al).

I then turned to modern day leaders. I looked for other imminent Christian leaders who had once been Protestant but converted to Catholicism. What I found was nothing short of amazing. Here is a list of just a few of them. I began to realize that so many of the major Catholic thinkers throughout the last 150 years were converts. This had escaped me before. Even C.S. Lewis, though Anglican at the time due to his birth in Ulster, Ireland, believed almost all of what Catholics believed. So many of the great leaders of the Catholic faith were once members of other denominations and oftentimes did not become the leaders they were until after they converted.

So, again, I was in a quandary. Should I trust my own judgment or should I give some credence to the authority of so many trusted men and women of God? No one I consulted could offer answers to the fundamental questions I had asked. And all of these questions boiled down to one: by what (or whose) authority did they believe and practice the things they did? Either Christ's authority given to Peter and the Apostles was final or it wasn't. If it was then Christianity was a sham religion. It was then that I had to trust in that authority and in the Church that the Apostles built in His name and by His power.

The rest was simply a matter of rediscovering that faith which they labored to protect under threat of torture and death. And it is a beautiful thing. After 13 years of searching in the wilderness – we have finally come home. On November 20, 2011–The Feast of Christ the King–we entered into full communion with the Roman Catholic Church.

Brett Farley is a political and marketing consultant in Oklahoma City and serves on the boards of numerous committees, organizations, non-profits, and is the CEO of Farley Enterprises, a consortium of business and consultancy corporations. He blogs about Catholicism, politics and culture at brettfarley.us.

If you have found this story helpful in your spiritual journey we hope you will consider sharing it. Have feedback or would like to share your story? Email us at

Baptist Convert: Vivien Betland

Mon, 21 May 2012 22:52:46 +0000

Vivien Betland

Vivien is a nursing student at the University of Minnesota and a convert from the Baptist tradition who was welcomed into the Catholic Church at the 2012 Easter Vigil.

Growing up, my family was never really religious or spiritual. We owned Bibles and celebrated Easter and Christmas, but we didn't read said Bibles and the holidays were more about presents than what God did for His people on those days. And we definitely never went to church, unless my younger brother's choir was singing at a service. I wouldn't say I was atheist, and my parents definitely weren't, but they did not share their faith or teach me anything about God. I'd heard about Jesus and knew that He had died on the cross, but I didn't really understand why and had no idea how important that fact was. My mom had grown up Baptist, so that's what I claimed I was whenever one of my friends would ask me. I had a happy early childhood, with parents who were super involved in my activities and spent time with us kids.

But in middle school, life got rough for everyone in my family. Right before sixth grade, my only living grandmother passed away and my mom was diagnosed with chronic kidney failure. Apparently, I took this all very hard, though I don't remember that fact. I became relatively unresponsive. People had to repeat questions to me because I would not answer at first. I was off in my own little world. That year, my mom had talked to my guidance counselor at school and arranged for me to be a part of a support group with other sixth graders. This was strange to me because I was unaware that anything was wrong with me. The other kids came from divorced families and there was one cancer survivor and I didn't really understand why I was in the group, but I got to skip part of class sometimes so I didn't mind. I don't think it ever occurred to my parents to start going to church or getting help from a pastor. I don't remember what we talked about in this group, but I'm pretty sure it never had to do with God and how we relate to Him during our struggles. I came through this phase alright, though I have no idea if the support group had anything to do with it or not. But this was not the end of troubles in our family.

As I mentioned before, my mother was diagnosed with kidney failure right as I started sixth grade. This changed a lot of things in my household. First, she had to go on a special diet of sorts. She could no longer have things that had a lot of potassium or phosphorous (no more bananas, cheese, potatoes, etc) and so this limited her food options greatly. And then there were lots of foods that just no longer sounded appetizing to her. Every night became a fight over what to have for dinner ending with everyone extremely frustrated with the fact that an agreement could not be made. Second, my mom was gradually losing the energy to do the things she used to and handed the reins to much of it over to my dad. This included the finances. Because of our family's inability to ever decide on something to make for dinner and my mom's lack of energy to make it (my dad is not a very skilled cook so that was never an option) we usually wound up eating out. Eventually, we were deep in debt. My dad has a hard time saying no, and so even though we could no longer afford to eat out, we did. My dad grew progressively more and more stressed out and his temper got shorter and shorter (he was never violent, but sometimes his yelling can be scarier). No one besides my dad knew how bad it really was until he finally told my mom my freshman year that he thought we might have to file for bankruptcy. It explained a lot of his behavior the past few years. Again, no one ever thought to think about how any of this related to God. No one thought about how we should be praying how God wants us to use these finances or turn to a spiritual counselor to help with the stress of everything.

Being a kid, this was a lot to deal with. I was no longer unresponsive as I had been sixth grade year, but I did withdraw into myself more than I used to. When I was really young, I was very outgoing, not afraid to talk to anybody. And then in middle school that all changed. Looking back, I think I felt like I had no one I could relate to. My family was going through so much and I didn't even understand it all, so how could anyone else? I felt very alone. Not only did I not feel like I could relate to my peers, I didn't feel like I could talk to my parents about the stress I was dealing with, familial and typical adolescent stuff, because they had their own things to worry about without my burdens added. I had a few friends that I talked to, but no one really knew what things were really like. If they knew my mom was sick, they didn't know how bad it was because I wouldn't share it with them. The only One who knew all about it (Jesus), was the One I didn't really know. I didn't know that my best friend was waiting for me to finally come to Him. This all lasted until my sophomore year of high school.

That year, my brother went away to college and after a stressful winter break at home that almost sent him into a nervous breakdown, he started to attend Campus Crusade for Christ with a friend. When he came home for a visit later that winter, he decided to bring me to church. Because my mom claimed to be Baptist, and because I knew a few people who went there, I asked if we could go to First Baptist. I was kind of excited. I had asked my parents sometimes if we could go to church, but there was always some excuse not to go. I filled out a visitor card in the pew and dropped it in the collection plate. The next day I got a call and invitation to come to youth group on Sunday evenings. For a few weeks, I made excuses not to go, but finally one day I went. Everybody was so welcoming! I felt like they wanted me to be there even though they didn't know me yet. I had never really felt like I fit anywhere before, but now I did. I started to open up to these people and tell them about my mom and family struggles. They always offered to pray for me and I felt so loved. I started to learn about God and His love for the people He created. I learned that Jesus died on the cross, a perfect man, so that my sins could be forgiven by God and I could reenter a relationship with Him.

This was all fine and dandy, and I considered myself saved because I believed what they said and said a prayer asking Jesus to come into my heart and forgive my sins, but I didn't really let that change me. I was never a "bad kid" so to speak, but I was selfish, always wanting to fit in and be cool. I was a cheerleader in high school and lived to try to be popular. I was rather shy and that hindered that, but it was always my goal. I continued to go to church and youth group, but my faith was not lived out much in my life outside of church. It was always there waiting to shine, but I wouldn't let it. I found it easy to gossip about others to try to fit in, to separate myself from the "uncool" kids. Deep down I knew it was cruel and unfair but I just wanted to be liked. That's what I lived for. I had some lines I would not cross, but it was never about God, more about the fear of disappointing my parents or adding more stress for them.

And then the summer before senior year, I went on a mission trip to Mexico with my youth group. We held a vacation Bible school at a local orphanage during the day and did witnessing activities and events in the local park at night. It was an amazing experience. The orphanage was run by a pastor so the kids all learned about God and some of them shared their stories with us. They had lived through things that both horrified me and broke my heart. Some had been abandoned on the streets by their families. Others had been abused and removed by the state to come live at the orphanage. It struck me how much worse off they had been than I was at that point. And yet, they had all forgiven those who had hurt them. Some had seen their parents face to face and forgiven them, others didn't have any idea how to find their family, but still did not hold anything against them. I could see that God was really working in their lives and that they had surrendered fully to Him. They had so much joy in spite of great pain and I wanted that. It was then that I decided to live out God's will, not my own. I haven't always been successful, but I'm on the right track. Sometimes I miss or ignore God's cues, but He never gives up on me.

Senior year, my brother came home for Christmas break and told us that he was becoming Catholic. We were all shocked! He had been one of the most outspoken people against Catholicism that I knew, so I didn't understand. I didn't know much about Catholicism, but I knew that people at my Baptist church thought that Catholicism was wrought with error and so I believed them. I thought my brother was crazy, but if that's what he wanted to do, I didn't really care that much. I gradually learned more about what Catholicism taught but it clashed so much with what I had learned from my pastor that I thought it could not be right. There was no such thing as purgatory. Why on earth would Jesus have meant to literally eat His Flesh? Where in the Bible does it say that? Mary? What's so great about her? I could not have defended much of my own position biblically but I didn't listen to my brother either. If he told me something in the Bible that supported the church's position I ignored it because that is not what I had been taught. I thought I could find a verse that would prove him wrong once and for all. But I really didn't care that much. He loved God and in my opinion that was all that mattered.

Two summers ago, before my sophomore year of college, I was baptized by my youth pastor in the Mississippi River. My brother rejoiced because, although I was not Catholic, my sins had been washed away. Again, I thought he was crazy. Baptism is just a symbol to show our obedience and faith in Christ. It doesn't actually do anything for us. But after that, I started to take my faith even more seriously. I started to try to change the way I relate to other people. I started to pray more often and meditate on God's word. I even started leading a small group of girls from a Christian group on campus. I wanted (and still do) to make a difference in the world and gradually become more like Christ.

That winter, I went with my brother to Eucharistic adoration, though I'm not sure why since I thought the elements remained bread and wine. I probably should not have been adoring mere bread and wine. But I went and he told me to read John 6 and pray about it while I was there. I did and I started to understand why Catholics might think the bread and wine became Christ's Body and Blood. But I still had other issues with the Church, like infant baptism and "Mary worship," so I continued to fight God's nudging. But my eyes were being opened.

And then finally this past summer (2011) I could not resist any longer. God convicted me that I had to look into what the Church really teaches and to have an open mind. Two things that were said during sermons at the Baptist church I was now attending that either irked me or pushed me into a search for the truth. First, during a communion Sunday service, the pastor, while praying before we took the bread and grape juice, said something along the lines of, "Thank you for this bread, that does not magically become your body but remains bread, a symbol of your sacrifice." The tone in which he said it clearly mocked the Catholic faith and though I still denied that the bread was Christ's body it bothered me that the pastor would so openly mock the Catholic faith during a service. I was slightly offended simply because it meant he was mocking my brother. I knew that though they "erroneously" believed the Eucharistic elements became Christ, that they did not believe it was magic. They believe it is through the power of the Holy Spirit. It irritated me that the pastor would be so disrespectful, but I ignored it and continued to attend this church for awhile. Second, there was a sermon about correcting people who held to a false Gospel. I felt God convicting me that I was holding to a false Gospel. I knew right then that it was time to seriously look into what the Catholic Church teaches and so I began a quest for the truth.

I began to notice inconsistencies within my Baptist faith. For instance, as a Baptist I had felt it was crucial that a person being baptized is dunked in order for it to be legitimate. I would argue this with my brother over and over as he believed that this was not crucial. But why did it really matter if someone was dunked or if water was simply poured over their heads? I didn't believe Baptism had any real significance outside being a symbol of one's union with Christ, so what difference did it really make? Why was there such a debate over the means when there was no real meaningful end to the act? I finally saw the foolishness of it all. It made no difference as a symbol. But I also saw that it was not just a symbol. Baptism really means something. That's why Christ commanded all disciples to be baptized. That's why he said to be born again; we had to be born of the spirit and water.

I also had always been bothered by the once saved, always saved mentality. If you had genuine faith you would always be saved and good things would naturally pour out of you. All this had accomplished for me was a questioning of my salvation if I struggled to choose good over evil or if I had occasional doubts about my faith and beliefs. It left me wondering sometimes if I had ever really been saved. Maybe faith was not genuine like I thought it was. Not very encouraging. And I didn't understand the faith verses works debate. The Bible made it pretty clear to me that both are needed. You can't be saved with one but not the other. One can exist without the other, but it doesn't matter unless the other exists as well. The Catholic faith seemed to be the only place I could find that somehow made sense of faith and works working together. The more I looked into it, the more I realized that the Catholic is in fact Biblical. I had been wrong for years in believing the Catholic faith was erroneous.

I realized that Mary was not worshipped by Catholics but only honored for her part in salvation and that the Protestant church did not give her the honor she deserved. In Luke 1 it says all generations will call her blessed and that was not something I saw in the Protestant church. I also came to the conclusion that the communion elements became Christ as He had said it would in all the Last Supper passages and as was foreshadowed by John 6. Once I realized that I could be in Christ's Physical Presence rather than just spiritual, I knew I could not stay away. Christ gives me His Body and Blood everyday and how can I possibly ignore that?

After much research, scriptural and historical, I could see the validity of the Catholic Church. I could also still see, somewhat, the validity of the Protestant argument (though only scripturally and not historically). It all boiled down to authority. Who has the authority to say that their interpretation is correct? To me, it only made sense that the Catholic Church, the only church that has existed from the time of the Apostles until now, would be the one to hold that authority. Protestant churches do not claim authority and as a result anyone can interpret Scripture as they see fit and start a new church, the perpetual branching. But Christ prayed for unity in His church and among His people and I only see that in the Catholic Church. He gave Peter the keys to heaven, clearly making him the leader of His Church, which has been passed down under the guidance of the Holy Spirit since then. United across time and lands, the Catholic Church is Christ's Bride and He promised the gates of Hell would not prevail over it and I trust that promise. If the Catholic Church is wrong, then for centuries, until the Protestant split, Christ did not keep His promise, and that is not something I can accept. The Catholic Church is the true Church of Christ and I rejoice that God finally led me home and I pray that He will lead others as well. This September I joined the RCIA program at a local parish and at the 2012 Easter vigil, I was confirmed and received my first communion.

Of course, my transition has not been easy. I have met much resistance from Protestant friends and my old pastor. I took it hard at first, but I have realized that Jesus lost friends and went through much more than I did. And I have no right to complain. I also have friends, and of course my brother, who have been very supportive. Even if I didn't though, the simple joy of following my Lord and Savior into His church would make it worth it. I am so happy to be a full member of the Bride of Christ.

Read more about Vivien and her ongoing journey on her blog "The Heart of St. Gianna".

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Anglican Convert: Fr. Dwight Longenecker

Tue, 08 May 2012 00:56:29 +0000

Fr. Dwight Longenecker

Fr. Dwight Longnecker is a former Anglican minister who entered the Roman Catholic Church alongside his family in 1995. Fr. Dwight is an author, speaker, and parish priest serving at Our Lady of the Rosary Parish in Greenville, South Carolina.

From Bob Jones University to the Catholic Church

by Dwight Longenecker

Taking dramatic steps of faith runs in the family. In the eighteenth century my Mennonite ancestors left Switzerland for the new colony of Pennsylvania to find religious freedom. Seven generations later my part of the family were still in Pennsylvania, but they had left the Mennonites, and I was brought up in an Bible church which was part of a loose-knit confederation of churches called the Independent Fundamental Churches of America.

The independent Bible church movement was an offshoot of that conservative group of Christians who were disenchanted with the liberal drift of the main Protestant denominations in the post-war period. The same independent movement saw the foundation of a fundamentalist college in the deep South by the Methodist evangelist Bob Jones. After World War II my parents and aunts and uncles went to study there and it was natural for my parents to send me and my brothers and sisters there in the 1970s.

The religion in our own home was simple, Bible-based and balanced. I will always be thankful for the sincere and deep faith of my parents, and will always regard with pride the great Christian heritage which I was given. Like our Mennonite forebears there was a quiet simplicity and tolerance at the heart of our family's faith. We believed Catholics were in error, but we didn't nurture hatred towards them. At Bob Jones the tone was different. There the Catholic Church was clearly the 'whore of Babylon' and the Pope was the Anti-Christ.

Ironically it was at Bob Jones that I discovered the Anglican Church. We were allowed to go to a little Episcopalian breakaway named 'Holy Trinity Anglican Orthodox Church.' The church was founded by a 'bishop' whose orders were 'valid, but irregular'. He had been made a bishop by a renegade Eastern Orthodox bishop as well as a breakaway Catholic. Despite the bizarre background, the little Anglican Church connected us with a faith that felt more ancient than the local independent Bible Church. So along with some other disenchanted Baptists I went to the little stone church in the bad part of town and discovered the glories of the Book of Common Prayer, lighting candles and kneeling to pray. We learned to chant the psalms, discovered Lent and Advent and felt we were in touch with the religion of C.S.Lewis, the Inklings and the great English writers.

While at Bob Jones I had visited England a couple of times, and feeling the call to the ministry I wondered if I might be ordained as an Anglican priest in England and maybe look after one of the beautiful medieval churches in the English countryside. Naturally for any lover of C.S.Lewis, Oxford was a kind of mecca, so when the opportunity to study at Oxford came my way I jumped at the chance and came to England for good. After theological studies the door opened for me to be ordained, and a life of ministry in the Anglican church opened up.

This whole period was a time of great growth and learning. Often it is the little bit of wisdom which makes the most impression, and I will never forget a little quotation from the great Anglican socialist F.D. Maurice while I was studying theology. He wrote, "A man is most often right in what he affirms and wrong in what he denies." After the negative attitude of American fundamentalism and the cynical religious doubt that prevailed at Oxford, Maurice's statement was like a breath of fresh air. It was sometimes tempting to feel guilty about leaving the religion of my family and upbringing, but with Maurice's viewpoint I increasingly felt the Anglican riches I was discovering were not so much a denial of my family faith, but an addition to it. So I took Maurice's dictum as my motto, and whenever I came across something new, asked if I was denying or affirming. If I wasn't able to affirm the new doctrine or religious practice I wouldn't deny it--I would simply let it be.

During my time as a student a Catholic friend in American named June suggested I might like to visit a Benedictine monastery. I made my first visit and found myself drawn to the quiet life of prayer and study that the monks followed. After finishing my theological studies I was ordained as a curate (assistant minister) in the Anglican Church. When my curacy was finished I had three months free and decided to hitch-hike to Jerusalem. So with backpack and a pair of sturdy shoes I headed across France and Italy staying in various monasteries and convents along the route. I found my journey went best when I fit in with the monastic routine. So I would begin a day's journey with Mass and morning offices in one monastery, say my Anglican office whilst travelling, then arrive at the next monastery in time for Vespers, the evening meal and Night Prayer.

The pilgrimage to the Holy Lands also took me further into Christian history. Part of the appeal of being ordained into the Church of England was to leave the modern 'do as you please 'church of Protestant America and find deeper routes in the history and faith of Europe. I wanted to be part of the 'ancient church in England.' Suddenly travelling through France, Italy and Greece to Israel I was immersed in a religion obviously older and deeper still than Anglicanism. The Benedictine monasteries put me in touch with roots of faith which were deeper and more concrete than I imagined could exist. Although I realised my views were becoming 'more Catholic' I didn't fight it. I wanted to 'be right in what I affirmed."

I had been ordained for about six years when my dream came true and I went to be the parish priest of two beautiful old churches on the Isle of Wight, just off the South coast of England. By this time I had come to regard my ministry in a very Catholic way. I knew we were separated from Rome, but I considered my ministry to be part of the whole Catholic Church. Despite the formal separation I thought of Anglicanism as a branch of the Catholic Church, and prayed for the time of our eventual re-union. My pilgrimage thus far had been mostly intuitive. I simply adopted the Catholic practices that seemed suitable, and when it came time to question certain doctrines I looked at them and made every effort to affirm and not deny. This mindset brought me almost unconsciously to the very doorstep of the Catholic Church. What I said to some friends who were considering conversion was true of me as well -- I was more Catholic than I myself realised.

As a result of this gradual process my thinking remained fuzzy for some time. It was the Church of England's decision to ordain women as priests that helped clear my vision. For me, women ministers were not the problem. Instead it was what the General Synod's decision-making process revealed about the true nature of the Church of England. The key question was--"Is the Anglican Church a Protestant church or a part of the Catholic Church? If she wishes to be considered Catholic then she does not have the authority to ordain women as priests. But if the Anglican Church was a Protestant Church, then like all Protestant groups, I guessed she could do whatever she wanted.

So when the General Synod took the decision I was in a quandary. Everything within me said a church that claimed to be Catholic could not make such a decision on her own. Yet I hated taking a negative position about anything. According to my motto I was denying women priests and I was wrong to do so. Then a Catholic friend gently pointed out that greater affirmations often include smaller denials. In other words you can't have everything. Choices need to be made. Denying women priests was merely the negative side of affirming something greater--the apostolic ministry; and affirming Catholicism had to include the denial of those things contrary to Catholicism.

Once I began to look again at the different churches and the claims of the Catholic Church I realised how very strange it was to have so many different Christian denominations. How could Jesus command and prophesy for there to be 'one flock and one shepherd.' (John 10:16) then we quite happily make thousands of different flocks with thousands of different shepherds?

I began to study the writings of the early Church fathers and got a copy of the Catechism of the Catholic Church. In our parish Bible study I took our people through a study of the New Testament Church. We considered the role Jesus gave the apostles. We considered what St Paul had to say about the Church. We considered the New Testament's clear teaching that Church unity must be maintained at all costs. We confronted the verses which taught that the Church was built of the foundation of the apostles and prophets (Eph. 2:20) and that it was the Church through which God has made manifest his wisdom. (Eph. 3:10) and that the Church is the 'pillar and foundation of truth' (I Tim. 3:15) I was stunned when one lady in the Bible study said, 'If what you are saying is right vicar, all of us ought to become Roman Catholics!' She had drawn the very conclusions that I was trying to run away from.

When I began to express my own increasing convictions about the strong claims of the Catholic Church the people were shocked and upset. Some had listened closely to my preaching and had seen the whole crisis coming. Others were angry and accusatory. I was being disloyal to my own troubled church. Even worse, I was calling their Christian life into question by leaving. Still others were confused and frustrated. Their feelings were summed up by a good Methodist lady who came to our church with her Anglican husband, "Surely the only thing that matters is how much we love Jesus!" she cried.

Her question was difficult to answer, not because there was no answer, but because there were too many. In a letter to an enquirer Cardinal Newman said, 'Catholicism is a matter, it cannot be taken in a teacup.' But that he meant that Catholicism was so vast and the reasons for conversion so overwhelming and complex, that it was impossible to sum up the whole thing in a neat and pithy formula.

In a sense my Methodist friend was right, "The only thing that matters is how much we love Jesus". Hers is the right answer, but it is also the right question. How much do we love Jesus, and how can we be sure that we love Jesus and not just our idea of Jesus? I had seen so many Jesuses amongst different Christians, and each one was strangely like that particular Christian. Charismatics saw a Spirit-filled prophet of God, people concerned with justice and peace saw a radical revolutionary who spoke for the poor, Intellectuals saw a Jesus who was cleverer than anybody else and suffered for it. Tasteful Christians saw a Jesus who was a kind of persecuted poet. Snobs saw a lofty Jesus who was head and shoulders above everyone else while working class people saw Jesus the carpenter. The list could go on and on. More importantly, I began to see that my Jesus was also a reflection of myself. I'm inclined to be intellectual, contemplative and intuitive by nature. I followed a Jesus who pondered problems, went out to the wilderness to pray and found crowds of people difficult. My Jesus was one who walked a lonely path to a distant cross because that's how I was walking through life myself.

But to follow Christ means to lose yourself, not to worship yourself. More and more I wanted an objective Jesus-- one who was not my own reflection. I wanted a Christ who was cosmic, not a Christ who was comfy. Where was this Jesus to be found? In the incarnation. In other words, in his body. Where was his body to be found? The Scriptures were clear. The body of Christ was the church. Saint Paul was inspired to use this image for the Church. I had been taught that the church was the body of Christ in a symbolic way, that all of us in a particular congregation should work together like members of a body. But the emphasis in that teaching was on only one half of the image: it stressed 'body'-not Christ. When I put the two together and saw the church as the body of Christ a window opened.

As an Evangelical I was taught that the different churches were all man-made organizations which were useful, but essentially un-necessary. Suddenly I saw the Church as the mystical body of Christ-a living, dynamic organism empowered by the Holy Spirit to continue the work of the risen Lord in the world. The Church was suddenly a sacrament of Christ. In my brothers and sisters I could find Jesus. In my service to the Church I could find Jesus. In our worship I could find Christ. In obedience to the teaching of the church I could find Jesus. By immersing myself in the Church I was immersing myself into Jesus himself and transcending the limitations of my personal walk with the Lord. But if my church was simply a gathering of people like myself, and Jesus was a reflection of ourselves, then we were only serving ourselves not him.

As an Anglican with increasingly Catholic sensibilities I began to feel that my experience of Christ within the Anglican Church was simply a larger version of the individualistic Christ I had experienced within Evangelicalism. In other words, if the Evangelical Christian was inclined to find a 'Jesus' who was rather like himself, then the same problem could be seen on a denominational level as well. I began to see that Anglicans worshipped a very Anglican Jesus. He was a refined, softly spoken gentleman. He was tolerant, tasteful and forgiving. He was eventually persecuted by the barbaric, bigoted religious people. There was much that was good and true in the Anglican portrait of Jesus, but there was also a fair bit missing. If individual Christians made Jesus in their own image, so did the various denominations.

The problem with a Jesus who is only personal is that he becomes private property. There were only two ways around this problem of the merely personal Jesus. One way is the Anglican way in which every opinion is tolerated and encouraged. By allowing every personal Jesus-even heretical ones-the Anglican hopes to obtain a comprehensive Jesus.

The other option is to break away into a little Christian group where everyone shares the same vision of Jesus, and that one becomes the only one. The first way is called latitudinarianism- or indifferentism. The second way is called sectarianism. In the first option every type of personal Christ is tolerated. In the second only one type of personal Christ is tolerated.

But surely both ways had an element of truth? All the different personal Jesuses reflected a dimension of Jesus Christ, but it was also true that there had to be one which was the fullest, and most complete experience of Christ. Somewhere there had to be a Church which embraced all the varied portraits of Jesus while still holding up an objective Christ who transcended and completed all the partial portraits. If Jesus promise to be with us always was true, and if the Church was the mystical body of Christ, then there had to be a Church which presented an objective Christ to the world in a personal way.

To offer a universal Christ in a personal way the Church had to speak with an authority that was bigger than any one individual. That authority had to have certain traits to offer a Christ who was both personal and universal. I began to draw up a little list to outline what traits such an authority ought to have. First such an authority would need to be historical. In order to give me a Jesus which was bigger than me this church's teaching and experience had to be rooted in history. Through her roots in history I could share in a Christian experience which transcended my own personal feelings and background.

Secondly, this authority had to be objective. In other words, it couldn't be subject to my personal whims, the whims of my local pastor or any local prophet or teacher. The authority had to operate above the interests and concerns of the church itself. To prove its objectivity, this authority had to be spread out over a large number of people over a long period of time while remaining consistent in its themes and purpose.

Connected with the criterion of objectivity is that this authority should be universal. It cannot be the voice of just one person, one nationality, one theological grouping or one pressure group. This authority has to transcend geographical, cultural and intellectual boundaries. Not only does this authority have to be universal in geographical terms, but it has to transcend time as well. It has to be universal down through the ages-connecting authentically with every age.

But if this authority is universal it must also be particular. This fourth trait means the authority must be specified in a particular place and through a particular person. It cannot be just a vague 'body of teaching' or some kind of 'consensus of the faithful'. To speak to me personally it must speak with a clear, particular and authentic voice. If it is particular, then it also has to be able to speak to particular problems and circumstances. A particular authority will apply the universal truths of the gospel to particular problems with confidence.

Fifth, this authority should be intellectually satisfying. While it must be simple enough for every person to understand and obey, it must also be challenging enough for the world's greatest philosophers. As Jerome said of Scripture, 'it must be shallow enough for a lamb to wade and deep enough for an elephant to swim.'This authority must be intellectually coherent within itself, and it must be able to engage confidently with all other intellectual religions and philosophical systems. Furthermore, if it is intellectually satisfying it must offer a world view which is complete without being completely closed. In other words, there must be both answers and questions which still remain.

Sixth, this authority needs to be Scriptural. Since Scripture is a primary witness to the revelation, this authority should be both rooted in Scripture, and founded by Scripture. If it is Scriptural it will also look to Scripture continually as a source of inspiration and guidance. While this authority will flow from Scripture it will also confirm Scripture and offer the right interpretation of Scripture with confidence-never contradicting Scripture, but always working to further illuminate Scripture.

If an authority can be shown to fulfil all six of these traits, then these are a good confirmation that the authority is not ephemeral and merely human but is of divine origin. If this authority can be found then it would be able to give my personal experience of Jesus Christ the universal depth and breadth which lifts me out of that worship of that Jesus in my own image, which is essentially the worship of myself.

I now accepted that my faith had to be Catholic if it was to be universal, however, I still felt that I could be a good Catholic while remaining an Anglican. According to my Evangelical viewpoint, since denominations didn't matter one could subscribe to Catholic views while remaining in another denomination.

But something still niggled. How could I claim to be 'Catholic' while I was rejecting one of the basic principles of Catholicism-that being Catholic means being in full communion with the head of the family of the Catholic Church, the Bishop of Rome? How could I be Catholic while rejecting the rock on which the Catholic Church was built?

I then came across Cardinal Newman's famous Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine. In a logically clear, but dense passage he says, "If Christianity is both social and dogmatic, and intended for all ages, it must, humanly speaking, have an infallible expounder, else you will secure unity of form at the loss of unity of doctrine, or unity of doctrine at the loss of unity of form; you will have to choose between a comprehension of opinions and a resolution into parties; between latitudinarian and sectarian error... You must accept the whole or reject the whole...it is trifling to receive all but something which is as integral as any other portion. Thus it would be trifling indeed to accept everything Catholic except the head of the body of Christ on earth."

In other words, if I wanted that Catholic fullness of the faith I couldn't pick and choose. How can you have fullness when you are still the one who is choosing what is 'full' and what isn't? To accept the body of Christ in its fullness one has to accept it all. That's what fullness implies. Not wanting to give up my ministry and my beautiful home, churches and congregations, I agreed to 'accept the Pope' but remain in the Anglican Church. Before long it became clear that I could not accept the Pope without submitting to his teaching, and that his teaching said to enjoy the fullness of the faith I had to be in full communion with the faith.

St Paul's word's haunted me. There is one bread and one body. We who are one body share in the one bread.' Eventually I accepted that the only way for my personal vision of Jesus to be enlarged to a universal experience of the risen Lord was to be received into full communion and personal union with his Body on earth--the universal Church.

The next few months were terrible time of indecision. By now I was married and we had two young children. I hadn't trained for any other career and if we left the Anglican church there seemed nothing but an uncertain future. Then one Sunday evening I went to Quarr Abbey for Vespers and Benediction. As the monks chanted I agonized over the decision to leave the Church of England.

"But I only wanted to serve you in the ancient church in England!" I cried out to the Lord.

As the incense wafted heavenward and the monstrance was lifted, the still small voice replied, "But THIS is the ancient church in England." Then the struggles ended. My mind was made up, and in the Autumn of 1994 my wife and I began our course of instruction at Quarr.

Once we were received the St. Barnabas Society continued to be there with practical advice and financial assistance. As we went through our instruction I not only read the documents of Vatican II, but did further reading in the apostolic fathers. Day by day I discovered that all the things I had come to affirm intuitively were part of the great unity of the Catholic faith.

When I became an Anglican I felt my Bible Christian background was being completed, and as we prepared to be received into the Catholic church I realized that I could still affirm everything my non-Catholic friends and family affirmed, I simply could no longer deny what they denied. F.D. Maurice's little snippet of wisdom had brought me across the Tiber, and in becoming a Catholic I was affirming all things and denying nothing that was true.

Our reception took place in a quiet service one February evening in the crypt of Quarr Abbey church. That night all was harvest. There as the monks sang and we were finally received into full communion, the simple faith of my Mennonite forebears, the Bible Christians' love of the Scriptures and the ancient beauties of Anglicanism were all gathered together and fulfilled in a new and dynamic way.

More reflections by Fr. Longenecker can be found on his blog "Standing on my Head" or by visiting his website.

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Baptist Convert: Todd Meade

Mon, 23 Apr 2012 22:55:57 +0000

Todd Meade

Todd is a former Southern Baptist who converted to the Catholic Church in 1999, four years after graduating from Jerry Falwell's Liberty University in Lynchburg, Virginia. He now lives in Louisville, Kentucky with his wife Wendy and their two young children, and works in the field of social services. He and his family are parishioners at St. Bernadette Catholic Church.

A Southern Baptist Liberty University alumni becomes Catholic

Every spiritual life is a journey. Mine began in Warner Robins, Georgia in 1971. I was born into a good Methodist family and had a strong Christian foundation laid for me in childhood. But unfortunately, as is all too common, during my teenage years I drifted away somewhat from this good foundation and was lukewarm at best towards Christianity. I still attended weekly church services and youth group activities, but my interests were mainly in having fun with my friends and having a spiritual life was far from my mind.

But at age 17, I had a profound conversion experience that impressed upon me the reality and urgency of Christianity. I gave my heart and life to Jesus and experienced a great sense of meaning and purpose in life. Around this time, my family and I became Southern Baptists, which matched well with my new fervency and devotion.

I ended up going off to college to Jerry Falwell's well-known Liberty University in Lynchburg, Virginia, which proved to be an ideal place for me at the time to deepen my devotion and learn more about the Faith. It was a great time of spiritual development for me, and by the time I graduated in 1995, I felt energized and excited about where Our Lord would lead me and what He would do through me.

However, with the external support and security of a self-contained Christian environment taken away from me, and being thrust out into "the real world," I found myself depressed, lonely and struggling to find my place. I had moved back to Georgia, but I could not find a church where I truly felt at home. The usual format of singing a few praise and worship songs and listening to a preacher for 30 to 40 minutes no longer fulfilled my spiritual hunger as it had before. Even my own private devotions of Bible reading and prayer also left me feeling empty. Talking with God became more and more of a struggle and trying to maintain that prior tangible sense of fervent devotion became an oppressive burden. It was a crisis moment in my life.

I was not aware of it at the time, because it was not a teaching that I ever came across in my Protestant circles, but what I was going through is a common stage in spiritual development and growth: After an initial period of zeal and sensible delight in the spiritual life, a period of dryness and seeming darkness is passed through as Our Lord draws souls closer to Him and away from self-seeking in pleasurable spiritual consolations. He leads them through this to teach them to rely more on faith alone, and not on good feelings. But I knew none of this at the time. I only felt like my Christianity was dismantling around me and that there was nothing I could do about it. My strength was as sand and I felt lost in barren darkness. No matter what I did, I could not find those familiar sensible indicators that I was close to God. He seemed very distant, even absent, and my cries out to Him seemed to be ignored.

New light did finally come to me after many months, oddly enough, through the writings of some medieval Catholics such as St. John of the Cross and St. Teresa of Avila. St. John's "Dark Night of the Soul" and St. Teresa's "Interior Castle," provided me with new spiritual insights and made some sense of what I was going through; they gave me hope. Their writings also ignited in me a strange new sweetness of intimacy with Our Lord that was quite unlike anything I had experienced before: profound and deep, but simple, quiet, peaceful. I discovered that a relationship with God was not always a matter of me thinking about what to say in prayer, or even in always studying Biblical texts for some applicable truths. Those laudable activities are only the means to reach the ultimate goal, which is a real loving experience with the living God. I learned about something called "contemplation," which was the name given to the simple serene loving intimacy with God that my soul had been craving but had been fighting against in trying to regain some past sensible devotion that I felt I had lost.

I began to embrace this new quietude and sweetness, but after a few months I was again plunged into a deep darkness of spirit, which frightened me greatly. A depressing weight seemed to descend upon me. I felt like I was suffocating and I was desperate to get out from under it. I felt like perhaps moving away from my hometown would be the sort of stimulating change of setting that I needed to expand my horizons and renew my outlook on life.

My foray into the wide world took me initially to New England. One night, I stayed at a Benedictine retreat house in Still River, Massachusetts. I still considered myself firmly Protestant despite the fact that my reading material was at that time mostly written by medieval Catholic saints. I also felt drawn to monastic settings for some reason, and had a handful of retreat houses picked out prior to my trip that were close to where I would be traveling. At St. Benedict Abbey, after a friendly dinnertime debate with some of the monks about Catholic beliefs, a fellow guest gave me a copy of "Born Fundamentalist, Born Again Catholic" by David Currie. She said that she would be praying that I would one day become Catholic. I thought to myself that she could pray all she wants, but I would never become Catholic. I tucked the book into my things and moved on the next morning.

I eventually settled in Louisville, Kentucky where I had friends from college. Over the months that followed, I continued to try to find a Protestant church to suit me, but I was unable to do so. I knew that I needed more than what I was being offered in the typical Baptist service. Occasionally, in my private time of prayer, I would still enter into moments of that certain deep contemplative peace, but I found upon entering a Baptist church service I would be pulled into something much more superficial, with all the songs and preaching and giddy exuberance. I recall on one occasion, I managed through the songs at the beginning of the service, trying unsuccessfully to get into the spirit of the singing, but when we sat down and the pastor got up to preach, I felt compelled to get up and bolt out of the door, which is exactly what I did. I decided that I could not sit there like that anymore and listen to another lengthy talk. Christian worship had to be more than that. But where would I go? I had experienced in years past the extremes of Pentecostalism and I knew that I did not want that. On the other side, the more "reverent" liturgical churches seemed to have, in recent decades, softened into a shapeless liberalism, so I steered clear of them as well. I looked objectively at all the different types of Christian groups, and I began to be very disenchanted with the fractured nature of Protestantism: So many competing groups, all claiming to be following the same Jesus and reading the same Bible. If the Bible was the authority, why did all these Christians disagree on so much regarding doctrine and practice?

I read more on the histories of various denominations and competing theologies and, in the process, my eyes were opened to the fundamental fallacy of the doctrine of Sola Scriptura, that the Bible alone is the sole authority for Christian belief. As I later discovered, this issue was the turning point for so many who end up becoming Catholic: The teaching that all Christian teachings must be taught in the Bible is not itself taught in the Bible. When the paradoxical truth of that statement settled into my heart and mind, I realized that I could not remain Protestant anymore. Protestantism was illogical at its very foundation. However, although I could not remain Protestant, I also felt that I could not become Catholic either, since I still felt that with doctrines like Transubstantiation, "worshipping" Mary, praying to saints, the infallibility of the Pope, Purgatory etc. it was a gravely misled religion.

I spent many months in this odd limbo of being between worlds and with the frustrated feeling that I was at an impasse. After wrestling with it from all angles, I decided to "just live" and not drive myself crazy over it. At least I still believed in Jesus, even though He seemed so distant to me. He was real to me by faith and I would trust Him to sort all these things out for me in time. Since I did not know which group to associate with, I actually stopped going to church services for a while, but I did not stop reading the Bible and trying to pray. Praying, at least with words, was like trying to swim upstream, but I tried not to worry too much about it. I eventually gave up trying to pray words at all and would just allot a certain portion of time each day to kneel quietly before Our Lord.

I began making weekly day-trips to the nearby Abbey of Gethsemane in Bardstown, Kentucky (where Thomas Merton had lived) for more intense quiet time with God. These peaceful retreats were the most nourishing times to me during this period, and it was the closest that I felt to a spiritual home. I would often attend Compline, or Night Prayer, in the chapel. Being there with the monks chanting the Psalms was a very peaceful and prayerful experience and it caused my spirit to truly soar. There was a strong sense that my seeking after God had brought me there, and it matched so well with the longing of my spirit. I ceased to try to make everything fit together and make sense. I could gain nourishment from these Catholic resources and places without actually being Catholic. Besides, I was not Protestant anymore. I was not sure exactly what I was except a follower of Jesus, but I was neither a Protestant nor a Catholic. It was a strange time.

My apartment in Louisville was very close to Holy Spirit Catholic Church. I passed by it daily. As an act of reaching out for more avenues of spiritual nourishment, I decided to attend Mass one Sunday evening. I sat there alone, spiritually burdened, exhausted. But here was something new: A worship service that matched my current spiritual climate and answered that unnamed longing. Music and singing there were, but it was peaceful, worshipful, reverent, with a subdued and beautiful joy. There were non-embellished prayers and readings from Scripture, followed by a mini-sermon that touched on a couple good points and then was mercifully over.

This was followed by the Eucharist, and I was prepared then to endure through some strangeness, some glaring vestiges of ancient pagan rituals. However, I was pleasantly surprised: The Eucharistic prayers sounded scriptural, very Christ-centered, and quite rich and meaningful. There was no strangeness, no invoking of pagan deities. The priest, in normal language, was expounding on the Sacrifice of Jesus Christ on the Cross, which I wholeheartedly believed in. Above the altar in that particular church, there was a life-size, very life-like statue of Jesus hanging on the cross. I found myself gazing up throughout Mass at His outstretched arms. He seemed to be reaching out to embrace me, to draw me close to Him, there in that place. I did not quite understand everything, but I knew that I would return the following week.

I started to feel very much at home there at Mass. I still felt strongly that many of the underlying doctrines of the Catholic Church were wrong, but I was finding nourishment there, and as I had not found it elsewhere, I continued to come to Mass. I felt confident that I could glean spiritual nourishment by coming there and still not become Catholic.

Eventually, I was moved to begin reading "Born Fundamentalist, Born Again Catholic," which had been given to me so many months before at St. Benedict Abbey. The book actually made me angry the first time through, as the author seemed to me to be somewhat arrogant in his absolute certainty of the truths of the Catholic Faith. How could he be so sure? I continued to make the weekly trips to the Abbey of Gethsemane. I read the book again. I read the writings of the Early Church. I came quietly kneeling before Our Lord daily, like a mute beggar.

Then, through continued prayer, reading, study, and attending Mass, a great miracle took place. Nothing else except a miracle could explain the melting away of so many barriers and long-held misconceptions I had about the Catholic Faith. The first doctrine I accepted was that of the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist. I saw then those scriptures like the 6th Chapter of the Gospel of St. John in which Jesus speaks so clearly of the necessity of eating His Body and drinking His Blood. This was confirmed to me by the Early Church writings I was reading that spoke of the Eucharist in ways consistent with the Catholic teaching. The Lord's Supper in the Baptist always seemed to be a bit lacking to me, and now I saw that it did not match up with either scripture or Early Church practice.

Papal authority and apostolic succession came early on and filled for me the authority gap that Protestants had unsuccessfully sought to fill with Sola Scriptura. Again I found confirmation in the Early Church writings of the authoritative role of the successors of the Apostles and that of the local bishops. After the authority question was settled, the other "problem" doctrines fell into place: Purgatory, Mary and the Saints, Indulgences and so on. Catholic doctrines and practices are so beautifully woven together that once someone begins to accept some of the Church's teachings, the entire theological system eventually falls into place.

And so, on the 18th of February 1999, after joining the RCIA program at Holy Spirit parish, at long last I was received into full communion with the Catholic Church. Words cannot express the fire that Christ ignited in me through union with His One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church, truly a Treasure of Treasures. I could go on for pages and pages about the Eucharist alone, as well as the Blessed Virgin Mary, the Communion of Saints, the Rosary, the Divine Office, the feasts and liturgical cycle of seasons, the myriad of precious devotions, the vast 2000 years of Christ's Church on earth, and the increased love for Our Lord that He has instilled within me! New vistas and vast oceans of boundless and unspeakable riches have opened up before my eyes as the clear and brilliant light of Truth - O Glorious Truth! - unmuddled, unchanging, shines brightly in the bosom of Holy Mother Church, in the Bride and Body of Christ dispersed yet One throughout the whole earth! I knew Jesus Christ before, yes, but the crumbs and morsels of Him that I tasted and cherished before, I now find laid out in fullness before me upon the richest and most glorious Banquet Table - the Catholic Church! Praised be God Forever!

May God bless you in your own journey,

Todd Meade

You can read a more detailed episodic account of Todd's journey at his blog: Catholic Sojourner

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Evangelical Convert: Russell Stutler

Tue, 17 Apr 2012 23:09:07 +0000

Russell Stutler

On August 14, 2011, at the age of 54, Russell Stutler joined the Catholic Church after being an evangelical Protestant his entire life. Russell currently resides in Tokyo, Japan.

I was raised in a Protestant Christian home in Akron, Ohio, and we went to church every Sunday. During my childhood my family changed churches several times. We went to the Lutheran Church, Church of the Nazarene (where I promised God I would become a missionary someday), United Methodist Church (where I was baptized), Presbyterian Church, and a non-denominational evangelical mega-church called the Chapel in University Park where I became a member in my early 20s. It was a great teaching church, and I studied the Bible and memorized parts of it, which was the norm for members of that church. I studied New Testament Greek on my own so I could get at the underlying nuances in the text. I was very active in fellowship and evangelism programs, and my sense of calling to be a missionary was re-kindled there. I even went to Japan on a summer missionary program in 1983.

I then went to Malone College (now Malone University) in Canton, Ohio, to earn a Bachelor of Arts degree in Christian ministries in preparation to be a career missionary. During my time there, my old junk car wasn't up for the trip home every Sunday so I tried several churches near the campus. I discovered I was attracted to beautiful liturgy, and joined the local Episcopal Church. It was good that I had received good Bible teaching at the Chapel and at Malone College because the Episcopal Church is great at "celebrating" but not "educating" as I heard one Episcopalian say. I enjoyed the beauty of the Episcopal Church and retained all my beliefs as an evangelical Protestant. There was a lot of room in the Episcopal Church for all kinds of beliefs.

I came to Japan in 1987 as a missionary with a small evangelical Episcopal (a.k.a. Anglican) sending agency. I was their only missionary assigned to Japan. I studied the language and was active in a traveling evangelistic ministry at many different Evangelical churches by invitation, and attended the local Anglican parish on Sunday. However, after a few years I was increasingly disturbed by the strange and even heretical teaching and behavior of Anglicans -- even among the leadership -- in Japan and in America.

My missionary career ended when a financial crisis left my home office unable to send me the funds I needed, and I had to look for other ways to make a living in Japan. Although this was a difficult time, I was no longer bound by my career to the Anglican Church, so I became an active member of an evangelical church in Tokyo.

However, after 18 years in the Japanese evangelical Christian community, that hunger for liturgical worship drew me back. I have to believe that it was the Holy Spirit who was drawing me back. But once I returned, I felt like the frog who had the sense to jump out of the water as it was getting hot, only to jump back in when it was boiling! The Anglican Church, especially the Episcopal Church in America had departed from its own doctrines and had descended so low that when you looked past the beautiful facade, it hardly resembled anything Christian, and the leaders were persecuting and driving out what few faithful orthodox Christians that remained. I saw that the disease had started to have an effect on the Anglican Church in Japan. I prayed for some way to have the old liturgy without all the heresies!

Just when I realized I was at a dead end in the Anglican Church, I heard the astounding news that Pope Benedict XVI had opened a door for faithful Anglicans to enter the Catholic Church as groups which could retain the good parts of their rich Anglican heritage. I had never dreamed of being a Catholic, and had no desire to be one now. I didn't have a very positive image of the Catholic Church, although I really didn't know a whole lot about them either -- other than the fact that the Anglican Church split from them a long time ago, and there were similarities in style. But I had heard that they didn't tolerate all the nonsense that plagues the Anglicans, and that was a point in their favor.

Also, I discovered that many of the Anglicans whom I had respected for their solid faith had left the Anglican Church a long time ago. One of these was Fr. Lawrence Wheeler whom I had met in 1987. When we re-established contact after a 20 year gap, I found that he was pastor of a parish that was part of a network of churches which worshipped in the Anglican tradition but were no longer connected to the official Anglican Church. His parish was ready to accept the pope's offer, and Fr. Wheeler challenged me to seriously consider the claims of the Catholic Church myself.

As an evangelical Protestant I was reluctant to go in that direction, but someone whom I respected and had a similar background as mine was actually encouraging me to do so (Fr. Wheeler had also been an evangelical Christian before he became an Anglican). So I began to investigate the Catholic Church. I found lots of internet sources and informative books on Catholicism, many of them written by former Protestants. I discovered EWTN, a Catholic television/radio network, and started listening to podcasts of its shows, such as The Journey Home, Catholic Answers Live, and Open Line.

I spent more than a year studying the claims of the Catholic Church, the writings of the early Church Fathers and related passages in the Bible, and my objections started to melt as I became convinced that the Catholic Church is the true and original church that Jesus established on earth, that "city set on a hill that cannot be hidden," and that all of the Protestant churches I had attended and had been a member of throughout my Christian life were actually "ecclesial communities," something like hut villages located perhaps on the same hill, but clearly outside the walls of that city.

I didn't want to wait for the pope's door for Anglican groups to open, especially since nobody really knows when that will happen in Japan; I felt I had to come over to the Catholic Church.

Now the question was how to go about it. How does a Protestant become a Catholic? During my period of study, I had visited several Catholic parishes in Tokyo on Sunday mornings and ended up in a small friendly parish with an English speaking priest just a few blocks from the Anglican parish where I had attended. This allowed me to attend the 8:00 Sunday morning service at the Anglican parish and then walk over and attend the 10:30 Catholic Mass where I could experience Catholicism first hand on a regular basis and make sure this was the right decision.

I continued in this manner for several months, taking communion at the Anglican service and watching everyone else take Communion at the Catholic Mass. No doubt the music in the Anglican Church was better, but I became convinced that the Real Presence of Jesus was in the Eucharist of the Catholic Church, and that this was indeed the true and original Church that Jesus Christ had established.

By the time I decided to join the Church, I had become a familiar face at the Catholic parish, and had made lots of friends there. So it was no surprise to anyone when I finally asked the head priest how to become a member. I figured the process would be long and drawn out with several months of classes, which is the usual procedure for adults coming into the Church. But the priest surprised me by saying he could let me join at the next international mass which was seven weeks away. For preparation, he only asked me to read one document from the Second Vatican Council about the role of the Church in the modern world (Gaudium Ee Spes). When I asked why the process was so simple and quick in my case, he replied that it was because of my training and background as an Anglican missionary, and that I had studied the Catechism of the Catholic Church!

A few weeks before I was to be confirmed, I went to my first confession, where I confessed all the serious sins I could recall during my entire life. I wasn't embarrassed to confess my sins to the priest since I knew he had heard it all before. Then he said that I was forgiven of all my sins, and I knew he spoke with the authority of Jesus Christ. It felt great.

Then a few weeks later I was confirmed and joined the Catholic Church and finally took Communion there. My baptism as a teenager in the United Methodist church was considered valid, so I only needed to be confirmed.

So now I am Catholic, having become convinced that I had no choice. I was compelled to join the Catholic Church. There were basically two reasons for this.

Reason 1: Peter

Jesus said to Simon Peter in Matthew 16:18-19 , "I tell you that you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of Hades will not overcome it. I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven; whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven."

Jesus said that his plan was to build a church, and Peter was to be the rock on which it was built. In their native language Aramaic, Peter's name and the word for rock are exactly the same word: Kepha. Later on, Jesus gave all the apostles the authority to bind and loose, but he gave only to Peter the keys to the kingdom of Heaven. And Peter alone was the rock on which Jesus would build His Church.

Jesus gave great authority to the apostles and especially to Peter which would have a binding effect on Heaven itself! This is mind boggling if you read how most of them abandoned Jesus at His crucifixion, and about all the mistakes Peter made; he could be a real bumbler at times. In order to avoid a disaster, you would expect God to keep Peter and the apostles on a short leash at least during those moments when they were exercising this authority! Catholics believe that God has done just that with Peter and the apostles, and with the men who succeeded them as overseers in increasing numbers as the Church spread throughout the world to this very day with the Pope and all the bishops of the world in union with the Pope.

Throughout history God has established specific humans on earth in places of authority to guide His people, such as Moses, the prophets, judges and kings. Without such an authority on earth, the Church would have the same problems that Israel experienced during a dark period in its history: "In those days there was no king in Israel; every man did what was right in his own eyes." Judges 17:6 (NIV)

What happens when Christians reject the authority of Peter's successor? Today there are over 30,000 Protestant denominations and independent churches, each with its own interpretation of the Bible, and the number keeps growing. It has become the norm for people to church-hop until they find one that suits their personal beliefs. They do whatever is right in their own eyes.

I finally realized that I had to end my own church hopping and submit to the teaching authority of the one church that Jesus built on a rock, with the direct successors to Peter and the apostles still leading it under the guidance of the Holy Spirit.

Reason 2: The Eucharist

When Jesus performed the amazing miracle of feeding five thousand people with just five loaves of bread and two fish, a large crowd followed him, hoping to be fed again and again with more miraculous food. It was at this time that Jesus made his shocking declaration which alienated many followers:

"I tell you the truth, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you. Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up at the last day. For my flesh is real food and my blood is real drink. Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood remains in me, and I in him. Just as the living Father sent me and I live because of the Father, so the one who feeds on me will live because of me. This is the bread that came down from heaven. Your forefathers ate manna and died, but he who feeds on this bread will live forever." John 6:53-58 (NIV)

The crowd obviously took Jesus' declaration at face value because many stopped following him as a result.

Later, at the last supper, we have this account: "While they were eating, Jesus took bread, gave thanks and broke it, and gave it to his disciples, saying, "Take and eat; this is my body." Then he took the cup, gave thanks and offered it to them, saying, "Drink from it, all of you. This is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins."" Matthew 26:26-28 (NIV)

The writings of the early Church Fathers clearly show that the Church from the beginning has always taken Jesus' words literally and has always believed in this miracle, that the bread and wine become the actual Body and Blood of Jesus Christ while still retaining the appearance and taste of bread and wine. The Church has the power to bring this miracle about.

I had to join the Catholic Church because of the Real Presence of Christ in the eucharist and the grace that comes from it.

Of course, I believe I could have gone to heaven as a Protestant. Who can deny that the Holy Spirit is active in Protestant Churches? They have the gifts of the Spirit, an amazing zeal and love for Christ and the Kingdom of God. Many Protestant martyrs have shed their blood for their faith.

For me, becoming a Catholic is about stopping for a moment in the midst of all my hopping from one hut village to another and discovering a huge and beautiful walled city at the top of the hill. It's about finally entering those old and strangely familiar gates and discovering all the riches and the fullness of the faith that I had only gotten a glimpse of before. It's about receiving grace through the sacraments to live the Christian life. It's about coming home to the true Church that Jesus Christ established on earth with Peter and his successors as its leaders. Yes, I am very excited about finally becoming a Catholic.

When I take Communion, the sense of Jesus' Presence is so overwhelming that I am often moved to tears. But it's more than just an emotional high at church; I can recognize the effects of grace. I find my thoughts turning to God more often than before. I'm finally able to succeed in the "practice of the presence of God" which I had been attempting for 30 years since I read the words of Brother Lawrence (by the way, in case you forgot, Brother Lawrence was a Catholic who received all the grace that comes from Jesus' Presence in the Eucharist). I am able to resist sin more successfully than before. My joy as a Christian is deeper than before, my love for the Bible is greater than before, and man, do I look forward to going to church on Sundays -- and any week day when my schedule permits it!

I thank God that I am finally a Catholic.

If you have found this story helpful in your spiritual journey we hope you will consider sharing it. Have feedback or would like to share your story? Email us at