On Becoming Catholic

Someone on a message board asked me why I converted to the Catholic Church. That person believes one must be gullible to become catholic because apparently intellectual giants like G.K. Chesterton, J.R.R. Tolkien, and Peter Kreeft were all “gullible”. So why did I end up believing what the Catholic Church teaches? Here is my answer:
“To be deep in history is to cease to be Protestant.” – Cardinal Newman

I was baptized as an infant in the Catholic Church (mostly due to the wishes of my father’s family) but after my parents divorced I was raised as an evangelical/protestant. My earliest memories are sitting with my grandparents in a rural Methodist church. This is where I first learned of Jesus and salvation – formation that was invaluable in my life.

My mother remarried when I was 6 and my family began going to a non-denominational church. As a young child, I wasn’t interested in hearing the sermons but I did hear all the bible stories in Sunday school. When I was in third grade I ended up with a shoe box full of baseball cards that I won over the course of the year as prizes in winning “Bible drills” (sometimes called sword drills) in Sunday school. All the students would hold their Bibles in the air and the teacher would call out a Bible verse. The first one to find the verse would win the prize.

As an adult, I still believed in the faith of my youth but I went the church less often. Church going pretty much ended when I met my wife who was raised in the Catholic Church although she had never been confirmed. She didn’t like going to my church (it just didn’t seem like church to her) and I didn’t want to go to a catholic church. It was just too ritualistic for me even though I had agreed to get married in the Catholic Church.

Soon after our wedding, my wife decided she wanted to go back to church – the Catholic Church. The Deacon that performed our wedding ceremony invited us to go to RCIA classes. I agreed to attend with her. We began the classes twice early in our marriage but dropped out both times because of different complications in our lives.

In 2004, my wife decided it was time to get confirmed. I again agreed to go with her. I agreed with her that faith needed to be a bigger part of our lives. I had a different plan though. I was thinking we would go to RCIA classes and I would find all the reasons why the Catholic faith was wrong. I would then gently share with her these reasons and we would find ourselves back in an evangelical church – you know, the kind Jesus started.

This time RCIA gave me some problems though. That is where I began to come aware of the historic church. When looking at the history of Protestantism, I realized that I would have to accept that God abandoned the world to heresy shortly after the apostles died and did not restore a way of salvation until 1500 years later. I discovered there really is no direct historical connection between Christ and protestants. Jesus lived 1500 years before the Protestant Reformation.

Then I started to look at the foundation of my belief – that the Bible is the sole authority of my faith or “sola scriptura.” Turned out I couldn’t find where the Bible said it was the sole authority. In fact, the Bible does not make that claim. This was an “uh-oh” moment for me.

If sola scriptura was not supported, then I needed to consider other options. Intellectual honesty required me to consider Catholic teaching. I discovered that the church did have a historic connection to Christ, that God didn’t really abandon the world for centuries. Jesus never said “Bible only”. I realized that 2 Timothy 3:16 (a favorite verse for sola scriptura advocates) was saying that Old Testament writings are still relevant in light of the New Covenant of Jesus, not that the apostle Paul advocated “Bible only” faith

So yes, to be deep in history was, for me, to cease to be protestant.

Part II The Eucharist

Is the Church right that Jesus was speaking literally when he took bread and said “this is my body?”

The objections I heard to that was that, while Jesus said “this is my body”, he also said he was “the door” and “the vine” but we don’t think he was talking literally in the latter cases.

What convinced me that Jesus was talking literally was reading John 6 for myself. In this chapter, Jesus is speaking to a Jewish crowd and foreshadows the Last Supper by telling the people that they must “eat my body.” I had been taught that when Jesus was speaking symbolically. When I read it this time, I paid attention to reactions of those he was speaking to.

Many of his own disciples left him after his declaration – the only time recorded in the gospels that disciples left over teaching. By that point those disciples had been with him for some time. This was not at the beginning of Jesus ministry, rather closer to the end. Those disciples must have known Jesus enough to understand when he was talking literally and when he wasn’t.

Evangelicals teach that Jesus was speaking figuratively but that the people were blind and did not understand it. But Jesus did not budge from his message when pressed on it. He never says “by ‘eat my flesh’ I really mean ‘just believe in me.’”

An honest teacher is morally obligated to clarify his position. If Jesus was speaking figuratively but knew his words are being interpreted literally, he is lying if his clarification furthers the literal view. Jesus is not a liar.

Jesus spends twenty five verses referring to his body as bread in a literal sense in John 6:35-59. In verse 52 the Jews are complaining about the literal nature of his teaching but he does not back down. He continues in verses 53-58 to make six more statements of a literal nature about his body being bread.

The rebuttal I have heard is that Jesus says in the last half of verse 63 “the flesh counts for nothing” so he must be talking symbolically. That does not support his previous statements though. Jesus spends twenty-five previous verses calling himself literal bread. That is a contradiction. That is unless Jesus is not referring to his own flesh in verse 63. It makes no sense to me that he would spend so much time speaking literally, purposely allowing people to think that way, then as an aside essentially say, “you know what, I didn’t really mean it that way. Next subject.”

Jesus knew what he was saying. He said what he meant and meant what he said.

The result of this revelation was that my plan to get my wife to reject the Catholic Church was completely undone. Instead of finding out all the reason they were wrong, I found the reasons they were right. I was received into the Church during the Easter Vigil of 2005 , eight months after I began RCIA with the intent of rejecting Catholic faith.

That’s why I’m Catholic.