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.

When my mother remarried, my family began going to a non-denominational church. As a young child, I wasn’t interested in hearing the sermons, but I heard 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). 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.

After our marriage, 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 and dropped out both times.

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.

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. There is no historic 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 is the Bible is the sole authority of my faith or sola scriptura. Turned out I couldn’t find anywhere the Bible said it was the sole authority. Uh-oh.

This is part of how I got to the point where I considered Catholic teaching. I found the church did have a historic connection to Christ that God didn’t really abandon the world for centuries. I realized that Jesus never said “Bible only”. I realized that 2 Timothy 3:16 was saying that Old Testament writings are still relevant, not that sola scriptura was required.

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

Part II

The Eucharist. Is the Church right the Jesus was literal when he took bread and said “this is my body?”

The objections I heard to 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 where he foreshadowed his words in the last supper and then I paid attention to reactions of those he was speaking to. Jesus said “you must eat my body.” Many of his own disciples left him – 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.

When I read John 6:50-51, I count Jesus saying three times in a literal sense that we must eat his body. In verse 52 the Jews are complaining about the literal nature of his teaching. In verses 53-58 he makes 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.” I don’t understand that. Jesus spends twenty-five previous verses calling himself literal bread. That’s a contradiction. 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.

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.

That’s why I’m catholic.