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Much learning hath made you mad!
I was nervous as I pulled into the parking lot of the huge gothic structure. I had never been inside a Catholic Church, and I didn’t know what to expect.
I entered the church quickly, skirting the holy water fonts, and scuttled down the aisle, unsure of the correct protocol for getting into the pew. I knew Catholics bowed, or curtsied, or did some sort of jig-like obeisance toward the alter before entering the pew, but I just slipped in and scrunched down, happy not to have been recognized as a Protestant.
After a few minutes of no grim faced usher tapping me on the shoulder and jerking his thumb back toward the door?“Come on, pal, hit the road. We all know you’re not Catholic”?I began to relax and gape at the strange but undeniably beautiful interior of the church.
A few moments later Scott strode to the podium and began his talk with a prayer. When he made the sign of the cross, I knew he had truly jumped ship. My heart sank. “Poor Scott.” I groaned inwardly. “The Catholics got him with their clever arguments.” I listened intently to his talk on the Last Supper entitled “The Fourth Cup,” trying hard to detect the errors in his thinking. But I couldn’t find any. (Scott’s talk was so good I plagiarized most of it in my next communion sermon.)
As he spoke, using Scripture at each step to support Catholic teaching on the Mass and the Eucharist, I found myself mesmerized by what I heard. Catholicism was being explained in a way I had never imagined possible?from the Bible! As he explained them, the Mass and the Eucharist were not offensive or foreign to me. At the end of his talk, when Scott issued a stirring call to a radical conversion to Christ, I wondered if maybe he had only feigned conversion so he could infiltrate the Catholic Church to bring about renewal and conversion of spiritually-dead Catholics.
It didn’t take long before I found out.
After the audience’s applause subsided I went up front to see if he would recognize me. He was surrounded by a throng of people with questions. I stood a few feet away and studied his face as he spoke with his typical charm and conviction to the large knot of people. Yes, this was the same Scott I knew in seminary. He now sported a mustache and I a seasonal full beard (quite a change from our clean cut seminary days), but when he turned in my direction his eyes sparkled as he grinned a silent hello.
In a moment we stood together, clasped in a warm handshake, he apologizing if he had offended me in any way. “No, of course not!” I assured him as we laughed with the sheer delight of seeing each other again. After a few moments of obligatory “How’s-your-wife-and-family?” chitchat, I blurted out the one thought on my mind. “I guess it’s true what I heard. Why did you jump ship and become Catholic?” Scott gave me a brief explanation of his struggle to find the truth about Catholicism (the throng of people listened intently as he gave his mini-conversion story), and suggested I pick up a copy of his conversion story tape, copies of which were being snapped up briskly at the literature table in the vestibule.
We exchanged phone numbers and shook hands again, and I headed for the back of the church where I found a table covered with tapes on the Catholic faith done by Scott and his wife Kimberly, as well as tapes by Steve Wood, another convert to Catholicism who had studied at Gordon-Conwell Seminary. I bought a copy of each tape and a copy of a book Scott had recommended, Karl Keating’s Catholicism and Fundamentalism.
Before I left, I stood in the back of the church, taking in for a moment the strange yet attractive hallmarks of Catholicism that surrounded me: icons and statues, ornate altar, candles, and dark confessional booths. I stood there for a moment wondering why God had called me to this place, then I stepped into the cold night air, my head dizzy with thought and my heart flooded with a confusing jumble of emotions.
I went to a fast food restaurant, got a burger for the long drive home, and slipped Scott’s conversion tape into the player, planning to discover where he had gone wrong. I didn’t get half way home before I was so overwhelmed with emotion that I had to pull off the highway so I could clear my head.
Even though Scott’s journey to the Catholic Church was very different then mine, the questions he and I grappled with were essential the same. And the answers he found which had so drastically changed his life were very compelling. His testimony convinced me that the reasons for my growing dissatisfaction with Protestantism couldn’t be ignored. The answers to my questions, he claimed, were found in the Catholic Church. The idea pierced me to the core.
I was at once frightened and exhilarated by the thought that God might be calling me into the Catholic Church. I prayed for awhile, my head resting on the steering wheel, collecting my thoughts before I started the car again and drove home.
The next day, I opened Catholicism and Fundamentalism, and read straight through, finishing the final chapter, that night. As I prepared to retire for the night, I knew I was in trouble! It was clear to me now that the two central dogmas of the Protestant Reformation, sola scriptura (Scripture alone) and sola fide (justification by faith alone), were on very shaky biblical ground, and therefore so was I.
My appetite thus whetted, I began reading Catholic books, especially the early Church Fathers, whose writings helped me understand the truth about Catholic history prior to the Reformation. I spent countless hours debating with Catholics and Protestants, doing my best to subject Catholic claims to the toughest biblical arguments I could find. Marilyn, as you might guess, was not pleased when I told her about my struggle with the claims of the Catholic Church. Although at first she told me, “This too will pass,” eventually she too became intrigued with the things I was learning, and began studying for herself.
As I waded through book after book, I shared with her the clear and common sense teachings of the Catholic Church I was discovering. More often then not we would conclude together how much more sense and how much truer to Scripture the views of the Catholic Church seemed than anything we had found in the wide range of Protestant opinions. There was depth, an historical strength, a philosophical consistency to the Catholic positions we encountered. The Lord worked an amazing transformation in both our lives, coaxing us along, side by side, step by step, together all the way.
But, with all these good things we were finding in the Catholic Church, we were also confronted by some confusing and disturbing issues. I encountered priests who thought me strange for considering the Catholic Church. They felt that conversion was unnecessary. We met Catholics who knew little about their faith, and whose life-styles conflicted with the moral teachings of their Church. When we attended masses we found ourselves unwelcomed and unassisted by anyone. But in spite of these obstacles blocking our path to the Church, we kept studying and praying for the Lord’s guidance.
After listening to dozens of tapes and digesting several dozen books, I knew I could no longer remain a Protestant. It had became clear that the Protestant answer to church renewal was, of all things, unscriptural. Jesus had prayed for unity among his followers, and Paul and John both challenged their followers to hold fast to the truth they had received, not letting opinions divide them. As Protestants we had become infatuated by our freedom, placing personal opinion over the teaching authority of the Church. We believed that the guidance of the Holy Spirit is enough to lead any sincere seeker to the true meaning of Scripture.
The Catholic response to this view is that it is the mission of the Church to teach with infallible certitude. Christ promised the apostles and their successors, “He who listens to you listens to me. And he who rejects you rejects me and rejects the one who sent me” (Luke 10:16). The early Church believed this too. A very compelling passage leaped out at me one day while I was studying Church history:

The Apostles received the gospel for us from the Lord Jesus Christ; and Jesus Christ was sent from God. Christ, therefore, is from God, and the Apostles are from Christ. Both of these orderly arrangements, then, are by God’s will. Receiving their instructions and being full of confidence on the account of the Resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ, and confirmed in faith by the Word of God, they went forth in the complete assurance of the Holy Spirit, preaching the Good News that the kingdom of God is coming. Through countryside and city they preached; and they appointed their earliest converts, testing them by the Spirit, to be the bishops and deacons of future believers. Nor was this a novelty: for bishops and deacons had been written about a long time earlier. Indeed, Scripture somewhere says: “I will set up their bishops in righteousness and their deacons in faith (Clement of Rome, Epistle to the Corinthians 42:1-5 [ca. A.D. 80]).

Another patristic quote that helped breach the wall of my Protestant presuppositions was this one from Irenaeus, bishop of Lyons:

When, therefore, we have such proofs, it is not necessary to seek among others the truth which is easily obtained from the Church. For the apostles, like a rich man in a bank, deposited with her most copiously everything that pertains to the truth; and everyone whosoever wishes draws from her the drink of life. For she is the entrance to life, while all the rest are thieves and robbers. That is why it is surely necessary to avoid them, while cherishing with the utmost diligence the things pertaining to the Church, and to lay hold of the tradition of truth. What then? If there should be a dispute over some kind of question, ought we not have recourse to the most ancient churches in which the apostles were familiar, and draw from them what is clear and certain in regard to that question? What if the apostles had not in fact left writings for us? Would it not be necessary to follow the order of tradition, which was handed down to those to whom they entrusted the Churches? (Against Heresies 3,4,1 [ca. A.D. 180]).

I studied the causes for the Reformation. The Roman Catholic Church of that day was desperately in need of renewal but Martin Luther and the other Reformers chose the wrong, the unbiblical, method for dealing with the problems they saw in the Church. The correct route was and still is just what my Presbyterian friend had told me: Don’t leave the Church; don’t break the unity of faith. Work for genuine reform based on God’s plan, not man’s, achieving it through prayer, penance, and good example.
I could no longer remain Protestant. To do so meant I must deny Christ’s promise to guide and protect his Church and to send the Holy Spirit to lead it into all truth (cf. Matt. 16:18-19, 18:18, 28:20; John 14:16, 25, 16:13). But I couldn’t bear the thought of becoming a Catholic. I’d been taught for so long to despise “Romanism” that, even though intellectually I had discovered Catholicism to be true, I had a hard time shaking my emotional prejudice against the Church.
One key difficulty was the psychological adjustment to the complexity of Catholic theology. By contrast Protestantism is simple: admit you’re a sinner, repent of your sins, accept Jesus as your personal Savior, trust in him to forgive you, and you’re saved.
I continued studying Scripture and Catholic books and spent many hours debating with Protestant friends and colleagues over difficult issues like Mary, praying to the saints, indulgences, purgatory, priestly celibacy, and the Eucharist. Eventually I realized that the single most important issue was authority. All of this wrangling over how to interpret Scripture gets one nowhere if there is no way to know with infallible certitude that one’s interpretation is the right one. The teaching authority of the Church in the magisterium centered around the seat of Peter. If I could accept this doctrine, I knew I could trust the Church on everything else.
I read Fr. Stanley Jaki’s The Keys to the Kingdom and Upon This Rock, and the Documents of Vatican II and earlier councils, especially Trent. I carefully studied Scripture and the writings of Calvin, Luther, and the other Reformers to test the Catholic argument. Time after time I found the Protestant arguments against the primacy of Peter simply weren’t biblical or historical. It became clear that the Catholic position was the biblical one.
The Holy Spirit delivered a literal coup de grace to my remaining anti-Catholic biases when I read John Henry Cardinal Newman’s landmark book, An Essay on the Development of the Christian Doctrine. In fact, my objections evaporated when I read 12 pages in the middle of the book in which Newman explains the gradual development of papal authority. “It is less difficulty that the papal supremacy was not formally acknowledged in the second century, then that there was no formal acknowledgment on the part of the Church of the doctrine of the Holy Trinity till the fourth. No doctrine is defined till violated.”
My study of Catholic claims took about a year and a half. During this period, Marilyn and I studied together, sharing together as a couple the fears, hopes, and challenges that accompanied us along the path to Rome. We attended Mass together weekly, making the drive to a parish far enough away from our home town (my former Presbyterian Church was less then a mile from our home) to avoid the controversy and confusion that would undoubtedly arise if my former parishioners knew that I was investigating Rome.
We gradually began to feel comfortable doing all the things Catholics did at Mass (except receiving Communion, of course). Doctrinally, emotionally, and spiritually, we felt ready to formally enter the Church, but there remained one barrier for us to surmount.
Before Marilyn and I met and had fallen in love, she had been divorced after a brief marriage. Since we were Protestants when we met and married, this posed no problem, as far as we and our denomination were concerned. It wasn’t until we felt we were ready to enter the Catholic Church that we were informed that we couldn’t do so unless Marilyn could receive an annulment of her first marriage. At first, we felt like God was playing a joke on us! Then we moved from shock to anger. It seemed so unfair and ridiculously hypocritical: we could have committed almost any other sin, no matter how heinous, and with one confession been adequately cleansed for Church admission, yet because of this one mistake our entry into the Catholic Church had been stopped dead in the water.
But then we remembered what had brought us to this point in our spiritual pilgrimage: we were to trust God with all our hearts and lean not on our own understanding. We were to acknowledge him and trust that he would direct our paths. It became evident to us that this was a final test of perseverance sent by God.
So Marilyn began the difficult annulment investigation process, and we waited. We continued attending Mass, remaining seated in the pew, our hearts aching while those around us went forward to receive the Lord in the Holy Eucharist and we could not. It was by not being able to receive the Eucharist that we learned to appreciate the awesome privilege that Jesus bestows on his beloved of receiving him Body and Blood, Soul and Divinity in the Blessed Sacrament. The Lord’s promise in Scripture became real to us during those Masses: “The Lord chastises the son whom he loves” (Heb. 12:6).
After a nine-month wait, we learned that Marilyn’s annulment had been granted. Without further delay our marriage was blessed, and we were received with great excitement and celebration into the Catholic Church. It felt so incredibly good to finally be home where we belonged. I wept quiet tears of joy and gratitude that first Mass when I was able to walk forward with the rest of my Catholic brothers and sisters and receive Jesus in Holy Communion.
I asked the Lord many times in prayer, “What is truth?” He answered me in Scripture by saying, “I am the way, the truth and the life.” I rejoice that now as a Catholic I can not only know the Truth but receive him in the Eucharist.

Apologia pro a final few words sua
I think that it is important that I mention one more of John Henry Cardinal Newman’s insights that made a crucial difference in the process of my conversion to the Catholic Church. He wrote: “To be deep in history is to cease to be a Protestant.” This one line summarizes a key reason why I abandoned Protestantism, bypassed the Orthodox Church, and became a Catholic.
Newman was right. The more I read Church history and Scripture the less I could comfortably remain Protestant. I saw that it was the Catholic Church that was established by Jesus Christ, and all the other claimants to the title “true church” had to step aside. It was the Bible and Church history that made a Catholic out of me, against my will (at least at first) and to my immense surprise. I also learned that the flip side of Newman’s adage is equally true: To cease to be deep in history is to become a Protestant.
That’s why we Catholics must know why we believe what the Church teaches as well as the history behind these truths of our salvation. We must prepare ourselves and our children to “Always be ready to give an explanation to anyone who asks for a reason for your hope” (1 Peter 3:15). By boldly living and proclaiming our faith many will hear Christ speaking through us and will be brought to a knowledge of the truth in all its fullness in the Catholic Church. God bless you!