I Hated the Idea of Becoming Catholic

Aleteia ^ | JUNE 20, 2014 | ANTHONY BARATTA

[NYer]

It was the day after Ash Wednesday in 2012 when I called my mom from my dorm room at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and told her I thought I was going to become Catholic.

“You’re not going to become Catholic, you just know you’re not Southern Baptist,” she said.

“No, I don’t think so.”

A pause. “Oh boy,” she sighed.

I started crying.

I cannot stress enough how much I hated the idea of becoming Catholic. I was bargaining to the last moment. I submitted a sermon for a competition days before withdrawing from school. I was memorizing Psalm 119 to convince myself of sola scriptura. I set up meetings with professors to hear the best arguments. I purposefully read Protestant books about Catholicism, rather than books by Catholic authors.

Further, I knew I would lose my housing money and have to pay a scholarship back if I withdrew from school, not to mention disappointing family, friends, and a dedicated church community.

But when I attempted to do my homework, I collapsed on my bed. All I wanted to do was scream at the textbook, “Who says?!”

I had experienced a huge paradigm shift in my thinking about the faith, and the question of apostolic authority loomed larger than ever.

But let’s rewind back a few years.

I grew up in an evangelical Protestant home. My father was a worship and preaching pastor from when I was in fourth grade onwards. Midway through college, I really fell in love with Jesus Christ and His precious Gospel and decided to become a pastor.

It was during that time that I was hardened in my assumption that the Roman Catholic Church didn’t adhere to the Bible. When I asked one pastor friend of mine during my junior year why Catholics thought Mary remained a virgin after Jesus’ birth when the Bible clearly said Jesus had “brothers,” he simply grimaced: “They don’t read the Bible.”

Though I had been in talks with Seattle’s Mars Hill Church about doing an internship with them, John Piper’s book Don’t Waste Your Life clarified my call to missionary work specifically, and I spent the next summer evangelizing Catholics in Poland.

So I was surprised when I visited my parents and found a silly looking book titled Born Fundamentalist, Born Again Catholic on my father’s desk. What was my dad doing reading something like this? I was curious and hadn’t brought anything home to read, so I gave it a look.

David Currie’s memoir of leaving behind his evangelical education and ministries was bothersome. His unapologetic defense of controversial doctrines regarding Mary and the papacy were most shocking, as I had never seriously considered that Catholics would have sensible, scriptural defenses to these beliefs.

The book’s presence on my father’s desk was explained more fully a few months later when he called me and said he was returning to the Catholicism of his youth. My response? “But, can’t you just be Lutheran or something?” I felt angry, betrayed, and indignant. For the next four months I served as a youth pastor at my local church and, in my free time, read up on why Catholicism was wrong.

During that time, I stumbled across a Christianity Today article that depicted an “evangelical identity crisis.” The author painted a picture of young evangelicals, growing up in a post-modern world, yearning to be firmly rooted in history and encouraged that others had stood strong for Christ in changing and troubled times. Yet, in my experience, most evangelical churches did not observe the liturgical calendar, the Apostles’ Creed was never mentioned, many of the songs were written after 1997, and if any anecdotal story was told about a hero from church history, it was certainly from after the Reformation. Most of Christian history was nowhere to be found.

For the first time, I panicked. I found a copy of the Catechism and started leafing through it, finding the most controversial doctrines and laughing at the silliness of the Catholic Church. Indulgences? Papal infallibility? These things, so obviously wrong, reassured me in my Protestantism. The Mass sounded beautiful and the idea of a visible, unified Church was appealing - but at the expense of the Gospel? It seemed obvious that Satan would build a large organization that would lead so many just short of heaven.

I shook off most of the doubts and enjoyed the remainder of my time at college, having fun with the youth group and sharing my faith with the students. Any lingering doubts, I assumed, would be dealt with in seminary.

I started my classes in January with the excitement of a die-hard football fan going to the Super Bowl. The classes were fantastic and I thought I had finally rid myself of any Catholic problems.

But just a few weeks later, I ran into more doubts. We were learning about spiritual disciplines like prayer and fasting and I was struck by how often the professor would skip from St. Paul to Martin Luther or Jonathan Edwards when describing admirable lives of piety. Did nothing worthwhile happen in the first 1500 years? The skipping of history would continue in many other classes and assigned reading. The majority of pre-Reformation church history was ignored.

I soon discovered I had less in common with the early Church fathers than I thought. Unlike most Christians in history, communion had always been for me an occasional eating of bread and grape juice, and baptism was only important after someone had gotten “saved.” Not only did these views contradict much of Church history but, increasingly, they did not match with uncomfortable Bible passages I had always shrugged off (John 6, Romans 6, etc).

Other questions that I had buried began to reappear, no longer docile but ferocious, demanding an answer. Where did the Bible come from? Why didn’t the Bible claim to be “sufficient”? The Protestant answers that had held me over in the last year were no longer satisfying.

Jefferson Bethke’s viral YouTube video, “Why I Hate Religion, But Love Jesus,” was released during this time. The young man meant well, but to me he only validated what the Wall Street Journal called “the dangerous theological anarchy of young evangelicals,” attempting to remove Jesus from the confines of religion but losing so much in the process.

Ash Wednesday was the tipping point. A hip Southern Baptist church in Louisville held a morning Ash Wednesday service and many students showed up to classes with ashes on their forehead. At chapel that afternoon, a professor renowned for his apologetic efforts against Catholicism expounded upon the beauty of this thousand year old tradition.

Afterwards, I asked a seminary friend why most evangelicals had rejected this beautiful thing. He responded with something about Pharisees and “man-made traditions.”

I shook my head. “I can’t do this anymore.”

My resistance to Catholicism started to fade. I was feeling drawn to the sacraments, sacramentals, physical manifestations of God’s grace, the one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church. No more borrowing, no more denying.

It was the next day that I called my mom and told her I thought I was going to become Catholic.

I didn’t go to classes on Friday. I went to the seminary library and checked out books I had previously forbidden myself to look at too closely, like the Catechism and Pope Benedict’s latest. I felt like I was checking out porn. Later, I drove to a 5pm Saturday Mass. The gorgeous crucifix at the front of the church reminded me of when I had mused that crucifixes demonstrated that Catholics didn’t really understand the resurrection.

But I saw the crucifix differently this time and began crying. “Jesus, my suffering savior, you’re here.”

A peace came over me until Tuesday, when it yielded to face-to-windshield reality. Should I stay or leave? I had several panicked phone calls: “I literally have no idea what I am going to do tomorrow morning.”

On Wednesday morning I woke up, opened my laptop, and typed out “77 Reasons I Am Leaving Evangelicalism.” The list included things like sola scriptura, justification, authority, the Eucharist, history, beauty, and continuity between the Old and New Testament. The headlines and the ensuing paragraphs flowed from my fingers like water bursting from a centuries-old dam. 

A few hours later on February 29, 2012 I slipped out of Louisville, Kentucky, eager to not confuse anyone else and hoping I wasn’t making a mistake.  

The next few months were painful. More than anything else I felt ashamed and defensive, uncertain of how so much of my identity and career path could be upended so quickly. Nonetheless, I joined the Church on Pentecost with the support of my family and started looking for work.

So much has changed since then. I met Jackie on CatholicMatch.com that June, got married a year later, and celebrated the birth of our daughter, Evelyn, on March 3rd, 2014. We’re now in Indiana and I’m happy at my job.

I’m still very new on this Catholic journey. To all inquirers out there, I can tell you that my relationship with God has deepened and strengthened. As I get involved in our parish, I’m so thankful for the love of evangelism and the Bible that I learned in Protestantism.

I have not so much left my former faith as I have filled in the gaps. I thank God for the fullness of the Catholic faith.

[CynicalBear]

Better yet would be “the universal assembly”. The concept of “church” that Catholics like to put forth is totally against anything written in scripture.

[CynicalBear]

And yet you considered it enough to take make the effort and take the time to post the comment. Hmmmmmm???

[BlueDragon]

My heart is so broken.

Oh what will I now do? oh, boo-hoo.

[Resettozero]

Then you probably mean...

...the Holy (c)atholic Church.

That is what I mean inside my head. Thanks for the correction.

R2z

[Resettozero]

Better yet would be “the universal assembly”. The concept of “church” that Catholics like to put forth is totally against anything written in scripture.

More than an assembly of believers to worship God; we are His Body, every part working beautifully together for the Kingdom of God, which we have seen only by faith and revelation.

And yes, by "catholic", I meant "universal".

[Resettozero]

If anyone speaks in a tongue, he should translate.

Why, that's another 500+ post thread.

[af_vet_1981]

But first among them are the Muslims right?

None have the right to hate the Muslims more than do Catholics, yet they do not. Think about the story of the prophet of Israel and the capital of Nineveh which would later invade Israel. Keep in mind Jewish tradition that Jonah was the child brought back to life by Elijah, and that the Muslims revere Jonah as a true prophet.

But it displeased Jonah exceedingly, and he was very angry. And he prayed unto the LORD, and said, I pray thee, O LORD, was not this my saying, when I was yet in my country? Therefore I fled before unto Tarshish: for I knew that thou art a gracious God, and merciful, slow to anger, and of great kindness, and repentest thee of the evil. Therefore now, O LORD, take, I beseech thee, my life from me; for it is better for me to die than to live. Then said the LORD, Doest thou well to be angry?

So Jonah went out of the city, and sat on the east side of the city, and there made him a booth, and sat under it in the shadow, till he might see what would become of the city. And the LORD God prepared a gourd, and made it to come up over Jonah, that it might be a shadow over his head, to deliver him from his grief. So Jonah was exceeding glad of the gourd. But God prepared a worm when the morning rose the next day, and it smote the gourd that it withered. 8And it came to pass, when the sun did arise, that God prepared a vehement east wind; and the sun beat upon the head of Jonah, that he fainted, and wished in himself to die, and said, It is better for me to die than to live.

And God said to Jonah, Doest thou well to be angry for the gourd? And he said, I do well to be angry, even unto death. Then said the LORD, Thou hast had pity on the gourd, for the which thou hast not laboured, neither madest it grow; which came up in a night, and perished in a night: And should not I spare Nineveh, that great city, wherein are more than sixscore thousand persons that cannot discern between their right hand and their left hand; and also much cattle?

[BlueDragon]

The bottom line is that the requirement by some to identify with some earthly formed “denomination” has no basis in scripture.

Yet it is written to not neglect the gathering of ourselves together.

And so, many attend church services and function with others, where there will be a mix of things, as there is a mix of people and their problems, along with their various giftings and blessings.

Coming together to share in worship can be quite important. There may be some exception for this... but that would be rare, and perhaps for seasons, or time-periods of a few persons lives.

But don't get me wrong. I am not recommending distancing one's own self too far away, or for too long, for there can be as serious dangers in doing so (for a Christian) as there can be in occasional contexts, that which goes beyond the more ordinary and mundane difficulties of interpersonal & institutional relationships, to that which can be seriously grievous. So I do not condemn those who hold themselves somewhat distant...

Still, all the "fishing around" which we have been seeing on this forum in the last few days concerning the personal religious affiliations of persons here, engaged in by a handful of Roman Catholics, comes across to me as nothing other than effort on their part to find something which they may criticize, and/or bash persons concerning, while making it as personal as possible (I've seen this particular movie, more than once) doing so in order to somehow get even with those who have criticized Roman Catholicism.

What's the use in all of that?

This forum's purpose is not to provide space for flamefests.

[aMorePerfectUnion]

“When we get down to brass tacks, however, and when the rubber meets the road, when we come face to face with the gut issues of life and our own demise, there is only one thing in all of creation that matters. What is the plan of salvation? “

+1

[CynicalBear]

>>Yet it is written to not neglect the gathering of ourselves together.<<

I fail to understand the gigantic leap people seem to take from not being affiliated with some organized religion to not gathering as believers.

[CynicalBear]

I’m sure somehow that made sense to you. However it had nothing to do with the fact that the Muslims do NOT serve the God of scripture yet the Catholic Church doesn’t even understand that.

[Resettozero]

... there is only one thing in all of creation that matters.

Indeed, yes. And that only one thing is a Person, as you know but others may not yet know, is Jesus Christ, Lord of Heaven and Earth, Son of the living God, and our Savior, Healer, Sanctifier, and Coming King soon to appear to all.

Important stuff; like you say, not for trivial pursuit.

[Resettozero]

Every time someone comes up with that “you shouldn’t judge” statement it tells me they internally sense they are in error.

As if they see the BSOD error message for a split second, but don't believe it, and allow themselves to reboot, reboot, reboot...

...hoping for a different outcome on one reboot...one day...maybe.

[verga]

Actually I didn’t read it at all, I was just too polite to say; “Shut up.”

[CynicalBear]

LOL Good analogy!

[imardmd1]

I have no ill feelings at all toward Rome.

You have to go to Northern Ireland To understand how deep the divisions really are when you cut deep to the root; and what the unrestricted Romanists really feel about you.

Furthermore, some RC posters on FR seem to be political liberals in conservatives' clothing.

They basically are, when their core program is the "social gospel" (to which the Methodists also subscribe), where the emphasis is more on the social part than the gospel part.

[BlueDragon]

Actually I didn’t read it at all, I was just too polite to say; “Shut up.”

So now there is pretense for yourself having some politeness, even as you admit to being so rude that you not read or consider at all what someone writes directly to yourself?

That's playing both ends against the middle.

Stop being such a rude example of your own name -- and maybe just maybe the general tone of conversation around here could eventually become less acrimonious...

[BipolarBob]

One would think that Nicodemus understood the language being spoken better than any of us. If Jesus had used a word to strictly mean “from above” why would Nicodemus ask about re-entering the womb?

I mostly answered this in post #490. Nicodemus was a Church Leader and was well aware of the terms for a "spiritual re-birth" as it applied to a nation or Gentiles. Here he was feigning ignorance to hide his surprise to think that he, a devout Jew, was lacking in anything God required. It wasn't the term which confused him but Jesus' insinuation about Nicodemus' salvation.

[af_vet_1981]

I’m sure somehow that made sense to you. However it had nothing to do with the fact that the Muslims do NOT serve the God of scripture yet the Catholic Church doesn’t even understand that.

But whereunto shall I liken this generation? It is like unto children sitting in the markets, and calling unto their fellows, And saying, We have piped unto you, and ye have not danced; we have mourned unto you, and ye have not lamented. For John came neither eating nor drinking, and they say, He hath a devil. The Son of man came eating and drinking, and they say, Behold a man gluttonous, and a winebibber, a friend of publicans and sinners. But wisdom is justified of her children.

[delchiante]

If you are not a catholic or a follower of a protestant organization, why do you care about the number of the beast?

Why would it have any interest for you?

The only reason I can come up with, and correct me if I a wrong, but it is because it hits too close to home and not because it hits Rome.. (like it did me)

And if it hits Rome, it actually hits too close to any Christians home if they are honest..

Because I too wasn’t a member of any church... I was associated with the presbyterians though by ‘tradition’
I thought there was real differences..

Then He showed me there wasn’t..

And He used a nice Catholic to help prove it to me.. that is one way to have your eyes opened..

The catholics didn’t have the problem with their faith.. I did... the only difference between me and them was mary..
And it was that mary that I tested when a nice catholic gave me some rosary beads..
And that mary is a lying prophetess-

If that Mary lies, she is lying about her son.. that isn’t a Catholic thing.. that is a Christian thing..

And asking, seeking, knocking one can find real Truth.

And it isn’t in Christendom, sad to say. Christian truth is Jesus, December 25, easter and sunday ( or Saturday depending on the sect) the words are truth.. but the worship is false..

Those aren’t truths in scripture..
If scripture could prove all those as just ‘traditions’ it would not just affect the ‘evil’ pope or papacy. and they can be proven.

And that maybe is why people who would rather be beating up Catholics and their worship are a little sensitive if it can be shown that the worship that is false for catholics is false for others who also call themselves Christians..

The mirror turned back isn’t a comfortable thing.. praise Yah He will forgive us when we confess our sins and we can go and sin no more..

Rome is just as dominating as they were over the years.. they don’t do it by the edge of the sword.. well, unless you are an enemy of their system..
Like places like Afghanistan, Iran.. those places don’t use the pope’s system to tell time..
Funny, those are two places that seem to be areas of concern or conflict by places like america (which does adhere to the pope’s system)

Today is some god named Tiw’s day on the English calendar.. it is,however,the First Day of the week on our Heavenly Father’s Kingdom calendar found in scripture and in His sky.
Yesterday was His weekly Sabbath.. sounds nuts to people who follow Rome’s system.

So does the thought that the name Jesus, December 25, easter and both Saturday and Sunday are not truth and can be explained with scripture.

But I don’t pretend to hate the papacy or pope and then let them set my work and worship schedule..

I know what scripture means when it say, to those who overcome... it isn’t a world set up to properly worship Him in spirit and truth.. that occurs in each believer until His Kingdom comes.

But His Kingdom will come. We pray for it all the time.. it may be a rather rude awakening when it does come for most.
They may find themselves defending the world and its systems ignorantly.

Without His mercy and grace none would be saved.

Pray for wisdom, knowledge and understanding,and then don’t be afraid to follow where He leads..

You may not be a member of a particular denomination for a reason.. I didn’t understand why He didn’t let me join a church..

Now I know why..