Posted on 11/18/2002 8:34:02 AM PST by pseudo-justin
Church Is Still Attracting Converts
By PAUL LIKOUDIS
A personal note: The phone rang the other day and the gentleman on the other end identified himself as Jim Anderson from the Coming Home Network. He said he had a message from an old high school friend. Who might that be, I asked, and he gave the name: Dion Berlowitz.
Anderson told me the Coming Home Network, with which I was not familiar, helped Protestants come into the Church, and that Dion was on his way in.
I hadn’t heard from Dion in more than a decade, even though we were best friends at Williamsville South High School, outside Buffalo, sharing several interests, including cartooning and comic books. Raised Jewish, Dion became a born-again Christian in his junior year of high school as his parents’ marriage broke up, and spent hours, days, weeks, and months trying to convert me into a Bible-believing Christian.
In 1971, Dion went on to the University of Buffalo to study literature and I went on to Eisenhower College to study history, and our paths never crossed again until a call out of the blue came from him around 1990, when he told me he was a Presbyterian. We have had no further contact since, though I suspect and hope that will change.
In this initial conversation, Anderson told me that so far, this year, the Coming Home Network has helped 94 Protestant ministers of various denominations, along with many other Protestants, come into the Church. Some, like Dion, are on their way in. This is the largest annual crop since the CHNetwork was founded nine years ago.
Here, in a year in which the Catholic Church in the United States and around the world has been wracked by scandals, we do have good news indeed.
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What would prompt a Protestant, especially a minister with a wife and family, to leave his tradition and often his livelihood to come into the Catholic Church, especially when there are so many broken-hearted Catholics embarrassed by the past ten months of sordid revelations involving clerical sexual abuse, bishops’ resignations, episcopal cover-ups and pay-outs? Not to mention the ongoing abuse of authority by bishops to hammer the lay faithful who object to dissidents and heretics speaking in parishes and education conferences.
"For Protestants," says Jim Anderson, "the scandals are a non-issue. Among the hundreds of people I have talked to who are thinking of coming into the Church, the scandals just aren’t an issue. Of all the people who have contacted me, only three or four have mentioned them, and that was only at my prompting.
"To a man, these men are intellectually convinced that the Church is a divine institution established by Christ, and bishops are only human — and, besides, they say, ‘These things are going on in our own denominations — only in our denomination they are not being addressed.’
"They see this as the Holy Spirit cleaning house. The judgment of the Lord begins with the family of God. They view the present scandals as a terrible tragedy; they want justice like everybody else. But as far as the truth of the Catholic faith is concerned, it is a non-issue. It’s sin; it needs to be addressed. And that’s it.
"These men," he continued, "are educated people. Most have master of divinity degrees and doctorates. They are aware of the problems, but once their hearts are converted and they see the Church as Jesus Christ’s, they know Christ will keep His promise. They have experienced troubles in their own denominations, but they know that when they are in the Church, God will prevail."
On average — based on the first ten months of this year — Anderson hears from a Protestant minister every three days who has made the decision to become Catholic.
Most, he says, are drawn to the Church for two reasons. Either they have come to understand the dead end to which the Protestant doctrine of sola scriptura leads, and they want to settle, in their own minds, the issue of authority in the Church; or they have been led to the Church by its doctrine of the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist, and they want to receive Jesus.
What many Protestants are coming to understand, even at a time when many Catholics and non-Catholics lament the apparent breakdown of authority in the Church, Anderson explained, is that the Church’s authority "is set by God."
"Those who take their faith and Scripture and God seriously," he said, "see the Catholic Church as being the answer to the chaos of the Protestant condition: Sola scriptura is a dead end, is unhistorical and unworkable. They understand this and so they have a crisis of faith and they enter the Catholic Church. And this is occurring across the Protestant spectrum. A lot of people contacting the Coming Home Network are ‘higher church’ Episcopalians or Lutherans, but we do get calls also from ‘low-end’ Baptists, Seventh-day Adventists, and Assembly of God ministers.
"To speak, as some Catholics do, about a ‘crisis of authority’ in the Church doesn’t make a lot of sense," Anderson said. "There is a ‘crisis of obedience to authority,’ but that has always been the case, just as there has always been a ‘crisis of obedience to the authority of God’ on the part of many men and women. The authority is there, and it is working; it is just not obeyed."
The Coming Home Support Network
The Coming Home Network was founded in 1993 out of the experiences of several Protestant clergy and their spouses. Upon leaving their pastorates to enter the Catholic Church, these clergy and their families discovered they were not alone. To help others come into the Church — and to deal with some of the tremendous personal and professional obstacles they faced — they began the organization as a support network.
Catholics, Anderson suggested, should understand some of the challenges these ministers face once they have made the intellectual decision to "cross over" to Rome.
"They go through tremendous struggles. They think, ‘I’m losing my friends, my family, my community, my church, and people think I’m crazy and I’m apostatizing from Christianity.’ Often the most serious conflict is with spouses, who not only have to deal with the change of religion, but have practical problems as well, such as, ‘What about me and the children?’ ‘How are we going to survive?’ ‘What will our friends think?’ ‘Have I been following the wrong religion all my life?’
"Most of these people have M.Div. and Ph.D. degrees, and so they are not employable in the world. It’s a difficult decision for these men to give up their work, their careers, and their livelihoods. Nevertheless, 94 this year have entered, or are on their way into, the Church."
One former minister, Anderson recalled, gave up his role as a prominent, prestigious minister for his community to work as a greeter at WalMart. For him, the blessing of being able to receive the Eucharist more than compensated for what he had to give up.
Anderson is well-prepared for his work helping Protestants come into the Church. Reared as a Methodist, the 47-year-old Anderson became a Lutheran at 19. As a history major specializing in medieval Europe at Ohio University in Athens, he knew he was on his way into the Church.
Three years after graduating, he entered evangelical Ashland Seminary in 1980, interested in pursuing studies in ecumenical dialog. In his freshman year, he made the decision to join the Catholic Church, and on July 25, 1981, the Feast of St. James, he was confirmed. His wife, Lynn, who entered the Church in 1983, now teaches in a Catholic school.
Contrary to popular stereotypes, he said, the biggest roadblocks would-be converts confront are not such "hot-button" issues as contraception, papal infallibility, or women’s rights, but the Church’s doctrines concerning Mary.
But another obstacle, he said, is "liturgical craziness."
Many Protestants, he said, "are scandalized by the liturgical craziness. They try to get around it by seeking out a Byzantine rite, or seeking out orthodox parishes. And usually, if they come into the Church, having been good Protestants, they have church-hopped enough to have found a parish where they don’t have to deal with abuses."
But, he added, many look beyond the abuses, because "they are attracted to Christ in the liturgy. For a lot of the converts, there are many who have intellectually convinced themselves already that they must join the Church before they ever attended Mass. And when they finally start going to Mass, often there is a culture shock, especially if they come from a small, intimate, loving Baptist church, and go into a parish of 2,000 people who aren’t particularly friendly. So there is this bit of culture shock — and that doesn’t include the shock of liturgy."
Asked to name the leading intellectual sources Protestants are reading to find their way into the Church, Anderson named familiar names.
"The intellectual sources are, certainly, Cardinal Newman, G.K. Chesterton, Bishop Fulton Sheen, Scott Hahn, and Catholic Answers.
"But most often, it is the fathers of the Church. When Protestant ministers encounter the fathers, they realize they were lied to and betrayed, because they were taught the Protestant Reformation cleansed Christianity of the barnacles on the Barque of Peter and the Reformers recovered ancient Christianity. Then they go back and read the apostolic fathers, especially Ignatius of Antioch who is preaching the Real Presence, the authority of bishops, and all these many Catholic things, and the conclusion is the words of Jesus, who says: ‘I will be with you always.’
"Either Jesus kept His promise, or the Church went to Hell in a hand basket after the death of St. John.
"When they start studying the early Church fathers, they are blown out of the water."
Solid Apologetics
The Coming Home Network’s executive director is former Presbyterian minister Marcus Grodi, who, captured the feeling and beliefs of many fellow Protestants who came into the Church in his book, Journeys Home (Queenship Publishing 1997).
"[T]he biggest thing that opened my heart to the truth of the Catholic faith was not all the apologetic arguments that convinced me of the trustworthiness of Catholic truth, but the realization that the Catholic Church, with all of her saints and sinners, was exactly what Christ had promised.
"The majority of complaints against the Catholic Church over the centuries have been aimed at the decisions and actions of bad Popes, or immoral clergy, or ignorant laity, or corrupt Catholic nobility, and the correct answer to this is, ‘But, of course! The Church is made up of wheat and tares, from the bottom to the top, sinners in need of grace! This is no reason to leave and form a new church, for any church made up of human beings is made up of sinners.’
"All true conversions to the Catholic faith from any other starting point carry with them complications, primarily because this conversion must be rooted in and thereby an extension of one’s conversion and surrender to Christ. If becoming a Catholic does not involve this, I don’t believe it is a true conversion. It might be a change of convenience or even possibly for some sort of personal gain or aggrandizement.
"But only when one recognizes or painfully discovers that to be fully a follower of Jesus Christ, and thereby have the full potential of growing in union with Him, one must also be in union with the Church He established in and through His Apostles, can one be truly converted.
"These conversions by definition must involve some extent of leaving behind and rejecting part of what a person once held very dear. Some things can be joyfully brought along, others can be cautiously tolerated, but yet there are ideas, practices, and sometimes even relationships which must be severed.
"It of course never means that we cease to love those we may need to leave behind, or who choose to turn their backs on us. In fact, we are called all the more to shower our now confused or indignant friends and family with the all-forgiving, all-accepting love of Christ. However, we must not let the emotional trajectories of our loving glances turn our attention off of the fullness of truth found only in union with the Catholic Church."
For more information about the Coming Home Network, go to its web site, www.chnetwork.org, or call 740-450-1175.
The actual greek rendering of that greeting is
Luk 1:30 And the messenger said to her, `Fear not, Mary, for thou hast found favour with God; (Youngs literal greek translation)
5487 charitoo {khar-ee-to'-o}
from 5485; TDNT - 9:372,1298; v
AV - be highly favoured 1, make accepted 1; 2
1) to make graceful
1a) charming, lovely, agreeable
2) to peruse with grace, compass with favour
3) to honour with blessings
Act 6:8 And Stephen, full of faith and power, did great wonders and miracles among the people.
Colleen was St. Ann sinless too?
Would you be kind enough to explain this more fully for me? I am confused by your words above.
Here goes. It is important not to think of the Dogma of the Immaculate Conception as putting forward the view that Mary does not require a savior. Mary herself clearly says "My spirit rejoices in God my savior". Now, the Catholic Church does not contradict scripture, and so you should be able to know in advance that the Dogma of the Immaculate Conception must have a formulation which takes into account Mary's necessity for a savior. In fact, it was this verse that prevented the dogma from being officially formulated until later. Christians were already were convinced, on the one hand, that "full of grace", since it is used as a proper name and in Greek expresses both intensity and duration over time, implies that Mary is without sin. On the other hand she rejoices in "God my savior". What way out of the quandary that Scripture itself presents? It does no good to deny that she is sinless, for to do so would be to deny the significance of "full of grace" used as a proper name, it would be to deny that she whose very name is "full of grace" is full of grace. But that is Scripture's own description of her. So, Scripture attributes to her the character of being both sinless and in need of a savior. How is that possible? It was St. Bonaventure who recognized that God is not under any sort of limit such that God can apply grace from Christ's atoning work only after the atoning work of Christ -- since it is above time that God knows all things simultanesously and knows in eternity that Christ's sacrifice is the source of grace for sinners. St. Bonaventure realized that God applied, in advance of the atoning work of Christ, the grace proceeding from the atoning work of Christ, and he applied the grace of Christ to Mary, precisely so that the incarnation of Christ may take place in a fitting way. Thus, she is both sinless and Christ is her savior. She is saved, in a preventitive manner, by her own child, so that her own child might save us all, in a reparative manner. So, the formulation of the Dogma of the Immaculate Conception more carefully stated goes like this: By virtue of the foreseen merits of her Son, God preserved Mary from original sin. The Immaculate conception is the only way to preserve the Scriptural message in toto. Detractors from the dogma do not take seriously "full of grace" and are not sensitive to the depths of its meaning.
And you place Adam and Eve there as well. So maybe instead of your usual ignorant knee jerking, you could think about what is being said.
Are Adam and Eve divine because they are sinless? Or is there more to divinity than just being without sin?
This is where you all fail on understanding the Incarnation. To be with sin is not the same as being human. And to be without sin is not the same as being divine.
SD
Dave you know scripture better than that ..so do not make a fool out of yourself ok?
Adam and Eve were created into a perfect world..they were created innocent.
They fell for all of us...unless you have suspended original sin
Was St Ann also sinless?
I know. I wasn't trying to be argumentative, just wanted to clarify.
You, Terry, are the one making a fool of himself. To have a list of 4 people, one of them Jesus, and to imply that we are thus making one of them divine is foolish.
Adam and Eve were created into a perfect world..they were created innocent.
Yes. No disagreement. They were human beings who had not sin. Does that mean they were "gods"? It doesn't to me, it seems to to you.
They fell for all of us...unless you have suspended original sin
Well, duh. Yes, this is exactly what we are talking about. Mary was conceived in St. Ann's womb without the transmission of Original Sin.
Was St Ann also sinless?
No, why would you think so?
SD
Can you provide any documentation in Aramaic which would prove Peter was The Rock referenced? If not, why not?
Can't answer my question huh?
Will you provide Scripture which indicates "...she was granted this special grace."
Thank you,
Adam and Eve were NOT born , they were created in the image of God..the Bible tells us that when they fell we all fell
Now you try to liken them to Mary being born the only fully human person since Adam and Eve fell without sin .You just prove you do not understand the fall, the nature of the fall or its full impact on men. (read Romans 1,2 and 3)
It was BECAUSE of that fall that Jesus ,the sinless one ,had to come..He had to live a sinless life and yet be tested in every way as we are (read Hebrews)..THEN He had to pay the full penality for sins that He never committed FOR US
You just lump Adam and Eve and Mary together because unless you do that your doctrine does not work
Adam and Eve fell for all of us...unless you have suspended original sin
Well, duh. Yes, this is exactly what we are talking about. Mary was conceived in St. Ann's womb without the transmission of Original Sin.
A doctrine of man contrary to scripture...which say all men have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God(Romans).You claim that even though Mary never claimed that for herself..She said she needed a savior (read Luke)..so either she knew she was sinful or she lied..which would have been a sin
Was St Ann also sinless?
No, why would you think so?
Well you seem to feel that to birth a sinless man the mother must then be sinless..so Ann must have been sinless too, and her mother and her mother all the way back to Noah
You haven’t been paying attention have you? Mary needed a savior just like the rest of us.
Hail Mary, full of grace
SD
Hail Mary, full of grace
Acts 6:
[8] And Stephen, full of grace and power, did great wonders and signs among the people.
The same special grace which was granted to Stephen?
That's right, just like the rest of us. Because there was no immaculate conception.
Neither do the Orthodox.
I take it you mean Paul means an absolute all. Because if you translate like that it would also include Jesus Christ, He being a true man as well as true God, good angels who never sinned, miscarried children, aborted babies, newborns, and severely retarded or brain-damaged persons, who do not have sufficient knowledge to commit actual sin.
If the translation is not absolute then your argument collapses. Because if all doesn't mean absolutely all, without a single exception, then Mary could be an exception (as indeed she is).
Yes, of course. Except that Stephen got this grace through Baptism and the coming of the Holy Spirit, after being born in the normal state. This was all after the Crucifixion, of course.
Mary got the grace before the Crucifixion (in time, anyway). She was full of grace before Jesus was even born, when the Annunciation of His Birth was made.
Same effect - sinlessness; different instrument - Baptism versus IC; same source - Crucifixion.
SD
Neither do the Orthodox.
Yes, if I remember correctly your belief is of something called "ancestral sin". Could you briefly explain what this entails? Thx!
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