John 8:32… AMEN! (Part I)

Dear Reader, if you’re not familiar with John 8:32, I encourage you to bust out your Bible and take a look because that verse will be the theme to this exciting stage of my journey. Up until this point I have tried to separate my journey into brief segments for you. I’d hate for you to get bored. I will go ahead and let you know that this will be a somewhat longer segment (and has been broken up into two parts) since I have so much I want to reveal to you in this segment about myself and what I discovered. Okay? Andiamo!

“Jesus then said to those Jews who believed in him, ‘If you remain in my word, you will truly be my disciples, and you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.'” John 8:31-32

To recap from my last post titled “He Who Takes No Chances Wins Nothing…”, we left off at the point that I had decided to listen to The Lord’s voice which spoke to me from His words in the scriptures. I had to know the truth. I had to know how I would answer His question for me… “Who do I say that He is?” and I made the decision to risk everything with a serious leap of faith and see where Jesus was going to take me…

The first thing I had to do was decide where to start my search… So I started where any good millennial would start… YouTube!! LOL!

The first thing I decided to do was search for Catholic vs. Protestant debates… Let me say this… I would NOT recommend starting here to anyone because, without getting into detail, it gets extremely overwhelming and confusing very quickly if you don’t already have a degree in theology. However, my YouTube search did lead me to one good video.

I found a recording of Dr. Scott Hahn’s conversion story. He was formerly a successful Presbyterian Minister and theological professor who experienced a similar calling to The Catholic Church. I was inspired by his story and not to mention, relieved that I wasn’t the only one who had ever faced this struggle. But what really got to me was that this extremely smart, intelligent, former anti-Catholic Presbyterian minister saw something that made him do a complete “one-eighty” and become a devout Catholic apologist now defending the faith! That told me that there was something to this… I had to keep digging!

I started pouring over YouTube video after YouTube video and bought several books to read such as: Rome Sweet Home and A Father Who Keeps His Promises by Dr. Scott Hahn, Dr. Edward Sri’s A Biblical Walk Thru The Mass as well as Allen Hunt’s Confessions of a Mega Church Pastor. A video series I got for my birthday the next year was Bishop Barron’s Catholicism (I HIGHLY RECOMMEND IT!!).

This research motivated me to dive into history of The Church. I checked out every library book I could handle and read through St. Ignatius of Antioch and Polycarp of Smyrna. I started reading Confessions by St. Augustine and Thomas Merton’s The Seven Storey Mountain. I love this quote from An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine by Cardinal John Henry Newman: “To be deep in history is to cease to be Protestant.” I had heard that quote in passing before but I hadn’t realized how true it was until I started down that path. I examined all of the evidence… From the letters of the early church fathers to the history of how our scriptures were assembled, not to mention the scriptures themselves…

Just to give you a brief sample of the things I was learning… Take, for example, Ignatius of Antioch… He wrote several letters during his journey to Rome to be martyred and in one of them he states: “Wherever the bishop appears, there let the people be, even as wheresoever Christ Jesus is, there is the catholic church.” And he wrote this at a time estimated to be 105 – 115 A.D. Not to mention… He was A DISCIPLE of THE APOSTLE John!

They [i.e. the Gnostics] abstain from the Eucharist and from prayer, because they do not confess that THE EUCHARIST IS THE FLESH OF OUR SAVIOR JESUS CHRIST, flesh which suffered for our sins and which the Father, in his goodness, raised up again. (Letter to Smyrnians 7:1) St. Ignatius of Antioch Circa 107 A.D.

(LESS THAN a century after the start of Christianity!!!!)

I was being completely blown away with what I was discovering…

In the meantime, my wonderful wife was just watching from “the background” and I failed to pay attention to the fact that she was getting a little… Hmm… How should I put this? I believe the word I’m looking for is NERVOUS with a capital “N”…

I tried to share my discoveries with my wife and we talked off and on about everything I was learning. She really seemed quite disinterested, to say the least, in what I was discovering to be absolutely mind-boggling and somewhat life altering. In fact, most of the time when I tried to talk with her about something “new” I had come across, our conversations would end in an argument over a doctrinal issue…

I was so into my research that I didn’t notice we were starting to drift apart in our marriage and our spiritual connection, which had once been so very strong. Our spiritual connection was slowly starting to fade a little bit more with each passing day…

The reason I didn’t notice is that I was ON FIRE for God! I was righteous in my quest and running full speed towards the end goal of truth! But I couldn’t or rather I didn’t want to see that I was putting my relationship with my best friend and wife in danger.

I decided the next best step to take would be to talk with several ministers that I knew from our church plus some other churches in the area and a couple of friends from our church (10 total persons in all over the course of several years). There are too many to go through so I’ll just tell you about four of them.

The first person I’ll mention was an old family friend, and Methodist minister, whom I had explicit trust in since high school. I told him what I was feeling and thinking. He was very calm about the whole matter and told me that it was certainly a big decision and worth praying about. He told me there were several couples who had joined the Methodist church where one person had been a Catholic and the other a Protestant and they had looked at the Methodist church as a good compromise and that they seemed perfectly happy with their decision.

However, with the suggestion of a compromise, more of The Lord’s words came to mind:

“I know your works; I know that you are neither cold nor hot. I wish you were either cold or hot. So because you are lukewarm, neither hot nor cold, I will spit you out of my mouth.” Revelation 3:15-16

To me, a compromise in the area of how I was to lead my family when it came to the salvation of our souls was unacceptable… I decided I needed to talk to several other people.

Finally, at my wife’s suggestion I got the courage to go speak with the head pastor at our church. I was able to call and schedule a 30-minute meeting with him to take place a few weeks later. Needless to say I was nervous as all heck. Several people had informed me that he wasn’t the most personable of people in conversations they had had with him so that definitely didn’t help matters much in my mind. I mean, how do you go up to a pastor and say “I don’t think I agree with what you’re teaching and so I feel like the Lord is leading me to lead my family away from your church”? Finally the day came…

He greeted me at his office lobby and he seemed nice enough at first. He certainly was not a man of many words (unless he was delivering a sermon). In fact, his overall demeanor expressed to me that it may have been a few years since he’d had a good laugh. He closed the door to his office and we sat down opposite each other on either side of a coffee table. He certainly didn’t waste any time… “What can I do for you today?” he said. I sat for a moment, trying to collect my thoughts when I finally just blurted out: “I think God is calling me to lead my family to The Catholic Church”…

Silence…

He just stared at me, looking me up and down, no expression on his face. I think he was trying to see if I was joking or not… His eyes seemed as if they were two hot coals and they were staring straight through me… It got to the point where I almost couldn’t take it anymore when he finally launched into his thoughts…

He told me that I could have picked just about any other denomination like the Methodist church down the road, the Lutherans or even another Baptist church and he would have been fine with it… But the Catholic Church was apparently NOT on that list… To summarize, over the course of the next half hour he berated me, bashed The Catholic Church (pulling out the ol’ crusades were terrible card, of course) and all but called me an idiot for even thinking that I should lead my family there. But the ONE thing he didn’t do that I was looking for, was give me any definitive biblical reasoning as to WHY The teachings of The Catholic Church were wrong. I left his office feeling as if I had committed the greatest sacrilege that could ever have been committed… But I knew I had to keep going in my search for the truth.

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Over the course of the next several months after that rather uncomfortable meeting, I met with a couple of associate pastors and a priest. In a meeting with one of the associate pastors (again, of the same Baptist church that we were currently attending), I hit a certain realization. Here’s what I mean…

This particular pastor told me that he’d grown up Catholic and that his family was Catholic. He told me that he LOVED the Catholic Church but he just couldn’t follow it. I asked him “why” and he said something that I’ll never forget. It was an answer which only confirmed to me that I was heading into the right direction. He told me that his reasoning for why he didn’t believe in The Catholic Church is because he believed in his own authority to interpret scripture… He didn’t believe that anyone else had the ability to interpret it for him and tell him how he should live… He told me that he alone would be responsible to God and that he didn’t believe in the authority of the papacy or sacred tradition over him and his spiritual decisions.

“There are not a hundred people in America who hate the Catholic Church. There are millions of people who hate what they wrongly believe to be the Catholic Church — which is, of course, quite a different thing.” Archbishop Fulton Sheen

I could see the logic (at least how he saw it) of his reason that he gave me; however, all I had to do to see the flaw in that logic was to look at history and the scriptures themselves. I mean, let’s look around us my dear reader… There are over 30,000+ denominations within Christianity, each claiming the authority of scripture alone and each believing something different… Doesn’t anyone else see a problem with that?

I mean, let’s look at the Bible itself… Where in the scriptures does it say what books or letters from apostles belong in it? Absolutely nowhere… This makes The Bible itself a tradition (oh, and it was also officially put together by The Catholic Church). In my research I came to the realization that anyone who says that they believe in the doctrine of Sola Scriptura is making a self-defeating statement and chances are that they probably don’t realize it. The doctrine of Sola Scriptura didn’t even exist until Martin Luther’s revolution in the 16th Century.

That is as much into that as I’m going to get. As I stated earlier, I do not intend to get deep into theology in this story, even though theological truth played a major part in my decision to end up in The Catholic Church. I will get into that in future articles; however, that is not my intent with these first articles. But you can see now, why I was leaning the way that I did.

Please, dear reader, do not misunderstand me and I pray that you take no offense… I have no hard feelings towards ANYONE who is not Catholic or disagrees with the Catholic faith. I simply wish to speak to those who have questions or even concerns about the faith and/or those who have questions about my journey.

We do not really want a religion that is right where we are right. We want a religion that is right where we are wrong. We do not want, as the newspapers say, a church that will move with the world. We want a church that will move the world. G.K. Chesterton

After my meeting with the associate pastor, I told my wife what had happened. and she seemed to be super disappointed because I think she had secretly been hoping and praying that my talks with these pastors would shut me down and convince me to stay where we were at. I think she wanted everything to go back to the way it used to be before my search had started.

A few weeks later I went and met with a priest whom I’d never met before… We sat in his office for a good hour or so (I think he even rescheduled an appointment to accommodate my visit) where he told me that he himself had formerly been a Protestant prior to entering the priesthood. I asked him what made him realize the truth of The Church… What made him so confident that he had found the “right” way in The Catholic Church?

Earlier in our conversation, we had talked about The Eucharist and how much I could feel Jesus calling to me through it with his words in the scriptures… How it certainly seemed like Jesus wasn’t talking metaphorically in his “Bread of Life Discourse” in John chapter 6.

He leaned over to me, looked me right in the eye almost with tears in his eyes as if he were glimpsing into my soul… He said: “William, I knew that The Catholic Church was Christ’s church when Jesus said ‘This IS my body… This IS my blood…'” And then he sat back up in his chair, reached over onto the table to the left of his chair and picked up his stole. Turning towards me and leaning forward, in a soft gentle whisper he asked: “Would you like for me to hear your confession?”

I hadn’t been to confession in years, but I mean… How could I possibly refuse!?!?!

To Be Continued my dear reader…

Your Servant In Christ,

William