Blame it on the Copts and the Mormons...

Like all Catholic converts, I have a conversion story that I'm egotistical enough to think other people want to read. This is one I posted in a discussion forum at Challies.com, edited a bit for my own blog. (This is also an experiment to see how long-winded I can get away with being on Blogger.) :)

I was raised Baptist (American Baptist, somewhere in the middle of the spectrum for Baptists, I think, maybe leaning slightly to the liberal side). My mother was a preacher’s daughter, and I grew up in the same church where my grandfather had been the pastor. When I was a teenager, we moved to another city, and I got involved with the occult. I don’t want to get too much into detail on this one, but when I finally got out of it at 17, I threw myself into Christian youth culture with a vengeance. This was mostly due to a friend of my parents’ who gave me a copy of C.S. Lewis’s "Mere Christianity." Still, I never did much actual doctrinal study; my Christianity, while sincere, was more shallow than I realized at the time.

Two more or less simultaneous things happened in my adulthood that first steered me toward the Church. The first Catholic thing that appealed to me was, frankly, an emotional one: the confessional. I was in a state of recurring sin by this time, following a divorce, a cohabitation, and a history of faithlessness. At 29ish, I was a believing Christian, but I didn’t act it out in my life. I had attended a number of different churches (Friends, Presbyterian, and finally back to Baptist), but I always knew I was just a little hypocritical.

The trouble with the Evangelical approach to sin is that although we know we can confess our sin to God and be forgiven, it’s harder to believe that we really are forgiven. There’s no point of demarcation. If I repent, and then revert to the same sin, was I really repentant enough the first time? And how would I know? I envied the Catholics their confessional; the knowledge that they could be objectively forgiven,and their forgiveness didn’t depend on their feelings about it. This, unfortunately, is an unspoken assumption in Evangelicalism. You’ve seen the bumper sticker, “If you don’t feel close to God, guess who moved?” The issue wasn’t salvation (I believed in once-saved always-saved) but a desire to be the sort of son God wanted, and a knowledge that I wasn’t doing it.

The other thing that happened was that I became friends with a Mormon couple. I live in a heavily Mormon area, and I had a lot of respect for them as neighbors, but with this couple, my respect grew considerably. They lived out their faith in a way I didn’t. They didn’t try to “evangelize” me, but I started looking into Mormonism anyway. Although I found that they had reasonable explanations for some of their beliefs that I had pooh-poohed, I still couldn’t make myself believe as they did. Mormonism (like Protestantism) is founded on the presumption that at some point, the gates of Hell really did prevail.

This was the big sticking point for me, although it took a little while before I applied it completely. I distrusted Joseph Smith because he came along 1800+ years and said, in so many words, “Christianity as it has been practiced all along is wrong; this is the right way to do it.” Ditto for Charles Taze Russell and the other modern “prophets.”

About this time I got curious about the Coptic Church, simply because it’s not something we hear much about in the West. I found that not only did they practice auricular confession, they also believed in the Communion of Saints, the Real Presence in the Eucharist, and Apostolic Succession, as well as that big bugaboo for Protestants, reverence for Mary. So did the Eastern Orthodox. So did the Mar Thoma Christians of India. In short, all the things I had always assumed were unique products of the medieval Catholic Church were facts of life for ALL the oldest Christian churches, since long before the Middle Ages. Only the newfangled Protestants rejected these things. Protestantism had done a Joseph Smith.

The final straw was Sola Scriptura. I had questioned whether the Bible was truly the Word of God, as well as whether other “scriptures” – like the Book of Mormon – were, but it had never occurred to me to wonder whether God meant a book to be the primary (let alone only) repository of Christian doctrine. In reading an overview of Orthodox Christianity by Clark Carlton (an ex-Prod convert), I realized for the first time that the Church was not just a collection of “Jesus fan clubs” but a living, established, authoritative body. Here was the place to look for interpretations of scripture. If I disagreed, well, that was my prerogative, but I was still wrong. This was when I remembered Steve Camp’s song from the 80s, “Upon this Rock,” where he quoted Christ’s promise to Peter. Individuals in the Church (even leaders) could do wrong, but the Church would go on as the “pillar and ground of truth.” The gates of Hell hadn’t prevailed after all. (Incidentally, Steve Camp is a committed Calvinist, who would probably be appalled at at having nudged me Romeward.)

So I wanted to become Orthodox. Well and good, but in this corner of Washington State, the nearest Orthodox parish was an hour and a half away, and my car was unreliable at best. (Yes, it sounds like a weak reason, but the Lord was moving behind the scenes.) The Catholic Church held to all the same things as the Orthodox, with two exceptions. One was the “Filioque” in the creed, and the other was the primacy of Rome. I wasn’t about to debate the nature of the Trinity; smarter men than I had broken their teeth on it for centuries. As for Rome, I suddenly realized that the Pope, the bishop of Rome, is still the patriarch of the West. Even the Eastern Orthodox recognize that. As a Western Christian, I come under his authority. If God prefers obedience to sacrifice, He also prefers obedience to perfection of doctrine, especially in a case like the Filioque where I would have to take somebody else’s word for it anyway. Having determined that the Catholic Church’s teachings were authoritative, I would be both a fool and a hypocrite to stay out of it.

I started attending Mass, sitting in the back and leaving discreetly afterwards. (This is a small town, and I didn’t want to have to explain to people I knew who were Catholic what kind of struggles I was going through. I still wasn’t sure I was going to join.)

The first thing that struck me was how much of the Mass came directly from the Bible. I had already been awestruck by the Orthodox liturgy (St. John Chrysostom) and the Pauline Mass was a bit of a letdown after that. But almost every line came from Scripture, much of it verbatim. It seemed to me that this was the context in which the Bible belonged. It took most of a year before I decided to enter the RCIA (Rite of Christian Initiation for Adults) program and make moves toward actually joining the Church. In the meantime, I read St. Augustine’s "Confessions", and "The Imitation of Christ" by Thomas A Kempis, and wondered how I had managed to be a Christian for so many years without ever reading these great men. (Easy; they don’t sell well in Christian bookstores.) I found I understood what my hero, C.S. Lewis, had been talking about in his apologetics.

I also went back to my Bible, and this time I found I didn’t have to skip over the uncomfortable parts, or re-interpret them to make them fit my Protestant assumptions. I discovered then, and I still maintain, that if you read any or all of the Bible at face value, it comes out Catholic. I bounced a lot of things off my best friend, a good strong Evangelical (attending an Assembly of God church), and he had to agree that he couldn’t come up with better or plainer interpretations than the Catholic ones.

When I finally started the RCIA program, I got a couple of surprises. First, I was already considered a Christian by my baptism in a Baptist church. Technically, a Protestant isn’t “converted” to the Catholic Church; he’s “reconciled” to it. That’s why Protestants are so often referred to as “Separated Brethren.” The other was that I was the only person in the class joining the Church for doctrinal reasons. Everybody else was either marrying a Catholic or had been poorly taught in their youth and wanted to know more about their faith.

Shortly after I was received into the Church in 1999, I was in the local Catholic bookstore and noticed a book called “Born Fundamentalist, Born Again Catholic.” I took it to the counter and told the owner, “I just did this!” Apparently, there had been a small army of Protestants who were examining the Catholic Church and finding the same thing I had, that they couldn’t remain Protestant without claiming to believe things that they could not accept as true. I’m actually grateful that I didn’t know about this before. I truly believe that the Lord was moving in my life, and the fact that He had to drag me to the Church bit by bit was much better than going along with a “movement.”

I still had some struggles with Catholic teaching. I was unsure about Mary – although the theory made sense, the practicality is still uncomfortable for an ex-Protestant. (To be honest, the Catholic Church doesn't seem to emphasize Marian stuff nearly as heavily as Protestants think we do.) The Real Presence took a while to sort out, but I found that the traditional take on it made a LOT more sense than the Baptist “Lord’s Supper” I had gotten used to as a child, where they never seemed to know why they were carrying out a ritual, but they were determined to do it anyway. And I’ve found that auricular confession, besides being Biblical (I wonder why those verses never came up in Sunday School? ) was exactly what I had been looking for. Just before my entry into the Church, I started my first confession with “Bless me, father, for this is going to take a while.” Oddly enough, the papacy had never been a big issue for me. It helped that John Paul II was such a good, Godly man.

So six years later, I’m a Catholic: a Romanist, a Papist, a mackerel-snapper, a left-footer. And I have no doubt that I’m exactly where the Lord wants me to be.