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Logical Conclusion

Many times since my decision to become Catholic I have been asked to give an account of what led to my reception into the maternal embrace of the Church. Writing anything of this sort is prone to failure, as a great deal of my conversion was the result of logical deductions and a spiritual longing from childhood through my teenage years. I am but a 17-year-old who-through prayer, reading, and a sincere desire to attain salvation-became Catholic in obedience to what I believed to be God’s truth. I came to realize that without sincerely desiring the truth and pursuing it, my possibility of dying in friendship with God was in peril.

I have lived my life in an area of Tennessee that is populated almost entirely by Southern Baptists. Since childhood I was exposed to the basic tenets of the Christian faith and lived in a nominally Protestant home. Vividly I remember being taught the Baptist doctrine that once you have had a conversion experience — once you’ve “been saved” — your eternal destiny is secure.

But I always found this illogical. It seems so opposed to what Scripture teaches concerning the absolute necessity of obedience to the commandments of Christ. For in truth, it allows you to commit any act of immorality, and, so long as you “accept Jesus Christ as your personal Lord and Savior,” you cannot be damned, whether or not you repent. This does not seem to fit with the concept of God’s justice and mercy.

When I was nearly twelve years of age, I “accepted Christ” in the normal Evangelical fashion and received baptism by full immersion. While I had no real knowledge of theology, the teachings of this man called Christ perplexed me. From what I knew at the time, it seemed as if all religions except Christianity promised happiness and contentment in this life. Of course, I knew this wasn’t possible. It was certainly not the experience of Christ at his crucifixion nor of Mary at the foot of her Son’s cross. A religion like Christianity that did not seem to fear blood, suffering, and anguish — the realities of human existence — appealed to me greatly. A religion that offered some solace amid life’s anxieties and pains seemed perfectly suited for me.

Around this time I began to read the Bible and various other books on religion, including numerous pamphlets and tracts published by the Church of God International. My father admired and respected its founder, Garner Ted Armstrong, and many of Armstrong’s conclusions offered an alternative to the problems I was finding in my own religion.

After reading a great deal of the literature published by this sect, I found that its members did not accept the Third Person of the Trinity, the Holy Spirit, as a separate entity in the Godhead. The sect proposed also that we should worship on Saturdays instead of Sundays, as do many other Sabbatarians and Adventists. Although I knew his conclusions must be wrong, I had to admit that Armstrong’s interpretations of many passages of Scripture were entirely reasonable. But by rejecting sacred Tradition in any form and denying the context in which God intended Scripture to be interpreted, Armstrong and his sect simply followed the principle of private interpretation of Scripture to its logical end.

A year or so later a close friend invited me to a local Pentecostal church. Pentecostalism attracted me because it offers a style of worship dramatically different from what is available in most Protestant churches. The singing and music seemed so much more exciting, so much more full of life, than the hymns I was familiar with. This church provided an oasis of sanity and a temporary solution to my anguish of mind and heart.

At some point I began to question things such as the origin of the Bible. Did it just fall out of the sky, as some of my Baptist and Pentecostal brethren seemed to imply, or did Christ himself give it to the apostles? Or was it really given through the disputation between early Christians and finally determined by the Catholic Church in the year 382 at the Council of Rome under Pope Damascus I, as history suggests?

The latter scenario destroys Protestantism because it involves accepting an authority outside of Scripture. This was the one, simple conclusion that led me to understand the logical fallacy of Protestantism: Without the Catholic Church, Protestants would not have a canon of Scripture and thus no ability even to use Scripture as a competent spiritual authority.

The second most damning fact I found about Protestantism is the disunity and bickering that exists among denominations on important points of doctrine. It did not seem to me that Christ’s intention was to found hundreds of warring sects. Obviously, this predicament came about only in the sixteenth century when the Martin Luther nailed his ninety-five theses upon the church door at Wittenberg. Protestantism did not seem to me to be the body of Christians for whom Christ prayed “that they all may be one as the Father and I are one” (John 10:30), or whom he declared must be of “one faith, one baptism” (Eph. 4:3). To me it seemed the whole plan of redemption was ludicrous if Christ gave us no absolute assurance of what we must believe.

After flirting with Pentecostalism, I yearned for something more, something supernatural. I studied the nature of Christian worship and its variants among different traditions. The notion of worship among many Protestants is that of a meeting, a social gathering of like-minded individuals. The high point of worship was a sermon, accompanied before and after by singing, nothing like what Scripture describes occurring around the throne of God. The book of Revelation describes the worship of God as incense being offered with the prayers of the saints at the foot of the Lord’s throne, countless angels and saints bowing in “unending adoration, worshiping and praising God, crying out, ‘Holy, holy, holy, Lord God Almighty'” (Rev. 4:8). 1 could not help but compare the absolute beauty of what was described with the barren worship in which I participated.

What I knew of liturgical worship (namely my brief exposure to Anglicanism, Catholicism, and Orthodoxy) seemed closer to the mark. Crucifixes, incense, candles, Gregorian chant, stained-glass windows, and even the posture of kneeling filled my thoughts. I recognized the path I was beginning down, but I was not quite ready to follow it to its logical conclusion.

It was at this point that I began studying the writings of the Church Fathers by way of apologetics magazines and by reading debates concerning their writings on the Internet. I recall being taught at some point in my childhood that the Church was pure before the legalization of the Christian faith by the Roman emperor Constantine in 312, and it was only afterward that it became “Catholic” and “pagan” and “corrupt.” As far as I could see, this idea didn’t line up with the facts.

The notion that Protestants with their open Bibles and widely differing private interpretations possessed a greater knowledge than Clement, Ignatius, or Polycarp was intellectually repugnant to me, especially since these Fathers had direct contact with the apostles themselves. Ultimately, such a supposition is contradictory to Christ’s promise in Matthew 16:18 that “the gates of hell shall not prevail” against his Church.

Last, and certainly not least, I found it terribly disturbing that the largest Protestant denominations in the United States refused to take a strong stance against the greatest sins prevailing in the world today: abortion, euthanasia, divorce, and artificial contraception. Concerning the latter, I came to realize that Protestantism as a whole holds no opposition to this sin, yet every Protestant Reformer and their theological descendants held it to be gravely sinful into this century. The same applies to divorce. Protestantism simply caved under societal pressure and abandoned its moral stances on these evils. Finally, on the point of abortion, I will concede that some Protestants do indeed take a strong, vigilant stance, but, without the unified support of their respective denominations, what progress are they going to possibly make?

I finally concluded that the answers to Protestantism’s problems are found in Catholic Church. As Catholics we have a supreme teaching authority given us by God himself-namely the Catholic Church (“the pillar and ground of truth” [1 Tim. 3:13])-to interpret the Bible for us and teach us the doctrines proclaimed by Christ. The Church will never err in teaching us the “certain things hard to be understood, which the unlearned and unstable wrest, as they do also the other scriptures, to their own destruction” (2 Pet. 3:16).

Protestantism’s unresolvable problems forced my decision. In spite of my emotional loyalty to the church I was attending, I could no longer remain a Protestant. Either I had to become a Catholic or I had to settle for agnosticism. The latter never had any real appeal to me because, without the existence of a God, no objective morality exists and no meaning can be given to the pains of our human life.

After much trepidation, I began attending Mass regularly and enrolled in RCIA. Over a period of months my conclusions concerning the Church were confirmed time and time again, and with the loving spiritual guidance of Fr. Michael Sweeney, I came to realize there was no turning back. At the Easter Vigil of 1998 I publicly pronounced my submission to the teachings of Holy Mother Church and received the glorious Body and Blood of our Lord.

Almost two years later I continue to reflect upon God’s great mercy in allowing me to embrace our most holy faith. With so many faithful Catholics who prayed for God to enlighten my mind and my heart, it seems unlikely that I could have strayed from the truth much longer. I confess as did John Henry Cardinal Newman: “This one thing at least is certain: Whatever history teaches, whatever it omits, whatever it exaggerates or extenuates, whatever it says and unsays, at least the Christianity of history is not Protestantism.”

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