I should’ve been a Protestant.
Not what you’d expect in a Catholic conversion story, I know . . . but allow me to explain.
I was born in June 1966 in Salem, Massachusetts, and born again in baptism about a month later at St. Joseph’s Catholic Church. My parents divorced when my siblings (a twin sister and younger brother) and I were very young. We’d stopped attending Mass sometime before, and so baptism was the only sacrament any of us every received.
We lived with our mother in an apartment house by the wharf; although our family had been torn apart, we learned quickly to adapt and so settled into a routine that, unfortunately, many children understand to be the norm: weekdays with Mom, weekends with Dad.
About two years later my stepfather entered the scene. Born in Sparta, Greece, he was a strong-willed but very loving stepfather. He “adopted” us so to speak; and while we learned to call him “Dad,” it wasn’t without some anxiety. We already had a father, after all.
A member of the Greek Orthodox church, my stepfather thought it best that we should be enrolled in Greek school. This was the equivalent of a foreign language class and RCIA class rolled up into one, whereby we learned the basics of the Greek language: the alphabet, certain phrases (“Good morning,” “Good afternoon”), as well as the core of the Orthodox faith. As an added bonus we learned that English-speaking children became the butt of certain Greek jokes. Inculturation was simply not a priority.
For our family, attendance at the liturgy occurred during special occasions: the marriage of a cousin, the occasional Christmas or Greek Easter celebration, or the funeral of a distant relative. And while discussions about faith in Jesus Christ were never engaged in at our home, I retained a somewhat childlike desire to know about Christ, a desire that went unfulfilled.
Throughout my teen years I began to move steadily away from God; if I thought of him at all, it was in an abstract, higher-power, non-intellectual manner. I was doing fine on my own. I didn’t need the emotional instability of religion. I thought religious people were all like the faith healers on television, the ones who paraded in new suits around a stage, pushing people on the forehead with a triumphant “You are healed!” Although I didn’t give God much thought, somehow I knew that faith, if it existed at all, was not like that.
In the winter of 1986 my stepfather died unexpectedly. I recall the pastor of a local Baptist church coming over to visit with my mother; he spoke with her at length, and then knelt down in front of me and began talking about Jesus. I listened at first, until he got in my face and asked me if I wanted to receive Jesus into my heart as my “personal Lord and Savior.” I was angry—angry at the God who could take a loved one like that and angry at this pastor for invading my space.
I politely declined. Yet he insisted. I declined again; he persisted. After a moment he finally relented; but the damage had been done. His actions had left an indelible mark: I’d decided that if Christianity made people act like that, I wanted no part of it.
Over the next year I worked at a number of carpenter and construction jobs. I would become restless and anxious after about two months and usually quit one job and search for another. I didn’t realize it at the time, but I was looking for something to fill me, to make me whole. I’d long stopped visiting with my biological father; I didn’t know what he was like and at the time really didn’t care. My stepfather had filled a void in my life. He was the father figure I’d needed growing up, and his passing had left me feeling utterly abandoned and alone.
It was late 1987 when I began working as a carpenter’s helper to a man who was a professing Christian. I’d made a number of costly mistakes on the job, mistakes that got him in trouble with the foreman; yet this man treated me in an understanding and Christian way. He talked to me about Jesus—about what the Lord had done in his own life and how Jesus could change my life as well.
I don’t know why, but at that point I began to listen, and the more I listened, the more I desired this life-changing event. I recall searching, sometime after our conversation, for the little Gideon Bible I’d had for years. On the inside rear cover was the Sinner’s Prayer and a place for me to write the date and sign my name, indicating I’d chosen to give my life to Christ and be “born again.” I can still recall sitting in my car by the waterfront, reading this prayer, and feeling sudden peace come over my soul.
This is what I’d been searching for. This is where I finally found Jesus Christ. This is when I was truly born again!
Or so I thought.
I knew in an off-hand way that I was a Catholic; though what that meant I had not a clue. All I knew was that God had guided me from infancy to this point in time when I could make the choice, after honest reflection, to follow him. Of course, I’d already received the new birth at my baptism. But I’d gone out into the world without further instruction and, more importantly, without the sacrament of confirmation, the gift that strengthens the Catholic in his battle against the world, the flesh, and the devil . . . and so ultimately I was unprepared. Though I was Catholic by virtue of my baptism, in practicality on that day by the waterfront I was a Protestant Christian.
But God wasn’t through with me.
My wife Dianna and I were married in June 1988 in a local Congregational church. My wife was a Methodist, and Catholicism played no role in my own life, so there was no question about canon law or a licit marriage.
Two years later we bought a house in Maine. It was at this time that God began to show me, through a succession of failures both personal and professional, how much I truly needed him. At my lowest point I found myself prostrate on the floor, feeling sorry for myself. Here I was, in my early twenties, married, and a homeowner—but jobless, with absolutely no direction in life. I felt like a complete and utter failure, and at that moment I wanted simply to die.
I called out to God then, for help and for hope. He answered me by convicting me of sin, by showing me two paths, and by challenging me to make a decision.
I decided to follow him.
I felt the desire to return to Scripture reading, to deepen my walk with God once again. It was at this time that I rediscovered the Bible that had been given to my parents on their wedding day and that had somehow come with us to Maine. The Gideon Bible had been all right for a while, but it lacked the Old Testament. My parents’ was a Bible I could sink my teeth into. It was an old, bulky Douay-Rheims Bible with a glossy picture of Mary on the cover. Inside were pictures of the Vatican and St. Peter’s Square and sections on praying the rosary, on the Mass, et cetera.
I began to read in earnest once again, but along with Scripture I read the footnotes and the articles on Jesus and the cross, Mary and Joseph, the Mass . . . and it was at this time that my Catholic identity came to the fore. I began to think about what it might mean to be a Catholic, to see that there might be more to faith than intellectual assent and a willingness to do God’s will.
I made an appointment with a local priest and spent several hours talking with him about Jesus, the Church, and the sacraments. It was all new to me, but it seemed to ring true. I agreed to enter the RCIA program and invited my wife to attend. At first she declined, and I didn’t press the issue. But shortly before the first official RCIA class, she suddenly changed her mind.
Grace was at work in our lives.
We were received into the Catholic Church in 1991. Before the ceremony we were asked if one of us would like to make a speech. I volunteered, and wrote a short speech, ending it with a quote from the Psalms: “I waited patiently for the Lord; he inclined me and heard my cry. He drew me up from the desolate pit, out of the miry bog, and set my feel upon a rock, making my steps secure. He put a new song in my mouth, a song of praise to our God. Many will see and fear, and put their trust in the Lord” (Ps. 40:1–3).
I had begun to learn that, while I was far from a patient man, the Lord had indeed heard my cry. Though I experienced stirrings of faith through reading Scripture, I knew when I hit rock bottom that only a power outside of myself could ever make things right. It was in deciding to rejoin the Catholic Church that I realized God had indeed drawn me from the desolate pit, had indeed pulled me from the miry bog, had indeed made my steps secure. Through the gift of constant, persistent, divine grace, Jesus Christ had called me back to himself, to the Church of my youth and of my baptism, to the Church that was his own body.
Soon after I had come back into the Church, my younger brother became engaged to be married. I’d spoken with him about Christ and about what it meant to be Catholic; he seemed genuinely interested, and we made plans to get together and talk. His fiancée, a fallen-away Jehovah’s Witness, suddenly began practicing her religion again. I found myself in the position of defending my Catholic faith, something I was not prepared to do.
I spoke with my confessor about this problem and explained that while I felt inadequate for the job of evangelizing, I also felt a burning desire to defend Christ and the Church. He agreed that I had a responsibility, both to Jesus and to my brother, to explain the faith.
I soon embarked on a study of the Watchtower, staying up late into the night, digesting their theology. The problem was, I had not yet learned basic Catholic apologetics, and so my rebuttals to my brothers’ arguments came mostly from Protestant counter-cult groups. During a phone conversation with the director of one such group I mentioned I was a Catholic. The gentleman began asking me questions about my faith, questions I was not prepared to answer. I hung up the phone and doubted for the first time the truth of the Catholic faith.
By God’s grace, what could have been a swift exit from Catholicism was turned quickly on its head. I met a very spiritual, orthodox Catholic through the pages of this magazine, a Catholic who himself had turned from the faith and spent years outside the Church only to come back to the household of faith around the same time I had. He helped me to understand the standard anti-Catholic arguments, as well as the Church’s response. He also helped me through the pitfalls of liberal Catholicism, presenting the faith to me in logical and reasonable terms.
I began studying, along with Scripture, classic works of the faith such as Ludwig Ott’s Fundamentals of Catholic Dogma and Tanquerey’s A Manual of Dogmatic Theology. These books and many others helped me to understand the nature and person of Jesus, to see the Church in terms of the big picture, and to reclaim the faith that is my Catholic heritage.
I began visiting local Kingdom Halls, engaging Jehovah’s Witnesses in discussions about topics like the Trinity, the Incarnation, and the canon of Scripture. I presented the gospel in its fullness, with the reality of the cross. The Watchtower, which had seemed to me such an impenetrable fortress of biblical knowledge, now paled in light of the clear, simple truth of the Catholic faith.
The same held true for those former Catholics I met in Fundamentalist churches. Honest, God-loving people, they’d bought the lies about Catholicism, had left the Church of their youth, and had joined forces with strict Fundamentalist churches, often opposing vehemently the teachings of the Catholic Church. In the years since my own conversion and in the public debates and on-line discussions that have ensued, I’ve seen firsthand the barrenness of theology that has divorced itself from the sacramental reality found within the Catholic faith.
My own feet were now firmly set upon the rock—upon Christ the cornerstone, the chief builder, as well as the rock of Peter, the chief steward. My hope, my reward, would all be based on him and on his promises coupled with my response in faith to his grace. He gives me grace constantly that I might be faithful to him; and as I turn to him, he increases that grace in a wonderful cycle intended to purify and perfect, to sanctify and to save. Until that day, when “the Lord himself will descend from heaven with a cry of command, with the archangel’s call, and with the sound of the trumpet of God” (1 Thess. 4:11).
Upon his glorious return may we be found, by his grace, ready for heaven.