Every so often something happens which brings the power of God’s grace sharply into focus. Meeting Leslie was one of these occasions. She was not a Christian when we met. In her frank and unaffected manner, she expressed interest in my conversion, and her own conversion began. Leslie sought truth. Something about Christianity seized and held her, and she knew she had to follow her heart.
Our friendship began as a debate of sorts and continued to grow in that direction. She would throw questions at me that I would answer—or try to answer, or find the answers for, because she would give me no rest until I did. I’m no apologist, but my husband is a guy all fired up about “the fullness of truth” and about defending the faith. Since I knew the Church had the answers on anything concerning faith and morals, I had never been too concerned with seeking out each and every tenet of Church teaching because, well, I’m busy. Besides, the Church has many learned people to do such things—and guys like my husband.
Evidently, though, Leslie was going to make me seek out these things. She pushed, prodded, and poked. Baited by my desire to expose to her the truth of Catholicism, I became eager to defend the faith.
I began to understand that it was my duty to understand, defend, and expound. I had to be evangelical. I had to read the Catechism. I even had to read the Bible. Leslie was ruining my safe, little ignorance-is-bliss world. Catholicism seemed so—I don’t know—complicated. Academic. Couldn’t I just have a personal relationship with Jesus? Couldn’t faith be that simple? I wasn’t struggling only with Leslie’s question of the day but with my own complacency about what my faith actually was.
Carefully and persistently, like my husband taught me, I explained to Leslie how authority was invested in Peter through Christ, and thus establishing the papacy. In Matthew 16:13-19, Jesus establishes Peter as Christ’s authority on earth: “I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven, and whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven” (v. 19).
Jesus refers to the symbol of the keys in the Old Testament as in Isaiah 22. The keys were symbolic of authority over a city, an office that would be passed on by the handing of keys from one to another. This office was of such particular authority that it could not be left vacant. In this case, it is the heavenly city that Jesus refers to. The power to bind and loose would be Peter’s (and his successors’) job on earth. Jesus told Peter that he would be the Rock upon which his Church would be built (John 1:42) and the shepherd of his flock (John 21:15-17). Together we poured over chapter 17, “Peter and the Papacy,” of Karl Keating’s book Catholicism and Fundamentalism, gleaning all the scriptural references to the best of our abilities.
Surely she was inspired by the unbroken line of succession of popes, going right from our own Pope John Paul II directly back to Peter himself. It is only logical to see that the authority of the Church and apostolic succession are crucial to the survival of the teachings of Christ in all their fullness. And, perhaps most relevant to me at the time of my own conversion, was the necessity of an authority to explain and define the faith. Without an ultimate authority to which to turn, no organization is capable of maintaining its integrity. Human beings have too many opinions, and there is too much room for interpretation. This is why every successful organization from square-dancing clubs to multi-million-dollar corporations requires a governing body and a set of rules to operate. Anything else would result in anarchy.
Leslie didn’t have any philosophical dispute with what I was telling her. I must be doing a great job explaining this, I thought, patting myself on the back.
Politely Leslie declined my invitation to attend Mass with our family and instead joined a liberal-minded Christian church—Unity Church of the Divine Fluff or something like that. There the woman pastor preached on love. Love and nothing else. No commitment, no obligation, no down payment, no monthly installments for the rest of your life. Until the day of judgment, I suppose. I was chagrined; I had blown it.
According to Leslie, the pastor was a lovely person, and I’m certain that she was. But she lacked an understanding of the fullness of truth. Leslie had a bit too much information, and joining this church turned out to be a lucky break. The gaping holes of unanswerable questions at the Church of the Divine Fluff practically catapulted her into the Catholic Church.
I watched from outside her conversion as she battled all the questions, came to me for information, and literally converted herself—if not into the Catholic Church then certainly away from “liberal” Christianity. Leslie was grasping the essence of objective truth, God bless her yearning soul. I understand objective truth in simple terms, so I explained it to Leslie in the same way that I could understand it.
We live in an “I’m okay, you’re okay” society. It sounds great: Your truth is right for you, my truth is right for me—it is a comfortable theory. But upon closer examination, it is the slipperiest of slopes. I believe that it is not okay to kill babies in the womb, but my neighbor thinks it is okay to kill babies in the womb. His neighbor thinks it is okay to kill babies outside the womb, and that guy’s neighbor thinks that it’s okay to kill anybody. The next neighbor is someone like Charles Manson, who, in fact, does kill anybody he likes and believes that it is okay.
The next logical step in this scenario would be the neighbor like Adolf Hitler who kills entire races of people and thinks it is okay. It’s not okay. Any normal person could see the obvious not-okayness of Hitler, Manson, the neighbor who thinks it is okay to kill anybody, and the neighbor who thinks it is okay to kill babies outside the womb. But beyond that we get into a gray area. If there is not some ultimate authority—like God, for example—everyone is going to draw the line between right and wrong in a different place.
The subject of abortion was the overriding critical obstacle in Leslie’s journey. To her, the Church’s moral teaching on this subject seemed hard and unforgiving. I shared with her the same argument that had convinced me that abortion was wrong. It was wrong to abort a baby at nine months gestation. At eight months, it was still wrong; at six, five, four months, it was still wrong. What logic makes it right before three months? There is none. It cannot be right at any age of gestation, any more than it is to take the life of a child at any age outside the womb.
She got caught in the concept that a woman may have a good reason for not wanting a child, and it is judgmental to tell her that her choice is not morally sound. For example, she said, what if a woman had been raped? How could she live with that child, knowing the circumstances of its conception?
I countered by saying that if her daughter were badly crippled in a car accident with a drunk driver, she wouldn’t be done away with because her difficult circumstances were a constant reminder of the pain inflicted on her as a result of someone else’s immoral behavior. We debated, disputed, and discussed. Finally, I had had enough. I broke the golden rule—and some basic rules of apologetic etiquette.
I yelled at Leslie. I know what you’re thinking: It wasn’t a rational thing to do. I stood up and yelled, “You can’t call yourself a Christian and be pro-choice, you can’t!” Leslie conceded. “I know,” was all she said.
I was elated. Yes! I won! It was a step in the right direction. Somewhere in the back of my mind a nagging little voice remembered reading the admonition, “Win converts, not just arguments.” I felt like a jerk for yelling at Leslie. She’s a good friend, and I suppose it wasn’t the Christian thing to do. But I just snapped.
God brings grace into the worst of situations. The grace that came with my blunder was the ability to discern, with absolute conviction, that my vocation was not that of an apologist. This coupled with the fact that I was expecting our fifth child clinched it for me.
Then more grace came. A couple of weeks later, Leslie called me. She said she would like to become a member of the Catholic Church and asked if I would be her sponsor.
Perhaps it was her candid and frank manner that first drew me into a friendship with Leslie. Possibly it was the very same quality that required her to be yelled at to convert. Evidently God knew I would be the one to yell. And so we were pulled together by grace, using the best and the worst in us for the kingdom of God.
I doubt there is an RCIA program in the world that would advocate yelling as an effective means of bringing people into the fullness of truth. The magisterium of the Catholic Church, the Holy Spirit, and I in no way endorse yelling or pointing fingers in a Very Unkind Way at prospective Catholics.
But every so often, maybe, push your luck.