On March 22, 2008, just two months shy of my thirty-sixth birthday I entered into full communion with the Catholic Church. I stood before the altar and, in front of the full parish congregation, testified and professed that I believed all of the doctrinal teachings of the Catholic Church and would in my best efforts support and defend those beliefs till the end of my days.
I would like to explain as simply as possible why I decided to move away from thirty-five years of Protestantism; a decision which put me at risk of alienating myself from Protestant friends and family in order to adopt the Holy Roman Catholic Church as my own.
My journey began a few years ago when I rediscovered Christ. I had been raised and baptized a Baptist, but for a dozen or more years had not seriously practiced my faith, nor allowed Christ to influence my behavior. I was Christian only by my own description. My return to Christianity was not difficult or painful, but rather like coming home. I knew this is where I needed to be, and I knew my marriage and my ability to be a good father depended on it. I was not ignorant to the values and beliefs of Christianity, but I was by good measure ignorant of why I believed those things. Fortunately, I have a wonderful family support system that provided me with many hours of conversation, direction, criticism, love, and education as to the roots of Christian values and doctrine.
Of considerable importance to me was to obtain an ability to defend my faith when faced with non-believers. I knew what I believed in, but could not prove any of it. My defense was targeted against atheists, agnostics, and Islam. In all honesty, I had never considered nor recognized Catholicism in my studies. Catholics were simply not on my religious map. My upbringing never addressed who Catholics were, what they believed, or the differences in doctrine. I had a sense that Catholics were wrong, and ranked among Mormons and Scientologists in my personal categorization of religions. My attentions were so engrossed in proving my Protestant faith that, up until the moment when I was confronted with the need to address Catholicism in order to properly justify my faith, I completely ignored its existence.
Placing the Bible within History
Verifying the Bible as valid and not just a bunch of stories or contrivances of human imagination was paramount to my cause. I sank myself into book after book discussing shreds of papyrus, translation techniques of the Vulgate and Septuagint books, chronology of biblical events and the authors of Scripture. I participated in Internet based college classes on Hermeneutics, Soteriology, Christology, Trinitarianism, Ecclesiology, and Post-modernistic Theology. I bought biblical concordances, dictionaries, cross-reference albums, and multiple translation Bibles. Without being even slightly conservative in my estimate, I can state that I spent hundreds of hours researching the justification of my faith and reading the Bible. Over time I felt I had become reasonably competent of biblical history and fairly astute in being able to competently evangelize to those who questioned my beliefs.
During the course of my studies, I eventually had to begrudgingly recognize that credit was due to the Catholic Church for largely developing the biblical canon as we now know it. They were the only game in town then⎯it is a fact one cannot ignore. So, on to my next cause, justifying Protestantism and the 66 book Bible. Hence the queries: Why did we leave the Catholic Church? Why does our Bible have 66 books instead of 73? What are the doctrinal differences? To whom do I owe a debt of gratitude for so deftly correcting hundreds of years of church abuse and evils?
Logical Problems Arise
My library began to include literature from Wycliffe, Luther, Zwingli, Calvin, and others. I compared doctrine, examined timelines, and searched for the reasons behind the “big-split.” Here is where my first problems arose.
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