Presented 1/18/24
To the RCIA Team and Participants at St. Bartholomew the Apostle Catholic Church
If you are familiar with the term “Catholic Revert,” then you know how it describes a person who was once initiated into the faith, subsequently left the Church (presumably forever) then at some point made “the journey back home.” This describes me. I was raised Catholic but after a dramatic conversion to Christ at a Baptist church at age 22, I renounced the Church and came to see it as a grotesque corruption of “true biblical Christianity.” But thirty-four years later, including ten as a seminary-trained evangelical pastor, I was reconciled with the Catholic Church. Although time does not allow me to share all the dynamics involved, I want to briefly mention three personal “discoveries” that turned my heart and mind back Home.
On March 18, 2023, through happenstance on our part (yet Providence on God’s), my wife and I attended Mass at the parish where I had been confirmed as a teenager. I can’t adequately express how deeply we were both awestruck that day by the Truth, Goodness, and Beauty of the Mass. The effect was so intense that together we immediately embarked on a new mission: to know if the Catholic Church was as it claimed. After several prayerful weeks and hundreds of books, videos, and podcasts, we were fully persuaded. On July 29 I was humbled to hear the priest in persona Christi say to me: Welcome Home.
Briefly, here are three personal discoveries that compelled me to return to the Church:
First, I discovered that controversial Church teachings about Mary, Papacy, Saints, Canon, Purgatory, Eucharist – doctrines I had for decades viewed as insurmountably offensive – were in fact Scripturally sound, carefully reasoned, and of ancient origin. Though I consulted numerous books and other media, my primary resource was the Catechism itself. I discovered, to my discredit, that the anti-Catholic views I held and often taught were in fact a mocking caricature of the Church. In the process I also learned that the Church not only gave us the NT and actually believes it, but that those often strange and controversial doctrines beautifully explain key passages of the NT that I had overlooked or misunderstood.
Second, I learned that today’s Catholic Church was not in fact some hideous departure from the “pristine Christianity of the early church.” A more honest and thorough reading of the Church Fathers showed me this quite unmistakably. In fact, I discovered the opposite: that The Early Church Was the Catholic Church, to quote the title of Joe Heschmeyer’s insightful book. I learned, among many things, that:
A. From very early the Church was governed by a hierarchy consisting of bishops, priests, and deacons, “Apart from [which], wrote St. Ignatius, “no church deserves the name.” Even more striking to me was the preeminent status already accorded the church at Rome. Cyprian of Carthage pointedly asked: “If someone does not hold fast to this unity of Peter, can he imagine that he still hold the faith?” Rightly so, confidence in my Baptist ecclesiology withered before historical evidence like this.
B. From studying the Fathers I also learned that today’s liturgy is nearly identical – at least in outline form – to the Sunday worship of the early church as described by St. Justin Martyr: Following an orderly arrangement still familiar to us: they read aloud from the Scriptures, the presiding minister explained the readings, they prayed for the needs of both church and world, brought offerings of Bread and Wine, and above all in the Eucharist, the priest made sacramentally present the death of Jesus Christ.
C. I learned that the Church’s teaching on core doctrines like Baptism, Justification, and the Eucharist were not medieval inventions, but faithful to the Patristic witness.
Bottom line: The Catholic Church is not a “gross departure from NT Christianity.” On the contrary, she alone is true to the Apostolic Tradition. And on so many issues on which I thought I knew Catholic doctrine and history – and thereby felt justified in rejecting it – I was actually misinformed and mistaken.
This quote by Steve Ray cut to the heart: “We cannot claim to be followers of Jesus and his apostles if we condemn [those] who carried out their commands and practices with detailed precision in the first centuries of the Church.”
My third discovery – the most important – regarded the Eucharist itself. You’ve heard of the manna, which literally translates as “what is it?” What is it? is the question of greatest urgency. Together with the papacy, there is no brighter red line dividing Catholic and Protestant than the Eucharist. What exactly is that “piece of bread”?
The majority of evangelicals today hold to some version of the “memorial view.” Yes the Lord’s Supper is important, but only symbolically so. The bread is just bread.
In contrast, the Catholic Church holds resolutely to the Real Presence. Despite 500 years of protest, it turns out, “This is My Body” means just that.
Embarrassing as it is to admit, it also turns out that the Fathers warned the faithful about those like me who taught an unorthodox view of the Eucharist:
St. Ignatius advised the churches to which he wrote to: “Take note of those who hold heterodox opinions …They abstain from the Eucharist… because they do not confess that the Eucharist is the Flesh of our Savior Jesus Christ.”
I haven’t even scratched the surface. I could endlessly tell of my love for the Truth, Goodness, and Beauty I now behold in the Bride of Christ. But these three really helped open my eyes:
One, Church doctrines I considered controversial, even offensive, were in fact Scripturally sound, beautifully explanatory, and rooted in Sacred Tradition. Two, the Church was not the grotesque disfigurement of an imaginary “simple faith” of the first believers; rather, the early Church was the Catholic Church. Three, the Eucharist is really Jesus: it is His body, blood, soul, and divinity, the supersubstantial bread, it is the medicine of immortality.
God makes all things work together for good for those who love him. “All things” includes my years away from the Church. God meets us even in the wilderness.
But I do sometimes lament the lost time and opportunity.
Gratefully, within the vast riches of our Catholic family, I found this beautiful gem:
“If I should fall even a thousand times a day, a thousand times, with peaceful repentance, I will say immediately, Nunc Coepi.
Now I begin.