About Me

I thought that for my first post on this blog, I might tell you the story of how I came to decide to join the Catholic Church. It should tell you at least a little bit about me in relation to my theological views, so I thought this would be a good way to start out.

 

April 16, 2007. I received a message on facebook from Lauren Pearson, who I had gone to school with from 1st to beginning of 3rd grade. I recognized the name, though I had never really played with her while I went to school with her. I replied that we had indeed gone to the same school (I checked my yearbook). We had intermittent conversations over the messaging system on facebook and texts until the beginning of the 07-08 school year.

At this time I was decided Baptist, though a very odd Baptist at that. I was most certainly a believer of the believer’s baptism, which is the idea that baptism is a sign of of being a Christian, and a testimony to others, and nothing more. You could’ve shown me the verses, and I would’ve replied quite easily, “Exactly, this shows that you need to live your faith, otherwise you have no faith at all.”

“Go and baptize the nations,” Jesus commands, and I thought this meant to teach others how to live for Him.

I didn’t believe in sola fide, which is where my oddness as a Protestant begins. It was absolutely irrefutable that one who didn’t live their faith didn’t have faith, that grace a gift that needed to be taken care of. As one pastor said recently to me, “God doesn’t give the gift of grace to you and then take it away,” to which I replied, “And God doesn’t take away our free will to mishandle that grace and lose it, at which He will have to give it back to us after we have been forgiven.” This part of my belief has never changed.

I have an uncle who is very decidedly TULIP Calvinist (or five-point Calvinist), the last two points being Irresistible Grace and Predestination, which absolutely clashed with the ideas of free will I saw as pre-eminent in the Bible. God will not hold someone with them against their will, and God has made it possible that we might be with Him, He will not hold us away against our will. That is quite easily why I believe those two doctrines are entirely contrary to Sacred Tradition and Sacred Scripture, and anyone who has been shown otherwise but believes these still is in heresy.

Was I Arminiist? I don’t know, I’d never cared to check. (Armini was the contra- to Calvin, as I understand.)

Because of my uncle, I didn’t believe in the Baptist idea of the priesthood of all believers, the idea that all Christians can interpret the Bible by the Holy Spirit’s help and reach perfectly plausible ends. It was too easy to see that this was impossible; how could we reach opposite conclusions and still have the same Holy Spirit working in us? God could do better, I thought. So I devoted myself to finding out who had the authority to interpret Bible. There were those who had written infallibly, surely there are still those around to interpret infallibly, I thought.

That was about the beginning of summer 07.

One of the first things I thought about in my reading of the Bible was the idea of purification. If we are given grace that we need to take care of, and we are yet imperfect, how can we still hold onto all the grace we were given? We die imperfect, and yet in Heaven we will be perfect. There must be some moment, or time, between Heaven and Earth, where we are purified and all our remaining sin and sinful nature is removed from us.

I brought this up with some friends at camp, and I showed Biblical suggestions of this purification, namely Matthew 5:25-26, in which Jesus says that we should “Settle our disputes with our adversary, lest he hand us over to the judge, and the judge hand us over to the jailer, and the jailer put us in prison, in which we shall not leave until we have paid the last penny.” This pointed all too much to this idea of purification, and made me decide that this must last longer than a moment, lasting as long as it took, depending upon the condition of that person’s soul. It was later when I found out the Greek word for adversary used here, antidikos, which is also used to describe Satan in Job and Revelations, which only strengthened my belief in this idea.

Unwittingly, I was a believer in purgatory.

Upon returning home after volunteering at camp all summer, I began having more in-depth conversations with Lauren over the phone. We talked about many things, and eventually we came to discussions about faith.

We were talking about going to church, and I told her I had something exciting to share, that I was sure she hadn’t heard about. I took out my Bible, asked her to take out hers, and I told her to go to Matthew 5:25-26. I read it out loud to her, and went into length about the idea of purification, as I understood it.

Then, she said something that absolutely shocked me; “Bryce, that sounds awfully like the Catholic idea of Purgatory.”

I said, “What? Catholic how? Catholics don’t use the Bible to defend their beliefs, that have tradition from men.”

Lauren said, “You realize I’m Catholic? And I know we don’t have men’s tradition, we have Sacred Tradition…”

“Man-made tradition,” I countered.

“Whatever,” she said. “But we do read out of the Bible, a lot.”

That conversation shook me. I said I’d look into it.

Hello Wikipedia.

 

It was about November when I started doing a massive amount of reading about the Catholic Church. At first, some ideas sounded absolutely absurd (“They believe that! Well, that certainly isn’t in the Bible”), and I managed to keep most away for about a month, until Lauren said, perhaps unwittingly as to how important a question it was, “Where does it even say in the Bible that it has to come from the Bible?”

“Uhm…” I said. “I don’t know.”

So I looked into that.

I found verses that said Scripture was good for reproof, but nowhere remotely mentioning the idea of Scripture only, or even Scripture primarily.

I unwittingly stumbled back upon my idea that there must be some way to have infallible interpretation of the Bible, and when I looked at 2 Peter 1:19-21, I saw irrefutable evidence that God had indeed given to men the power to interpret Scripture perfectly as it was meant to be. But who were these people?

 

Beginning of December I really started backsliding on Baptist beliefs, and becoming at the least, very Anglo-Catholic. I was convinced beyond a doubt of Purgatory, the Communion of Saints, Jesus starting the Church (though I was still a little iffy on Peter being the first Pope, never mind that Jesus quite obviously says “You are Peter, and this Rock I will build my Church.” -Matthew 16:18) Baptism, Faith and Works, the Eucharist, Holy Orders (it was Acts 1 that convinced me of that), but there was just one obstacle, as I saw it, to becoming Catholic.

Mary.

I could not understand the ideas that Catholics had about her. I knew they didn’t worship her in any way (hyperdulia, the veneration due to Mary above the saints, and patria, the worship and praise due to God alone), but I didn’t see any reason for her having to be sinless.

So, it was about late December I asked Lauren to put me on the phone with her father, who I knew could speak quite well for Catholics.

We spoke, and he explained the basics, I said I knew those. I just asked, “Why does she need to be sinless?” (Those were my exact words)

And then he seems to go on a tangent. “Do you know about the Ark of the Old Covenant?”

I say yeah, it was the Ark that held God’s presence.

And Mr. Pearson says, “And who did Mary have in her womb?”

I didn’t say anything for a little bit. I just had a very audible click go off in my head, one that doesn’t come too often. It’s like that click you get when you just finally grasp something you haven’t been understanding.

After that short moment, I say, “How long does it take to become Catholic?”

There was a short silence on the other side of the phone, Mr. Pearson changing gears. “Well,” he said, “It takes about a year, because there’s simply so much to learn, and Catholics want to make sure you understand everything about the Church before you enter it.”

 

So, that’s my story. I will be taking RCIA (Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults) this fall, and will be entering the Church Easter vigil 2009, at Cathedral of Our Lady of the Rosary.

 

Prologue;

 

Lauren said to me once she came back on the phone after I finished talking to Mr. Pearson, “My dad just said that you asked how long it took to become Catholic.”

I said, “Yeah.”

“Are you… have you decided…?”

“Yeah.”

Shrieks of joy on the other end.

 

I told my family early February about my plans to join the Catholic Church, and sorry to say, it hasn’t been going over well.

 

I went to my first Mass January 27, the day before St. Thomas Aquinas’ feast day, which seemed to be a little bit of a coincidence, since I’m sure I want him to be my patron saint.