Why This "Jesus Freak" Became a Catholic

I was pretty nominal Methodist as a child in the 60s. My faith wasn't very vital (to put it mildly), for whatever reason. I was very ignorant of theology, and didn't have a good Sunday school, or much at all to teach me otherwise. But 1977 I became an evangelical Christian.

I was highly influenced by movies about Jesus, like The Greatest Story Ever Told. One time in the mid-70s we were watching that and my older brother Gerry (who was, by then, a long-haired “Jesus Freak”) said “Jesus is God.” Flabbergasted, I said, “no, he's the son of God!” So I started thinking about it, and it gave me a different perspective, even watching the movie, that this person was God in the flesh.

It required a huge depression that I went through in 1977 to bring me to God. I was 18 at the time, and God more or less had to put me right on my back to get it through my thick skull that I couldn't survive on my own. I was under this illusion of, “well, I don't need God in my daily life.” I had lived for ten years without going to church: a very secular life; sort of like what we see in England now, where about 4% go to church every Sunday.

At first, I didn't even go to church on Sunday; I went only to the Bible studies on Wednesday nights. But in 1980, I experienced a further spiritual awakening, and started to seriously commit myself and my entire life to Jesus. I have great and fond memories of my evangelical period (1977-1990).

I learned all about the Bible when I was there, and good moral teaching. I just think there was more to it that the Catholic Church can offer, along the lines of sacramentalism and tradition and matters of Church and authority.

I was involved in counter-cult ministry and my own campus ministry, and then in the late 80s, I started participating in Rescues (Operation Rescue: pro-life activities). Even then, I didn't have a sense that there was something more that I needed. But in 1990, I started a discussion group in my home and invited two Catholics that I had met in the Rescues, and that got me thinking, when they would start answering questions.

I used to think, “Catholics can't defend their views.” Unfortunately, I had had very little experience talking to informed Catholics. Then I met one, named John McAlpine, who actually tried to answer things that I would ask him, and did a great job. He excited my intellectual curiosity, so that I began studying Catholicism very seriously.

At that time, being a pro-life activist, I was curious about contraception, and why Catholics were against that, and how they made a connection between contraception and abortion. I'd try to figure that out, thinking, “what connection is there, because one is trying to prevent conception; the other is killing a child.” My Catholic friends told me facts like, “the whole Christian Church was against contraception until 1930.

That floored me, because I always valued Church history. So, to hear that fact was a real bombshell. I thought it was a stretch to believe that in our century, we would somehow manage to get a moral teaching right, after 1900 years of Church history had supposedly messed it up. All of a sudden, a collective “light bulb” goes on, and we all get it, that contraception is fine and dandy? I thought that was an absurd scenario, with all the murder and chaos that we had in the 20th century, the bloodiest in history. Some things stretch credibility and plausibility beyond the breaking point.

I started pondering that issue, trying to eventually work through the distinction between contraception and Natural Family Planning, which is permitted for Catholics. And I came to realize that in one case you're deliberately thwarting a possible conception; you're going ahead and having sex anyway, and it's against the natural order. You don't even have to appeal to Church authority to know the wrongness of it, if you reflect on the morality.

Also, we might consider the analogy of comparing contraception to food. Food entails a nutritional aspect and also taste buds. People instinctively think it is strange if one is separated from the other; if we eat for pleasure only (all junk food) or vice versa (all boring but nutritious food).

I still would have said, “this doesn't mean I'm gonna be a Catholic.” But I thought it was strange that the Catholic Church had, in my opinion by then, the best moral theology of any church. So I thought, “how could they be right about these things, and be so wrong on Mary and the pope?,” and the typical things that evangelicals don't like.

At that point I started reflecting upon matters of “What is the Church?,” because I believed that there was such a thing as the Church, with a big “C”. So I started thinking, “how does that work out?” I had a view that the early Church was more than anything else, “Protestant” – and became corrupt and “Catholic” with the Inquisition and the Crusades.

And then when Martin Luther picked up the ball in the 1500s, the Church sort of switched back to Protestantism at that point. The Catholic Church was still Christian, but it wasn't what I would call the mainstream. The evangelicals were really where it was at and the Catholics, well, they had a lot of truth, but not as much as they should. Catholics could still be saved, but they were in a different league. This how I used to think: not anti-Catholic, but extremely “pro-Protestant” as a superior choice.

In my discussion group every two weeks, I would try to shoot down the idea of infallibility. I'd say, “Okay, you guys can be the Church, or a Church, but you're not infallible.” I thought that couldn't possibly be, there were too many errors, and the Inquisition, and so forth. This was my biggest objection to Catholicism, by far. So I started doing my own study, trying to shoot down the Catholic Church.

I found the typical things that people bring up, like Pope Honorius, who supposedly was a heretic, or made publicly binding heretical statements (he did not: the material in question is from private letters), but it was all from a kind of jaded viewpoint. It was sort of a dishonest effort of special pleading. There are good Catholic answers to all these so-called charges of heresy. But I was only reading one side of things, so obviously, I would retain the Protestant “anti-infallibilist” view if I didn't expand my research to include Catholic apologetic materials.

My friend John became totally exasperated with my constant questions. I was getting into some pretty technical things, and he hadn't done the study, so, he said, “why don't you read John Henry Newman's Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine?” -- which is considered the classic on that subject. Newman (1801-1890) was a genius and an Anglican who had (famously) converted to Catholicism in 1845. I started reading that book, and it pulverized my conception and outlook: this notion that the early Church was simple and Protestant, and became corrupt.

He explained the idea that you can have a development as opposed to a corruption. A doctrine can grow, but it doesn't have to be a corruption, because it remains the same in essence. What happens is that we understand it better as time goes on. One can find this in St. Augustine and early Church fathers. I think it's the key to Catholic history; why we believe that we are the apostolic Church.

I had had this notion as an evangelical that the early Church was this bunch of “Jesus Freaks” running around, meeting in caves, who didn't believe in the Eucharist, or any of that kind of “hifalutin'” stuff. But that's really not what we find in the Fathers. The earliest “apostolic” Fathers are very “Catholic” indeed. They believed in Real Substantial, Physical Presence of Jesus in the Eucharist, and regenerative baptism, all the things, pretty much, that Catholics believe today, only in more primitive form.

I told myself, “okay, now I accept the Catholic viewpoint of history, so I need to look at the Protestant 'Reformation' and determine, 'what is the Protestant Reformation?'” I had read a little bit about it, but I wanted to get more in depth and maybe read the Catholic views of it – get the other side. I had accepted the widespread myth that Luther came around when the Bible was “in chains,” and the Church was in darkness, and Luther heroically brought the Bible to the people.

But this is sheer mythology, because, for instance, a hundred years before Luther's time, there were fourteen German versions of the Bible, from Catholics. And yet the popular notion is that no one had the Bible, and they were chained. That's mostly because of the printing press. There was not widespread literacy and Bibles for the public until the printing press and mass production of books, and that was only in the 1450s. Bibles in libraries were chained precisely so that no one would steal them: to make them available, not hidden. Yet we hear this notion that the Catholic Church was somehow suppressing the Bible. It's not true.

The Catholic replies by saying, “we just suppressed badtranslations of the Bible.” That's nothing more than many Protestants do today. They'll say “this is a translation that undercuts the deity of Christ.” Catholics were the ones who preserved the Bible for a thousand years, with monks painstakingly translating beautiful manuscripts.

At that time, I read a book called Evangelical is Not Enough, by Thomas Howard. He showed how the liturgy and the Catholic Mass had a timeless quality to it, that transcends time and space. It's a fantastic book, that gave me a deep appreciation for liturgy, which I had virtually no experience with, or that much love for, because I had been “evangelical low church.” And I read the great book, The Spirit of Catholicism, by Karl Adam.

By then, it was just a matter of getting over the cold feet and the jitters. One day I was reading a little meditation by Cardinal Newman, called Hope in God the Creator. And whatever resistance was there, ceased. I said to myself, “I'm a Catholic now, I believe everything, so now's the time.”