The Mystery Horn—Prodigals

A.N. Wilson—Prodigal Son

2009-05-07T18:05:00.000-07:00

Benjamin Wiker

For all too many years, eminent novelist and biographer A.N. Wilson was a self-satisfied atheist, a proud member of the British unbelieving intelligentsia, along with Richard Dawkins and expatriate Christopher Hitchens. But no more. Andrew Norman Wilson has come home.

I still remember the taste of ashes in my soul reading A. N. Wilson's biography of C. S. Lewis. It was filled with the kind of meticulous spite that can only be mustered by someone entirely bent on chipping away at a larger-than-life figure until he is largely unrecognizable, riddled with pock marks and imperfections. I sensed that I was not getting a representation of Lewis, but rather, a glimpse of the atheist Wilson himself and his thinly disguised contempt for so great a Christian apologist.

Looking back on it, I would dare to suggest that what animated Wilson's spiteful treatment was a deep anger and frustration that Lewis, his intellectual superior, could waste his talents on something so infantile and obviously inferior as Christianity. If he was that evidently smart, why couldn't Lewis -- like Wilson -- see that the whole God thing was a sham?

Wilson just couldn't understand, and so in writing about Lewis, he searched under every psychological rock to find evidence that Lewis's great intellect had been deformed by some hidden twist in his soul, and bent unnaturally to the defense of Christianity.

This Easter found that same Mr. Wilson in church among the faithful, singing the praises of the Risen Christ, a believer once again, a man who had experienced the heady thrill of casting away all belief in God thereby freeing himself from all ultimate claims, and then gradually, humbly recognized how small-minded and trendy his whole anti-God phase had been. Looking back on it all, Wilson wondered, "Why did I, along with so many others, become so dismissive of Christianity?"

"Like most educated people in Britain and Northern Europe (I was born in 1950), I have grown up in a culture that is overwhelmingly secular and anti-religious. The universities, broadcasters and media generally are not merely non-religious, they are positively anti.

"To my shame, I believe it was this that made me lose faith and heart in my youth. It felt so uncool to be religious. With the mentality of a child in the playground, I felt at some visceral level that being religious was unsexy, like having spots or wearing specs.

"This playground attitude accounts for much of the attitude towards Christianity that you pick up, say, from the alternative comedians, and the casual light blasphemy of jokes on TV or radio.

"It also lends weight to the fervour of the anti-God fanatics, such as the writer Christopher Hitchens and the geneticist Richard Dawkins, who think all the evil in the world is actually caused by religion."

What ultimately changed Wilson's mind? There was no dramatic, sudden conversion experience; just a slow, sure recognition that atheism rang hollow. Life was too deep, too rich for mere materialism.

"My own return to faith has surprised no one more than myself. Why did I return to it? Partially, perhaps it is no more than the confidence I have gained with age.

"Rather than being cowed by them [the anti-religious smart-set], I relish the notion that, by asserting a belief in the risen Christ, I am defying all the liberal clever-clogs on the block: cutting-edge novelists such as Martin Amis; foul-mouthed, self-satisfied TV presenters such as Jonathan Ross and Jo Brand; and the smug, tieless architects of so much television output.

"But there is more to it than that. My belief has come about in large measure because of the lives and examples of people I have known -- not the famous, not saints, but friends and relations who have lived, and faced death, in the light of the Resurrection story, or in the quiet acceptance that they have a future after they die.

"The Easter story answers their questions about the spiritual aspects of humanity. It changes people's lives because it helps us understand that we, like Jesus, are born as spiritual beings.

"Every inner prompting of conscience, every glimmering sense of beauty, every response we make to music, every experience we have of love -- whether of physical love, sexual love, family love or the love of friends -- and every experience of bereavement, reminds us of this fact about ourselves."

And what of all the atheists he left behind, all his fellow comrades in the struggle against belief? Wilson accuses them, not of dishonesty, but a certain woodenness of soul.

"When I think about atheist friends, including my father, they seem to me like people who have no ear for music, or who have never been in love. It is not that (as they believe) they have rumbled the tremendous fraud of religion -- prophets do that in every generation. Rather, these unbelievers are simply missing out on something that is not difficult to grasp. Perhaps it is too obvious to understand; obvious, as lovers feel it was obvious that they should have come together, or obvious as the final resolution of a fugue."

The Risk of Education

2008-10-13T12:33:00.000-07:00

I am very pleased to be here and very comfortable being here, comfortable under the banner of the subject matter and the body Communion and Liberation.

And there would have been times in my life when I wouldn’t have felt comfortable, I would have felt that there was the necessity for me to excuse myself from some of the implications of what we are discussing; but, although I’m on a journey, personally, I feel relaxed in a way that I have never felt before in this society in making that journey, here, and in the terms that we’re discussing our subject this evening.

I suppose I would describe myself, I have come to describe myself in the context of recent times as a lapsed agnostic. And briefly, I grew up as a Catholic in Ireland for the first twenty years of my life and then I left abruptly and went a-wandering and the last decade I’ve been returning, I think, I’m not sure but I think. Certainly I got to the cliff face and realised I could go no further in the journey that I set out on at the age of twenty or twenty one and I have turned back. And, as I say, I am comfortable now with the direction I feel myself going. But more that that, I think I have a sense, that just as that journey that I made when I was twenty was reflected or reflected something in the society, that I was a creature of my time, that I am also now a creature of my time in that, that journey back will be reflected and is being reflected at some deeper level in the society.

So that’s why broadly I am here, I guess. The term education, the risk of education, the title of Fr. Giussani’s book, it didn’t immediately engage me because education has come to mean certain things in the society. Perhaps the concept has strayed from its original meaning and, you know, there is so much talk about education, so much talk about the Leaving Cert and the points race and the education supplements and so forth that the true meaning of this discussion, as outlined in this book, could be short-circuited. There’s one sentence in the book which jumped out at me, as a sort of reinvigoration of the meaning of the word. He says "Education has the inestimable value of leading a child to the certainty that things in fact do have a meaning".

It seems to me that that is what education is. It’s entirely about meaning. And in the journey that I have seen, that I’ve been through in society and to observe the nature of the society in the last ten or twenty years something again and again I find myself as a journalist returning to this theme of meaninglessness, of senselessness, that all around there seems to be, on the one hand a march towards something called progress, modernity, the future and yet, underlying that, a fragmentation in which, in various pockets, there is a certain degree of sense. But standing back, and trying to reconcile the various pockets and compartments, there is nothing but meaninglessness. And I find myself drawing together now in my life and my thoughts, strands from various parts of, from various compartments, from various aspects of that senselessness and reading for the first time, reading in the last few days Fr. Giussani’s book, I have a sense, for the first time, of a book actually bringing those strands together, of those ideas being brought together in one between the covers of one volume, things that I had begun to write about, say ten years ago. I wrote about, I have been writing about the destruction of fatherhood in the society, for example. And a few years ago as well, I read an extraordinary book by Alexander Mitscherlish about this. But, an even more extraordinary introduction by the American poet Robert Bly and he outlined the nature of the crisis, as he perceived it then, in 1992, and which is, I think, developed in this book. Because, whereas Bly outlines the problem, Fr. Giussani outlines a solution.

But first to Bly because his theme is very much to do with, I think, our theme. He says in the introduction: "The father society has collapsed. It’s not so much that the father doesn’t talk or pay support or has left the house but rather that the image of the working, teaching father has faded from the mind. An image that has existed rightly in the mind for thousands of years has faded. It is hard to imagine what that fading could mean. The disappearance of the working, teaching father has happened so abruptly, so unexpectedly from the centuries viewpoint and the implications there are so immense that we really turn our heads away, we can’t take it in. Because he no longer teaches as he works, we in our rage call him a nuisance, a curse, a survival from archaic times, an enemy or a virus, some persistent strain in the bloodstream. Just as some early Christians rejoiced over the death of the pagan great mother some people hope that the father and the great father will both go. Whatever may happen in the future, whether God the Father will survive or not, the image of the working and teaching Father in the psyche has already succumbed.

What happens then? At first glance we see the missing psyche father has been replaced by a massive, many breasted interior state mother. But it’s more accurate to say that when the father is gone, everyone becomes a sibling. Mass society with its demand for work without responsibility, creates a gigantic army of rival envious siblings."

And this is his theme, fundamentally. And, if you look at the ticket, the invitation for tonight, the very first sentence is there "something is happening that has never happened before"

And Bly outlines this something as "the collapse of the vertical line of history, the vertical line of culture and its replacement by a horizontal line. That the vertical line along which tradition and learning and knowledge and wisdom were handed down from one generation to another. That this line has been severed and instead our cultures now exchange only across the horizontal line between broadly people of a similar age."

And Bly calls this after Mitscherlish the sibling society. And in this book and subsequently in Bly’s own book, it’s outlined in great and rather frightening detail.

"In the old father organised society" he says, "one knew where power was. It exhibited itself and announced itself by cockaded formal dress, men in gold braid and wide epaulettes getting out of elaborately decorated carriages at the tops of high flights of stairs. The citizens look up. The king is there. If the citizen wants power he kills the king and takes it. Cromwell got his power in that way, so did Mao. But citizens in the sibling society look sideways. The sibling synsis are aware of individuals similar to themselves or herself in large numbers all over the globe. Sibling society has its positive side but on its dark side it wants VCRs, compact disk players, high definition TV , expensive tennis shoes, designer clothes, access to mass communication, fifteen minutes of fame. The sibling society is only forty or fifty years old" This as I say was in 1992 "and not yet in full bloom but already we notice that the committee, a sibling mode dominates decision making more and more all members of the English Department have to teach the same theories and so forth. This has happened before but there is a new age to desire unity now, responsibility for eccentric decisions is not a quality of sibling society". And this is precisely the theme that Fr. Giussani takes up.

A few years ago, when my daughter was about three or four and I started to investigate the possibility of what school she would go to because she was rather belatedly came to Ireland haven grown up in London . I made some enquiries and there was one, because I came from the society which I suppose at the time you would have called a liberal out look, I was looking around for a school that would have similar programme of education and one particular school had a very good reputation in this regard. So I asked them to send me a prospectus and in the prospectus it said, under matters of religion and faith, it said "they would teach their children a wide ranging knowledge and tolerance of many different beliefs and viewpoints". So I called them up and I asked them "that sounds very interesting", I said "but what do you actually teach them" ? "So,well, we teach them a wide ranging belief and tolerance". "Yes, but what do you teach them? I presume that if they are there and there are other people with wide ranging beliefs and viewpoints they can tolerate them to their hearts content but if they go there with nothing what do you give them?" And the answer is: nothing.

And this, it seems to me, is at the core of the problem that we face now in this society. That we have created this idea in Irish society, that because we’re on the run, as I was at the age of twenty, twenty one, from the alleged or believed assertive authoritarianism of the Catholic Church, that we could run for miles and be free, without consequences. And that somehow it didn’t matter that we could create a society without the core represented by Catholicism up to that point and that it wouldn’t be missed, that somehow, organically in the society, there would come a new flowering of belief and that people would either believe in the Budda or believe in Allah or whatever and that the rest of us would simply sit around tolerating them And it seems to me, now, that this a completely unsustainable idea.

And reading Fr. Giussani’s book I begin to see why, because he outlines in extraordinary and ultimately saddening detail the nature of the problem. That when we’re denied meaning by the fragmentation, by the idea that simply we cannot make up our own truth, that without tradition, without that vertical line that Bly talked of, we’re simply scrambling around.

There’s a beautiful image he uses of a child taking a clock apart and he takes it apart with great care and attention. I’ll read it out for you : "The student" and this is in the modern context "the student is like a child who finds a large clock in a room. Smart and curious he picks up the clock and slowly takes it apart. In the end he has fifty or one hundred pieces before him. He was really clever, but now he feels lost and begins to cry for the clock is all there but it’s no longer there. He lacks the unifying idea that would allow him to put it back together.’

And this, it seems to me, is at the core of the idea of what has happened to us. That we have everything but the core meaning. We have everything but the glue, we have everything but the connections between things, that we have a society in which we can pick and mix, from all kinds of options but it doesn’t make us happy.

We are very near the offices of the paper I used to work in, I still work there theoretically, and I’m conscious that to use the kind of terminologies that we use, we will use here tonight, to speak of God, to speak of Jesus Christ as the Way, the Truth and the Light, that will have a certain meaning. And if that were reported in the Irish Times or Independent tomorrow people would decide, that as the headline in the Irish Catholic said recently "Waters returns to the faith"

So the public square, the language that we use in the public square and the language that we use to discuss the meaning of life are, to a degree, a very high degree, incompatible now.

I take my daughter to the family Mass in Dalkey on Sundays and there in the sort of the centre of the Irish Times universe, I see parents, like me, with their children. They bring them to the choir, they bring them to communion, they bring them there because they serve Mass. The entire family is there. And it strikes me, again and again, that when they turn on their radio or open a newspaper there is nothing in that, which will give a resonance to the experience of taking their children there on a Sunday. There’s no recognition of it, there’s nothing but opposition to it. The logic of everything they will read will tell them that it is something that, they still do, if they do it, but really it can’t go on for much longer, can it. That they are some kind of hangover, some kind of residues from some traditional past. And it seems to me that they must be as confused by this as I am, to be unable to actually speak in the public square about God, about meaning about the horizon of human existence, without, you know, without being seen to be something that you are trying to avoid being. Perhaps wrongly, because the culture has been so damaged by the war that has gone on here for fifty years now. That war, I would define as - it didn’t just happen in the spiritual domain, it happens also in the political domain, that in the reaction to British Colonialism a certain ideology of nationalism grew up and also an ideology of Christianity, where the Catholic Church became, in a sense, the parent of Irish society, became not just the spiritual guide but in many ways the moral and political and sometimes even social custodian of our ability to survive at that time. And in the last thirty years, we have a counter veiling reaction, we have people of my generation and the generation before that reacting against authority reacting against superstition, supposed, reaction against supposed irrationality, created this war. And, at the end of this war we’re left with nothing but questions. Those of us who fought it on either side still have the questions, still have the emptiness. We have a society now in which suicide levels are among the highest in the world - again the lack of meaning - but how deep does this meaning go. In Fr. Giussani’s book the answers are there, but they’re very challenging answers, they’re not easy answers. And they are answers that we can only come to if in this society we can actually somehow manage to explode the many prejudices and misunderstandings and corruptions of language itself which now prevent the public square from grappling with the major questions of meaning that confront us .

There are many, many sections of this book that I’d like to read out to you. It’s a quite extraordinary book, not an easy book. Its every page is crammed with ideas and challenges, but there is something I’d like to read, which has to do with - if I can find it now - with the meaning of satisfaction, yes.

"When we say that faith exalts rationality we mean that faith corresponds to some fundamental, original need that all men and women feel in their hearts. In fact it is significant that instead of the word rationality the bible uses the word heart. Faith truly answers the original needs of the human heart which are the same for everyone – the need for truth, beauty, the good, justice, love and total self satisfaction. As I often remind my students the word satisfaction had originally the same connotation as the word perfection for in Latin satisfacere and perficere are analogous terms. This perfection and satisfaction are synonymous just like happiness and eternity".

And this is an idea that is lost to us now in a society which believes that it can mould the human being, that what society gets is a blank slate and that through our educational system, properly regulated with the correct ideologies, can actually make people in a kind of perfection. And this is the most dangerous idea because it denies what is at the core of human longing, that in there there are hungers for those qualities of truth and justice and that ultimately the only answer that is ever being offered in the whole of human history, the only satisfactory answer, the only answer that gives comfort to the human being is that Jesus Christ came as man and lived among us.

And I find myself now at the age of fifty saying these things. They were taught to me as a child, saying them again and wondering at my saying of them, wondering, do I mean it? can I mean it" can it be true? Can I get over all of that anger that caused me to walk away in the first place? Can I make the connection between that idea and what is wrong in my life? This is the challenge I find and in Fr. Giussani’s book I find the shadows of answers. I need to read it again and again but in there are the answers because that connection is made very clearly. The question, the connection between meaning, faith and courage. It’s a very difficult thing, I find as a parent now, - what do you do? How do you teach your child in a world which is so unpredictable, in a world in which the parenting of your child is taken away from you in so many ways, not just by the educational system but by a TV set, by peer pressure, by all kinds of things? What do you begin to tell you child of what the world is about? How can you hope to succeed against all those other pressures? And I found myself at that stage, ten years ago nearly now, and embarking on that parental journey, having to make a decision in my heart that I didn’t know the answers and that the only thing that I could offer my child was what was offered to me because I had the luxury of fighting with that, of struggling with that for ten, fifteen, twenty years and that allowed me to have meaning. But what frightened me about the attitudes I was beginning to come out of then - the idea that, somehow my child could reach a certain age and make her own choices.

It seemed to me that this was a recipe for my child to becoming the hole in a doughnut, that she would look at everybody else and tolerate their views – spectate upon the carnival of belief, but would have no beliefs herself. So what I decided to do then was simply to allow, to start her off on the path that I was started on while I was thinking out the next move.

And in some ways I feel vindicated reading Fr. Giussani’s book, I feel vindicated in that because he talks so much about experience, he talks so much about criticism, about interrogating the beliefs that you have been handed but about fundamentally believing in your our experience and drawing, not just from the truth, from the word but from its resonance in that experience And if I was to identity something which struck me very recently - the idea that modern ideologies which have sought to replace these truths, what they have said to us, is that the particularity of our own experience is not valid, except to the extent that it can be critiqued by the ideologies.

So, my experience was to be born in a certain room, in a certain town, in a certain time: that is my life, that is the only way I can be a human being, to live life to the full is to engage with that actual particular reality. There’s no point in me reading Karl Marx and deciding that the way I was brought up was unjust because I should have a bigger house or more carpets or a bigger TV screen/

What Fr. Giussani says is that our experience that is what me must live. And we live in a world that is seeking to give us a different kind of perfection. a man made perfection which with every move seems to fragment more and more and leave us all, more and more isolated

And the strange thing about, I’ll finish with saying this about my daughter: I don’t know very often what I’m doing. I follow a pattern, I follow the tradition, to the best of my ability. I tell her what I was told. If I don’t know I point her in the right direction. We talk. And sometimes I wonder how does she equate the various things she hears, how does she deal with that split between the belief system which I now try to give her and the public square, how does she, because, you know, she watches TV, she goes to school, she learns about biology, she learns about dinosaurs and monsters. And I was one day trying to tease out with her how she was reconciling these things, because she never expresses any confusion about the dissonance between evolution and the creationism, for example. And so I said to her, I said "Roisin, how are you not confused about the idea that on the one hand Darwin says, you know, that man evolved from the apes and on the other you believe that God created And how do you reconcile the idea you know, that rather than what it tells us about Adam and Eve and so forth and Genesis and so forth, that there was actually a big bang. And she says "Yes, but who made the big bang?"

At Home in Truth

2008-10-05T20:14:00.000-07:00

Jeffrey A. Tucker

I am no fan of "conversion" essays, which are sometimes pompous and self-serving. My purpose is to achieve a greater spirit of mutual respect. How rare are Protestant conversions to Catholicism? More rare than reverse, but I know enough cases, including my own, to make the subject worth exploring.

J.I. Packer recently wrote in Christianity Today (May 1989) that the contrast between the "zany wildness" of Protestantism and the "at-homeness" of Catholicism alone is sufficient to explain conversions to Catholicism. It is the only Church that can, and does, claim institutional continuity from the time of Christ to the present. He contrasts the "at home" motive with a more genuine longing for the truth.

But the Road to Rome is a long one, and, I submit, the choice between instability and continuity, sectarianism and universality, is not a sufficient reason for conversion. The Christian ought to be willing to be a minority of one if the truth is at stake.

It is precisely the conviction of truth that led to my conversion to Catholicism. I wrote Rev. Packer that "My conversion to Catholicism was motivated by more than a feeling of 'at-homeness.' God makes us feel at home when we have a sincere conviction of truth. There is no dichotomy between the two, as you suggested. Truth is what I sought when God led me to Rome....My plea is for you to take my conversion, and others like mine, seriously."

Anti-Catholicism

Catholic and Reformed theological discussion has matured since the Reformation, when neither side was immune from using smear tactics to score debating points. Today the inflammatory rhetoric is largely gone, yet fundamental misunderstandings persist. My own anti-Catholicism was partly a product of ethnic prejudice, growing up, as I did, as a Southern Baptist in a largely Hispanic town in West Texas. It took years before I could look at Catholicism as more than a hypocritical, anti-scriptural, even anti-Christian cult.

The Baptist culture of my childhood treated Christianity as a wholly individualized phenomenon. No man was to exercise authority over any other, in the affairs of the church, or, more importantly, in the understanding of doctrine. There was no discussion of history, councils, creeds, saints, martyrs, or controversies. I don't think my experience was far from typical. Even in the "good-old days" when every family attended Wednesday night prayer meeting such instruction was absent. The Bible -- one's subjective interpretations of it -- was all that was necessary for individualized Christianity.

My high-school conversion to Presbyterian Church moderated my anti-Catholicism. I began to understand, for the first time, the significance of the creeds, of Church government, of liturgy (however loosely defined). But the most important thing being a Presbyterian did for me was to alert me to the meaning of Christian history. It was the overwhelming weight of 2000 years of history that finally convinced me of the truth of Catholicism.

The Devil Theory of History

Presbyterians do not want to tear themselves away from church history, but rather want to be part of God's eternal covenant with His people, from its inception to eternity. At my Orthodox Presbyterian Church, we read the words of the great Reformers with respect and even veneration. We discussed their theological views. We tried to imitate their liturgical styles. All of this is important; it helps in the maturation process. Even though Presbyterians endorse the Reformed doctrine of Sola Scriptura (formed in opposition to Rome), they recognize that the Church has a teaching role and that pious individuals in Church history have a level of understanding that supersedes most of our own. Individual faith and conscience are the final guides, of course, but our primary earthly allegiance must be to the teaching authority of the Church.

But there was still something missing from Presbyterianism for me. It seemed to concentrate too heavily on post-Reformation Church history, and the first 1500 years of Christianity received scant attention. Do these years offer us anything that will enhance our understanding of Christianity? One easy way to answer this question is to adopt the Devil Theory of History, which says the history of the Church is the story of corruption. The way to sound doctrine is to adopt the views of the Persecuted simply because they stand against Rome. The result of this view is intolerable: heresy becomes orthodoxy and anybody who shouts "to hell with the Pope" gets a hearing.

The Devil Theory collapses on the most superficial analysis. Christians justifiably take pride in their heritage, yet the Catholic Church was the only Christian Church for at least 1500 years (leaving aside the 11th century Orthodox break). Why would Christ have allowed his Church to wallow in the mire of falsehood and heresy for so long? What kind of witness would that have provided to the world? If Christ did indeed establish a Church, wouldn't He have providentially protected her from significant error?

Partial Corruption?

An alternative view is to see the Church as only partially corrupt. As I understand it, this is the Presbyterian position (the new one; not the traditional). But given the Church's own historical claims of authenticity, authority, and infallibility, this view is difficult to sustain. One cannot have it both ways: the Church was either in Christ's hands (as she claimed) or she was the anti-Christ by virtue of making such claims.

One can selectively draw from pre-Reformation doctrine and expunge from it its pro-Papacy statements. For example, Reformed thinkers are famous for quoting St. Augustine in support of predestination and election. But rarely quoted is St. Augustine's view of the Church, which anticipates ultramontanism (an extreme position on papal authority).

Yet the partial corruption thesis collapses from internal contradictions. Christendom's greatest thinkers and the most pious saints were also devoted to the Church as a divinely protected institution: its catholicity, apostilicity, infallibility, and sacraments. It is anomalous to claim the authority of a saint like Augustine without mentioning his views on the Church. It's like discussing the development of a child without mentioning the mother's role in nurturing, sustaining, and reinforcing the maturation process.

Presbyterians must decide if they were ever part of the universal Church of Catholicism. Did they ever endorse the papacy as a legitimate institution reflecting Christ's will? Was it corrupt from the beginning or just become so in the 16th century? Under what conditions would Presbyterians have been willing to be in communion with Rome? Ideally, should the papacy have been wiped out? It seems to me the correct path is to regard the Catholic church as Christ's church and to regard her claims as true.

The Role of Tradition

Protestants look skeptically on the Catholic view that Christian tradition has doctrinal authority stemming from Christ and the apostles. Yet tradition (the teaching authority of Christ and His apostles) is essential to full Christian understanding for several reasons. First, not everything concerning Christ's work is found in Scripture (Jn. 21:25) and some Christian teaching is handed down by word of mouth (II Tim. 2:2). The Bible instructs us to "stand fast, and hold the traditions which you have learned, whether by word or by our epistle" (II Thess. 2:15). Second, the early Church did not have a Bible in the sense that we do today; yet their faith was fully protected and sustained through tradition. The Bible itself is a product of the 4th century Church. Third, no single individual can fully derive the meaning of scripture by himself; it takes tradition to set up the proper framework for understanding and for asking the right questions. Say the Bible was given to a fully competent scholar and he was asked to write a creed based upon it. Even if he had ten years to do so, who doubts that he would not get it quite right? Christ never intended him to. The Church was established to articulate and defend Christian doctrine (Mt. 16:18-19).

As a Presbyterian, I rejected the subjectivist position of Biblical understanding, and I wanted to embrace Church history. Then I had to decide which parts of the tradition to embrace and which parts to reject. It seemed to me that the doctrine of the Reformers was too much in flux to provide a sufficient grounding in the Faith. And that approach freezes Christianity in time. The Reformers had valuable things to say; but I thought their words and liturgical practices should be weighed against the whole of Christian tradition. I settled on this: I reject the part of tradition that is contradicted by the Bible. And that is the rule the Catholic Church herself has accepted.

The consistent Christian finds that the Church is the anchor of his faith. The fair-minded historian finds that the Catholic Church is the anchor of history. In both cases, I came believe, Providence is at the helm.

My Conversion Process

There were many steps in my conversion, but the most important one was the initial one: investigating what the Church has to offer. My experience accords with G.K. Chesterton's: "This process, which may be called discovering the Catholic Church, is perhaps the most pleasant and straightforward part of the business; easier than joining the Catholic Church and much easier than trying to live the Catholic life. It is like discovering a new continent full of strange flowers and fantastic animals, which is at once wild and hospitable."

There were a host of Catholic terms and objects that have meaning with Catholicism with which I was completely unfamiliar: offices, the magisterium, mortal and venial sins, confession, penance, rosary beads, the saints and martyrs, and even, yes, Marian theology. Suddenly, I found that most of the anti-Catholic ideas that I held were canards with no basis in fact (e.g., that Catholics worship Mary and statues, that they don't believe the Bible inerrant, that they cannot pray directly to God). Even the dreaded doctrine of the infallibility sounded more reasonable considering its limits: the Pope must speak ex cathedra (from the Chair of Peter) and he must do so in communion with the Bishops.

This discovery process led me to the proverbial slippery slope of Romanism. As Chesterton describes it: "It is impossible to be just to the Catholic Church. The moment men cease to pull against it they feel a tug towards it. The moment they cease to shout it down they begin to listen to it with pleasure. The moment they try to be fair to it they begin to be fond of it. But when that affection has passed a certain point it begins to take on the tragic and menacing grandeur of a great love affair."

Finally, I cannot discuss my conversion without mentioning the Eucharist, the source and sacrament of Catholic spirituality. Here lies a central difference between the Catholic and Orthodox faiths as versus Protestantism. The vast majority of Christians believe what scripture says about the Eucharist: the bread and wine is fully transformed into the body and the blood -- the doctrine of transubstantiation. The Real Presence is indeed a divine mystery (as is much else about our Faith). I was amazed to discover that both Luther and Calvin, in different degrees, taught the Real Presence in the Eucharist. The Memorialist view--that the Eucharist is all bread and that communion is really without divine significance, done merely "in memory" of Christ--that is, the common teaching of evangelicals, wasn't believed or taught by the Reformers. I rejected the Memorialist view, but could see no reason not to go all the way to a pure Catholic position.

From Geneva to Rome

It was in my search for a "pure" Presbyterianism that I found Catholicism. I became tired of "protesting"; I wanted a real and positive Christianity. I didn't want a liturgy and theology defined in opposition to something else; I wanted the Christian liturgy and theology that the Church throughout the ages defined and practiced. Moreover, I did not want these things because they were part of the past; I wanted them because they will be part of the future.

John Henry Cardinal Newman, among the most famous of converts from Protestantism to Catholicism, makes the point in Apologia Pro Vita Sua that the best and most orthodox elements of evangelical, Reformed, and Anglican Christian doctrine find their fullest expression and glory within Catholicism. The bread in the Lord's supper becomes the mystery of the Real Presence; collective confession becomes private, specific, and efficacious; the claim of Church authority becomes the hard-core position of infallibility; Scripture becomes the infallible story of the covenant of God, both in content and canon; mere perseverance becomes a well-defined penance; martyrs and saints, whose lives are to be admired and emulated, become advocates on your behalf; the pastor becomes priest; the worship service becomes the Mass, with liturgy based on Scripture and imbued with holiness; the Christian "quiet time" becomes the requirement of a regular and disciplined prayer life, with litanies, memorization, and hours of intense contemplation on the Triune God.

Yet at the base, there is one reason why I converted to Catholicism. It is summarized by the line from the Apostle's Creed: "I believe in the One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church."

It's no wonder that Catholics have been so hysterically hated and persecuted throughout history. The Church's claim to be a fortress of truth, fully expressing the whole of Christian doctrine, makes it the single biggest threat to the forces of modernism and atheism. If a person hates God, why bother attacking Lutherans, Methodists, or the Reformed movement when he can attack Catholicism?

I am not hostile to Protestantism in general, and certainly not to Presbyterianism, to which I owe a great debt. I came to believe that Christ's Church subsists in Catholicism, which is why it has been so successful in defending orthodoxy and in standing against the tides of Christian sectarianism and atheistic modernism. Catholicism offers orthodoxy, universality, and stability.

Conversion was not an easy decision; the agonizing process lasted nearly three years. My final step was taken out of a conviction of truth, and it was a step I shall never regret.

Conversion reading material: Vatican II; The Catholic Catechism by John A. Hardon, S.J; anything by G.K Chesterton, but especially Orthodoxy and The Catholic Church and Conversion; Apologia Pro Vita Sua by J.H. Cardinal Newman, Catholicism and Fundamentalism by Karl Keating (Ignatius Press, 1988); and Evangelical is Not Enough by Thomas Howard (Ignatius Press, 1989).

Jeffrey Tucker is a Fellow of the Ludwig von Mises Institute and the Managing Editor of The Free Market.

Conversions to Catholicism

2008-09-11T06:25:00.000-07:00

Mike McManus

In a recent column I reported that 20 million Americans who grew up Catholic have become Protestant. However, there is a significant counter-trend of conversion to Catholicism.

Most famously, after Tony Blair stepped down as British Prime Minister, he was "received into full communion with the Catholic Church," said Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor in London. All Prime Ministers have been Anglicans, Britain's state church. However, Blair attended Mass weekly with his Catholic wife and children.

In 1996, the year before he became Prime Minister, Cardinal Basil Hume, head of the Catholic Church in Britain, wrote a letter to Blair asking him to stop taking Communion. He agreed to do so. In 2007 he underwent a period of "spiritual preparation," meeting regularly with a Catholic priest who is an assistant to the Cardinal.

His conversion was controversial within the Catholic Church that opposed many of his policies as Prime Minister to support stem cell research, legalizing gay civil unions, and he resisted toughening the nation's abortion laws. His conversion was also bitterly attacked by many British: "Hopefully he will now go and live in a Catholic country," said a letter to the London Times.

In the United States, Kansas Sen. Sam Brownback converted from the United Methodist Church. He was prepared by Father C. John McCloskey, an Opus Dei priest who also led other prominent people to Catholicism, such as abortion Dr. Bernard Nathanson and columnist Robert Novak, published by 125 newspapers.

In his new book, "The Prince of Darkness," Novak writes that he grew up "in a Jewish household that was only nominally observant." After nearly dying of an illness in 1982, a Catholic friend brought him Catholic literature and introduced him to McCloskey. Novak's wife, Geraldine, started attending Mass in 1992 at St. Patrick's, Washington's oldest Catholic Church.

Asked to attend with her, Novak did so and found himself "moved by the ritual." One reason he felt comfortable was the presence of Father Peter Vaghi, who had been an advisor to Sen. Pete Domenici, before his conversion to Catholicism. Novak also had attended a series of breakfasts, lunches and dinners for two decades with Father McCloskey, a "world-class proselytizer," who also helped convert New York gubernatorial candidate Lewis Lehrman and Wall Street economist Lawrence Kudlow.

"I was a tough nut to crack, but McCloskey never faltered," Novak wrote. In time he grew to see Geraldine, Fathers Vaghi and McCloskey as "the hand of the Holy Spirit." Still, he hesitated until he spoke at a university. A student asked him if he were Catholic, and he replied, "No," but my wife and I have been going to Mass every Sunday for about four years."

The young woman replied, "Mr. Novak, life is short, but eternity is forever." He and Geraldine were baptized shortly afterwards in 1998, witnessed by such Catholic friends as Sen. Pat Moynihan.and Kate O'Beirne.

Three Episcopal Bishops have recently resigned and become Catholics: Daniel Herzog of Albany, John Lipscomb of Sarasota and Jeffrey Steenson of Albuquerque. Each has concluded that the Catholic Church is the church founded by Jesus Christ who told Peter, "You are Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church."

Steenson, who is studying to become a Catholic priest, says, "I felt the Episcopal Church had lost something. They did not think it was possible to find the truth. They have replaced the idea of revelation with human-based authority, rather than discerning what God is saying."

Santa Fe's Catholic Archbishop Michael Sheehan told him, "Look, you have to lead from conscience." That is how Steenson "found freedom in my soul to become Catholic."

Most Catholic conversions are not of famous people. Katherine Spaht, an LSU Professor of Law, an active member of First Presbyterian Church in Baton Rouge, says "I was drawn to the crucifix and not the empty cross."

"I loved Lent, which my Presbyterian church does not emphasize. I fast, beginning on Ash Wednesday. I like to remember that even God suffered and died. We cannot get to the joy of Easter Sunday without going through Good Friday.

"I found myself drawn to the awe in worship. The quiet Catholic approach is entirely different from Protestant churches with people chatting and visiting. I love kneeling, which is humbling. I like to be humbled in the presence of our Lord and Savior," Spaht said.

Finally, she liked the fact Communion is the focus of the Catholic Mass, while Presbyterians have it only once a month. "I want it every time. It is holy to me." The Catholic Church is attracting people for many different reasons.

Michael J. McManus is a syndicated columnist writing on issues of "Ethics & Religion". He is President & Co-Chair of Marriage Savers. He lives with his wife in Potomac, Md.

A talk with the author of Basic Instinct

2008-08-31T13:31:00.000-07:00

By David Yonke

Joe Eszterhas' latest book is a shocker, but not the kind that made him rich and famous.

The upcoming release from the man who penned dark thrillers such as Basic Instinct and Jagged Edge tells the story of his spiritual conversion and his newfound devotion to God and family.

In Crossbearer: A Memoir of Faith, to be published Sept. 2 by St. Martin's Press, Mr. Eszterhas describes how his life got turned around during the summer of 2001.
He and his second wife, Naomi, had just moved from Malibu to a suburb of Cleveland - where he had grown up; she was from nearby Mansfield. They felt Ohio would be a better, more wholesome place to raise their four boys (he had two grown children from his first marriage).

A month after the move, Mr. Eszterhas was diagnosed with throat cancer. Doctors at the Cleveland Clinic removed 80 percent of his larynx, put a tracheotomy tube in his throat, and told him he must quit drinking and smoking immediately.
At age 56, after a lifetime of wild living, Mr. Eszterhas knew it would be a struggle to change his ways.

One hot summer day after his surgery, walking through his tree-lined neighborhood in Bainbridge Township, Mr. Eszterhas reached a breaking point. "I was going crazy. I was jittery. I twitched. I trembled. I had no patience for anything. … Every single nerve ending was demanding a drink and a cigarette," he wrote.

He plopped down on a curb and cried. Sobbed, even. And for the first time since he was a child, he prayed: "Please God, help me." Mr. Eszterhas was shocked by his own prayer.

"I couldn't believe I'd said it. I didn't know why I'd said it. I'd never said it before," he wrote.

But he felt an overwhelming peace. His heart stopped pounding. His hands stopped twitching. He saw a "shimmering, dazzling, nearly blinding brightness that made me cover my eyes with my hands."

Like Saul on the road to Damascus, Mr. Eszterhas had been blinded by God. He stood up, wiped his eyes, and walked back home a new man.

In a phone interview this week, Mr. Eszterhas said it was "an absolutely overwhelming experience."

He went from doubting if he could make it through life without tobacco and alcohol, to knowing that he could "defeat myself and win."

He and Naomi have been faithfully attending Catholic Mass on Sundays ever since, and as the book title states, Joe carries the cross down the aisle. He asserts his nonconformity, however, by wearing jeans and Rolling Stones T-shirts when he does it. Despite the rebel attire, he says he carries the cross with more reverence than most.

Although he is a devout Catholic, Mr. Eszterhas writes bluntly of his disgust for priests who are pedophiles and bishops who have covered up for them. He and Naomi decided they could not, in good conscience, donate a dime to the church because of the clerical sexual abuse scandal.

He also writes about the inner turmoil he felt when he took his boys to catechism classes or other church events and kept a protective eye on them the whole time, making sure they were never alone with a priest.

And he complains about priests' homilies being boring and pointless. When Mr. Eszterhas visited a nondenominational megachurch, he heard a sensational sermon. But he felt empty afterward, missing Holy Communion and the Catholic liturgy.
"It may have been a church full of pedophiles and criminals covering up other criminals' sins … it may have been a church riddled with hypocrisy, deceit, and corruption… but our megachurch experience taught us that we were captive Catholics," he wrote.

Mr. Eszterhas told The Blade that despite his mixed feelings over the church and the abuse scandal, the power of the Mass trumps his doubts and misgivings.
"The Eucharist and the presence of the body and blood of Christ is, in my mind, an overwhelming experience for me. I find that Communion for me is empowering. It's almost a feeling of a kind of high."
He said that living in the heartland, he sees how much Hollywood producers are out of touch with most Americans.

"I find it mind boggling that with nearly 70 percent of Americans describing themselves as Christians, and witnessing the success of The Passion of The Christ and The Chronicles of Narnia, that Hollywood still doesn't do the kinds of faith-based and family-value entertainment that people are desperate to see," Mr. Eszterhas said.

He has turned down hefty offers to write scripts for movies with sinister plots and dark themes like the 16 other ones he wrote that made it to the screen- some paying as much as $3 million a script. Mr. Eszterhas said he spent too much of his life exploring the dark side of humanity and does not want to go there anymore.

He was born in Hungary during World War II, grew up in refugee camps, and then moved to the United States and lived in an impoverished neighborhood in Cleveland.
He worked as a police reporter in Cleveland and "was always fascinated with the darkness. I covered countless shootings, urban riots, and in several situations I was there before police were because I had a police radio and used to drift around the city until something happened," he said.

But after his spiritual transformation, he said, he had had enough of death, murder, blood, and chaos. "Frankly my life changed from the moment God entered my heart. I'm not interested in the darkness anymore," he said. "I've got four gorgeous boys, a wife I adore, I love being alive, and I love and enjoy every moment of my life. My view has brightened and I don't want to go back into that dark place."

Mr. Eszterhas' love and appreciation for life was magnified even more last year when his surgeon told him he didn't need to schedule another visit. "He used the word 'cured,' a word that oncologists generally don't use," Mr. Eszterhas said. "He said I didn't have to come back for any checks, that my tissue had regenerated to the point where you cannot only not tell that there was ever any cancer there, but you can't tell that there had been any surgery there.

"Naomi and I were, of course, overwhelmed when he told us. I think it's truly a miraculous blessing." One miracle Mr. Eszterhas has hoped for but not seen since returning to Ohio is to see his beloved Cleveland Indians win the World Series. But he is using the Tribe's woes as a lesson in faith and patience for his children.

"I think that our Deity may have a pretty nasty sense of humor," he said with a laugh. His new book is evidence of Mr. Eszterhas' victory over writer's block, something that struck him after going sober. It was a difficult adjustment to write for the first time in his life without sipping wine or cognac.

But he was compelled to write Crossbearer as "a thank you to God" and "to tell the world what he has done for me." When his wife finished the book, he said, she gave it a hug. "That's how I feel. I'm very proud of it."

The Road from Arizona to Rome

2008-08-31T13:27:00.000-07:00

Tom Cabeen

A Jehovah's Witness finds the way to Christ in the Catholic Church

My parents were baptized as Jehovah's Witnesses in the spring of 1954, shortly after my fourth birthday. My father, a old-fashioned cattle rancher and cowboy, had grown up mostly without church of any kind. My mother had been a nominal Methodist, but did not attend church very regularly. They were attracted to the Watchtower version of Christianity and embraced their beliefs very enthusiastically. Within two years, believing the end of the world (Armageddon) to be imminent, they sold their new home in Phoenix, Arizona and volunteered to move where the need is great. In 1956, my father was appointed to oversee the Cottonwood, Arizona congregation, which at that time consisted only of our family of three and one very old Witness woman. By 1960, it had grown into a small but zealous congregation of about a dozen families. Dad brushed up on his high school Spanish and started a small Bible study among a group of Hispanics in the Cottonwood area. Later, at the Watchtower Society's request, we moved to El Centro, in southern California, where he served as Overseer of a Spanish-speaking congregation.

My mother and I started at that time to learn Spanish. I learned it rather easily, but she had much more difficulty with it. She never learned to speak it fluently. A couple of years later, we were again asked to move to a small Spanish congregation in Arizona. After I graduated high school in 1967, I became a full-time door-to-door preacher (Pioneer). As a result, I was classified as a Minister of Religion from my local draft board and exempted from military service. In the summer of 1968, at my parents' suggestion, I applied to serve at the world headquarters of Jehovah's Witnesses in Brooklyn, New York. I was invited to serve there starting November 14, 1968.

Success in Brooklyn At Bethel (as the headquarters is called), I applied myself diligently to my work. I was also determined to learn as much as possible about Watchtower teachings.

My willingness to work hard and a natural aptitude for the work assigned to me resulted in my being given increasing responsibilities, generally much more than was usual for someone my age. Shortly after I went to Bethel, my parents, encouraged by my example, began Pioneering. My dad was invited to become a traveling Circuit Overseer. He worked with Spanish-speaking congregations in the southwest and northeast of the United States for over ten years. In New York, I was appointed a member of a Service Committee in my local congregation when I was 19, and subsequently as an elder in 1971, when I was 21. The following year I was appointed a Bethel Elder. As such, I often spoke as a Watchtower Society representative at their conventions. (I was the featured speaker at a District Assembly in Roanoke, VA, at age 27.) At Bethel, I was assigned to work on the large printing press which produced The Watchtower magazine. About a year later, I became a foreman over several presses. When I was 27, I was appointed overseer of the Pressroom.

I cultivated friendships with mature, responsible members of the Bethel staff, many of whom worked in Writing, Service and other offices where the most respected, loyal and mature Witnesses were assigned. I was having many indepth discussions with them about the Society's teachings and the functioning of the organization.

Late in 1973, I became reacquainted with a lovely young woman named Gloria, also a Bethelite, whom I had met shortly after she arrived in 1971. We dated, fell in love, and were married on May 25, 1974. Gloria, like me, was zealous for the Watchtower Society and a hard worker. We had both decided to completely dedicate our lives full-time in the few remaining years before Armageddon as members of the headquarters staff. We both learned French and volunteered to work with French-speaking Witnesses, mostly Haitians, in Newark, New Jersey. Disturbing questions arise Although I had been a Witness for nearly 10 years (I was baptized in 1959), I had never read through the Bible. Doing so raised many questions in my mind. The more I read, the more inconsistencies I found between plain statements in Scripture and my Witness beliefs. At first I attributed my lack of understanding to youth and inexperience. But as time went on and I began to be more respected and trusted, I began to cautiously discuss my Bible questions with older, well-respected members of the headquarters staff. I was surprised to discover how many of them were struggling with the same problems as I, and how openly they discussed them. I began to look at Watchtower teachings in new ways starting after the release of Aid to Bible Understanding in 1971. Organizational changes which followed opened the door to a reexamination of other foundational teachings. I wondered If we have been wrong about so many activities we formerly thought to be solidly based on scripture, why couldn't we be wrong about doctrines, too? I was not alone in asking this question. During the 1970's, a growing number of sincere people at headquarters began to read other Bible translations than the Watchtower's own New World Translation, as well as Bible commentaries, and to gather in informal groups, where we studied and discussed things openly, without the assistance of Watchtower publications. By 1979, I became convinced that there could be no reconciling some key Watchtower teachings with the Bible. However, I still trusted that God was guiding the organization, so I believed that big changes were ahead. I awaited them with eager expectation. My wife Gloria, on the other hand, was unhappy at Bethel. Her difficulties were not primarily doctrinal, but had to do with the way people were treated. She wanted to leave Bethel and start a family. For me, the Watchtower chronology was correct, so I could not imagine why anyone would want to leave with the end so close.

I brought the matter up to a trusted friend on the Governing Body, Ray Franz. He gave me a copy of a letter that had been written to the Watchtower Society by Carl Olof Jonsson, a Witness elder from Sweden. Jonsson presented indisputable evidence that the Watchtower chronology was in serious error. His logic and documentation was solid and scholarly. I read and reread the evidence. Finally, I was convinced. What was so hard to accept was not the error itself but its corollary: Chronology was and is absolutely essential to establish the Watchtower Society's claim to be God's channel of communication to mankind in the brief period before the end of the world. I began to seriously consider the possibility that the Watchtower Society was not what it claimed to be. It seemed certain that the leaders of the Society were misled at best, or hypocrites and false prophets at worst. Although I had thoroughly enjoyed my service with them, and loved my Witness brothers and sisters dearly, it appeared virtually certain that there would be a parting of the ways.

I simply lost my desire to actively support something I no longer believed in. My headquarters career was over. In the midst of this tumultuous time, my parents came to New York from Texas to visit Gloria and me. Because of some expressions I made about the disfellowshipping of some of our close friends, they sensed that my former totally supportive attitude toward the organization was changing. I assured them that I would never abandon God, Jesus Christ or the Bible, but I could not deny that I had serious questions about the organization's authority. But with faith in Watchtower chronology gone, there was no reason to postpone our desire to have a family. We decided to leave Bethel as soon as possible. We left on July 15, 1980. I was not ready to simply walk away from my whole community. Our entire life was tied up with Jehovah's Witnesses. It also seemed that we would be in a better position to help our parents understand how my thinking had changed if we were still associated. Things didn't work out the way I hoped. A deep rift lasting a quarter of a century started then. It continued to grow until I was cut off almost completely from my parents. I was never reconciled with my father before he died in 2002. I still love and miss him. Our life was now to totally change. We had to start our lives over. We had no money, for the previous twelve years had been spent as an unpaid volunteer. I had studied hard, and had both job experience and technical expertise, but had no college degree. I borrowed $300 from my father-in-law to move our few possessions to Lancaster, PA. We lived with Gloria's parents for 10 weeks until I could get a job and find a place to live. Disfellowshipped (Excommunicated) We had left the headquarters of our own volition, and I was still in good standing with the organization, so shortly after we arrived in Pennsylvania, I was appointed an elder. I had doubts, but I saw no reason to withdraw from Jehovah's Witnesses, as long as my association with them did not require me to violate my conscience. However, I found that to be increasingly difficult, as the main thrust of the Watchtower publications for months was warnings against and condemnation of apostates who disagreed with Watchtower teachings. After a year or so, I resigned my position of elder. By this time we had a son, Matthew, born on August 9, 1981. About a year and a half later, the congregation elders of Lancaster PA asked to speak with Gloria and me after the regular Thursday night Service Meeting. It turned out to be an informal judicial hearing. I (in Gloria's presence) was questioned for over an hour about whether I had any doubts. The only specific subject about which I was questioned was whether or not I believed the Watchtower Society to be Jehovah's organization. I replied that I believed that God had worked through Jehovah's Witnesses, but was unwilling to limit him to working through them exclusively. He is God, after all, I said, and he can do whatever he wants. The meeting ended with no action taken.

Although we had been fairly active with the congregation for over two and a half years, few, if any, had any idea that we had doubts. However, within a couple of days, many had heard that we were doubters. We were asked to attend a second brief meeting a couple of weeks later. The elders informed us that since our doubts had become common knowledge in the congregation, they had to take some action. I mentioned that no one in the congregation knew anything about any doubts before the elders met with us, so the elders themselves must have spread that idea after our meeting. (One of their wives had told Gloria's sister-in-law about the meeting.) One of the elders replied, How the information got to be known is not the issue. Now that it is public, we must take action. They announced their decision to disfellowship us. This would mean that our family and friends would be required to completely shun us or face the same action against them. It appeared to us that the decision to expel us had been made before they met with us, based on factors other than evidence or our own testimony, so it seemed to serve no purpose to appeal the decision. Thus ended nearly three decades of our association with Jehovah's Witnesses. Our religious community had rejected us, and we were on our own. Does God work through an organization? Despite how we were treated, there were many admirable things about Witnesses which I was sure were right. I had discovered error, but what I wanted was truth. I needed some reliable way to know which Watchtower teachings were true and which were false. Because I once believed that God uses the Watchtower organization as an exclusive channel to communicate with his people, that was the first focus of my reflections. I hoped to be able to write an essay that would help my parents (primarily) to see why I had changed some of my views about the Watchtower Society. Using my concordance and Bible dictionary, I began to carefully search the Scriptures for evidence as to whether or not God had ever used any organization as an official instrument to communicate with or direct humans. I concluded that he did not, and published my research in an article entitled Does God Work Through an Organization? It was eventually translated into several languages and saw fairly wide circulation among exiting Witnesses, particularly after the Internet came into wide use. Although I acted in good conscience at the time, I am somewhat sad now at the degree of success I had, and must accept the fact that most likely many were misled by my writings. Initially, I did not understand the difference between human organizations and the true church, the body of Christ. Later, I revised my article to show that Christ was joined organically with his body, which was not like human organizations. But I still had much to learn about what Jesus had started and preserved: a visible church, a living body in which he dwells. An outreach to former Witnesses After we left Bethel, I kept in touch with ex-Witness friends and added new ones. A growing network was forming, exchanging comfort and encouragement. In the summer of 1983, my friend Peter Gregerson invited us and a number of other former Witnesses to a meeting, where it was decided to formalize that network into a ministry. We called our group Biblical Research and Commentary, Incorporated, BRCI for short. Its purpose was to produce materials 1 and provide support to help exiting Witnesses make the very difficult transition out of the Watchtower Society and into the outside world. The next summer, 1984, the first of many annual meetings was held in Gadsden, Alabama.

We set up a confidential telephone help line to comfort persons who were hurt by leaving the Watchtower organization. Shortly after its publication, my Organization article was always included in the packet of information sent to callers of the BRCI Help Line. Church experiences For the first 7 years or so, Gloria and I read and studied the Bible on our own or with other former Witnesses with whom we met every other week in a small support group. We formed strong social bonds with these dear friends, but our spiritual growth was slow. Usually, our discussions were more centered on things we once believed to be true, but had rejected. We often covered much the same ground every time we got together. Finally Gloria said, I am tired of going over and over these same old things. I want to learn something new and true about Christ! By now, we also had a second son, James, born November 22, 1986. As our two boys began to get older, we felt a growing need to find Bible-believing Christians with whose children ours could associate. Many of the children in our neighborhood were being raised as secular humanists, and they did not share either our Christian morals nor our views about the importance of pleasing God. We tried a local church, and quickly became friends with the pastor and his wife. When he found out about my background, he asked me to teach an adult Sunday school class. I was surprised that he did not ask me for many details of my actual beliefs. Nor did he ever attend the class to see what I was teaching. This seemed strange to me, for whom doctrinal accuracy was still important. But I always taught orthodoxy in the sense that I could support my teaching both from Scripture and respected Protestant commentaries. Neither Gloria nor I ever joined that church. We did not want to become members of any religious organization. After I taught there for about a year, the pastor reluctantly asked me to step down as a teacher, as he felt that he couldn't have someone teaching classes who was not a member of the church. I didn't blame him. Overall, it was a good experience. We began to make Christian friends. We learned that evanical Christians do not feel nearly so strongly about doctrinal truth as we did. We looked for a community of believers with lots of kids and plenty of programs for them. We eventually settled into an independent evangelical Baptist fellowship. We met many fine Christian people there, and quickly got involved in church activities. A few months after we began associating with that church, I was again asked to teach an adult Bible class, which I did almost continuously for nearly fourteen years. History lessons Late in the 1990s, I started working on another article to supplement the one I wrote about the organization. Its aim was to help former JWs find and associate with other believers. I wanted to make them feel comfortable by helping them see that many churches of today teach and worship similarly to the first century disciples. I though it would be helpful to show what the earliest Christians were like, how their congregations were structured, how they lived and worshiped, and how that differed from JW teaching and practice. I wanted them to see that Christian living was what mattered most, and encouraged them to join any Biblebelieving Christian fellowship.

I started out using only the Scriptures, but soon found that so many things taught and done in churches cannot be supported directly from Scripture alone. I ended up buying history books dozens, eventually, in addition to doing plenty of research on the Internet. I finished Where is the Body of Christ? and received some nice comments on it. But what I discovered raised far more questions in my mind than it answered. A major paradigm shift As I did research, I began to run across references to the Early Church Fathers. Practically every scholarly source respected them very highly, Catholic and Protestant alike (a few modern scholars excepted). At the time, I had only the vaguest concept of who these writers were. When I learned, in the late 1990s, that my friend David Bercot had published a Dictionary of Early Christian Beliefs, I bought a copy. I glanced at it but didn't read much. I had my own ideas about what the early church was like and how they believed and worshiped. Nearly twenty years since I had I left the Watchtower Society, I still believed that sometime shortly after the end of the first century, the faithful early apostolic church was transformed into the corrupt Roman Catholic Church. The Reformers, I later learned, had a somewhat similar view, except that they dated the great apostasy into the fourth or fifth century or even later. Both Luther and Calvin, however, believed that the ante-Nicene church was truly authentic. One purpose of the Reformation was to restore the church to its original, pristine, ante-Nicene purity. I began to think about the implications of the great apostasy idea. One corollary is that Jesus had no congregation of faithful followers, no visible body of believers or church on earth, for an extended time, possibly many centuries, until some individual (Martin Luther, John Calvin, John Wesley, Joseph Smith, Charles Russell or someone else), reading only the writings of early Christians, understood them correctly and restored true apostolic Christianity to earth. I came to see this view as untenable. It would mean that most people who lived between the apostasy and the restoration, whenever it supposedly came about, would have virtually no chance to become true Christians, since apparently no one was capable of recognizing the plain truths taught in the Bible until the reformers came along. The church: visible or invisible? I also thought seriously about what the true church of Jesus Christ must look like. Due to my own experience, I found it easy to accept and promote the invisible church view, in which all members of the one holy catholic and apostolic church are scattered throughout all the world's Christian denominations. They are the men and women in each Christian community who really take their faith seriously and attempt to live by the Scriptures. Most faith communities I saw were apparently full of sinful people who didn't practice their faith. But as I thought about it, I began to see that there were insurmountable problems with the invisible church perspective. An invisible church is a community of scattered individuals who do not know each other, nor are in contact with each other. In fact, it has no visible characteristics at all (it is invisible, after all). We can know nothing for sure about such a church: where they are, what they believe, how they worship. I came to see that the whole thing is imaginary. It looks like whatever we want it to look like, for there is never anything real with which to compare it. It is a church of our own construction.

More importantly, it doesn't look anything at all like the church described in the New Testament, which was full of real people, saints and sinners. It had structure, including elders, deacons, and disciples of Christ who submitted, to a greater or lesser degree, to their leadership. Every congregation of God's people described in Scripture is not only visible, it is human, with all the problems which exist in any family, group, club, or community of human beings anywhere. How else could any church be salt and light in the community? How else could unbelievers see their good works and give glory to God? Even the reformers, though they rejected the authority of Rome, recognized the existence and need for a visible body of believers. I continued reading history books, as well as the early Christian writings, which I saw as accurate representations of what the main body of Christians only a few generations away from the apostles believed and practiced. I was surprised that so many concepts and teachings I once rejected had been presented to me incorrectly, even dishonestly, in Watchtower and evangelical literature, then explained away as illogical or unscriptural. As the early Christians presented them, they usually made more sense and fit the Scriptures better than many of the explanations I had read in commentaries. I began to accept a growing number of the teachings I found there, simply because they were clear, sensible and scriptural. One by one, I tested these teachings against the Scriptures, and as I became convinced of their validity, gradually my understanding of Christianity began to change. Problem passages with which I had struggled for years slowly began to disappear. Everything was starting to really fit together (for the first time in my life). My entire understanding of Christianity changed. Sacraments The early Christians believed that the bread and wine served at communion, when blessed by the Christian elder officiating, actually became the body and blood of Jesus Christ. Of course, this is exactly what Jesus actually says in John chapter 6, but most Protestants take Jesus' words to be symbolic. None of the early Christians did. In fact, with few exceptions, no Christian before the Reformation even questioned that teaching. This was my introduction to the concept of sacraments or mysteries of the Christian faith, material objects through which God transmitted grace to his people. I had never heard about them from the Witnesses or evangelical Christians. The whole idea was new and strange to me. But as I read and prayed and thought about it, it began to make more and more sense. Briefly, sacramental worship teaches that God works through simple things such as water, bread, wine and oil. These material objects, when blessed and used by authorized leaders of the church Jesus founded and their successors, were transformed into the means by which God's grace was communicated to fallen humans. They play a key part in healing and restoring them to full fellowship with our heavenly Father. In this perspective, God works through his creation, not around or in spite of it. At first, I though such a thing to be totally unscriptural. But, guided by the early Christians, I began to see it everywhere in the Bible. One example: Naaman, a Syrian leper, was healed by obeying Elisha's command (transmitted through a greedy servant, by the way) to bathe seven times in the Jordan river. The water wasn't magic, but Naaman had to obey the command and bathe in that specific water to be healed. (1 Kings 5)

Early Christians believed that the waters of baptism had the power to wash or remove sin from new disciples (Acts 22:16), just as it had removed the leprosy from Naaman. Other examples: Jesus healed a blind man by making mud, putting it on his eyes, and ordering him to wash in the pool of Siloam. (John 9:6-11) A woman who trusted that if she just touched the hem of Jesus' garment, she would be healed, was actually healed. The cloth wasn't magical, but in combination with her faith, it became the means by which Jesus' power was transmitted to her. (Matt 9:20-22) As I read the scriptures again, I was surprised at how many accounts of powerful works done by Jesus and the apostles involved physical acts like touching or breathing on the recipients, or used objects like bread, fish, oil or wine. A shocking discovery! About that time, I was browsing a used book sale and saw a copy of the Catholic Catechism for 50 cents. I bought it and started to read. I was shocked at what I found! The Catholic explanation of the Christian faith and morals, including salvation, baptism, redemption and atonement, were much more like those of the early church than those in any Protestant commentary I had read. It quite often referred to the early Christians as a source of authority. From that point on, I began to take a serious look at the Roman Catholic church. I was surprised at how closely their teachings and practices agreed with the early Christian perspective. But how could I explain the many Catholics who apparently did not take their Christianity seriously? At first I struggled with the concept, but as I thought and prayed about it, I began to remember that God used ancient Israel as a container for the divine self-revelation given through Moses for over fifteen centuries, even though most Israelites and even their leaders were unfaithful. Why could he not do the same thing in connection with the universal, orthodox church which he founded? Sacred Tradition I had learned, primarily from Jewish sources, how much of Jewish practice had been handed down for centuries in oral form. Moses communicated the regulations of the Law covenant to the Israelites at Sinai. But not all of it was put in writing. The verbal traditions were first put into written form (in the Talmud and Mishnah) after the destruction of the second temple in the first century AD. Of course, Jesus said that the Pharisees had made the word of God invalid by their traditions. But, I realized, that did not mean that all tradition was bad, only the ones men had created that were in conflict with God's revelation to them. Scripture clearly says that Christ revealed many things to his disciples which were not written down (Jn 21:25). It also says that the church (not the holy writings) is the pillar and foundation of the truth. The things Jesus taught his disciples orally were not added to Scripture by the apostles. They were taught orally to the new disciples they made. Scripture was composed within a fully functioning church setting in which every single Christian teaching had been taught orally for decades. When the apostle Paul wrote epistles to congregations, he had usually spent much time with them prior to that, teaching them orally. His letters could and often did leave many things unstated. They primarily deal with exceptions, not the normal teachings and practices everyone knew and had been taught orally.

Point of Decision: We Press on in Faith and Are Rewarded Eventually, the evidence became conclusive. My investigations into the historical early church allowed me to adopt a Catholic perspective without my former prejudice against the Catholic church getting in the way. What we have found in Catholic teachings is astounding: deep, scriptural, historically supportable, elegant, logically-coherent teachings, not just satisfying to the head, but also to the heart. We feel like this is where I have belonged all these years. I have found the writings of other converts to Catholic Christianity particularly helpful. I realize that I have barely scratched the surface in examining Christianity. Serious Catholic theologians are spiritual giants. By reading them, I have learned so much about God and his ways that I never even knew existed! I read G. K. Chesterton's The Everlasting Man, which influenced C. S. Lewis to become a Christian. His Orthodoxy, Heresy and conversion story truly struck a chord within me. C. S. Lewis, although Anglican, is very highly regarded by Catholic apologists, for his theology is completely orthodox. Frank Sheed's A Map of Life, Theology for Beginners and Theology and Sanity are clear and concise. Books by contemporary converts to Catholicism like Jimmy Akin, Thomas Howard, Karl Keating, Scott Hahn, Dave Armstrong and Peter Kreeft are particularly helpful at addressing questions Protestants have about the Catholic faith. Dr. Kreeft's Catholic Christianity and his Christian Apologetics (with Ron Tacelli) are more clear and comprehensive than any Protestant defense of Christianity I ever read. These people are not misled, as I once thought. They think far more deeply about most matters than I ever did, and were willing to risk their lives and careers to follow truth wherever it led. For a long time, I made the mistake of judging Catholic teachings by Catholic people, most of whom (like their Protestant cousins) are rather indifferent about theology. But after I accepted the historical evidence that the Catholic faith was the original and fullest expression of Christianity, not to be judged by the behavior of sinful believers, my perspective changed. I began to read Catholic writings enthusiastically. Catholic explanations of Christianity fit the Scriptures, the real world and the human heart. I honestly believe that anyone who followed them faithfully would become a man or woman of God. Catholic teachings are solid, fulfilling and upright. We came to them slowly and carefully, following truth and identifying and rejecting error. I shared the things I was reading with Gloria. She read and reflected. We discussed some things, but I did not want her to be pressured into a decision but to make up her own mind. She kept reading, then one day she said simply, We should become Catholics. (She had been baptized as a Catholic as an infant.) We consummated our desire to become part of the great ancient Church by meeting with our local parish pastor, Father James Cronin, for several months to review Catholic teachings. We were received into the Roman Catholic Church on Friday, June 9, 2006. We are thrilled to be Catholics, and we are happy to share the good things we have found with any of our former evangelical Christian companions, or our new Catholic ones. We are completely happy within the ancient church of Jesus Christ. We are home.