The Full Story: How I found Rome (Revised)

For most of my life, Roman Catholic culture has hardly ever had any real pull on my heart or senses. As an American raised in the States, I have a general tendency to be skeptical about any politico-cultural system that is not built around the "respect" of individual rights. It is in my blood to think that way. Any environment that expects me to act in a prescribed form of behavior strikes me as a threat to my liberty and free rights. It is "Communism", "Socialism", "Totalitarianism", or whatever - it is anything but Capitalism, which is a cultural cornerstone of the concepts of "freedom" and "liberty" for any American, whether they consciously acknowledge it or not.

But that has only been my first hindrance to any real attraction to Catholicism. I was also raised as an American Evangelical. I think it is fair to say I was unintentionally raised to think that every true experience of "freedom" must only be expressed in enthusiastic spontaneity and bold charisms. For instance, I do not talk to the people I genuinely love in the same scripted and ancient words every day to express my love for them. Whenever I greet my mother, I do not say "Hail Dana, Full of Grace..." or "Peace be with you." I do say "I love you" every time I hang up the phone with my mother, but that is not said in some pretentiously holy and archaic language. I would not say "I loveth thou" in Old English, and certainly not in Latin. Why would I talk to God that way?

I perceived Catholicism (along with all its rituals, statues, mosaics, tradition, and images) to be an artificially forced movement that built on its own dead and dying doctrines to keep itself alive. It accidentally survived through the Protestant Reformation over 500 years ago but no longer had whatever life it might have had before that. There was hardly any breath left in its over-aged lungs. It was bound to die out in the next couple of hundred years or so; that is, unless it morphed with the changing colors of the world.

But, as I have already implied, Catholicism was mostly not worth my focus. It was just that other thing going on with other people who were unfortunately raised in that wholly other and tragic environment. My idea of being a Catholic was being raised in shackles. Only the enlightened Catholics, or the ones who received a helping hand from a “real Christian”, were able to break the chains. Occasionally there were a few Catholic stragglers who stuck around in the Church, but that was just because they had some deep nonrational feeling of obligation to their families. Either that or they just did not believe all the Roman Catholic Church taught.

I remember a lot of the Christian cultural trends and movements in my high school years, ones that are still breathing and flourishing today. I remember when the mega-Church movement became very prominent in the 90's and early 2000's, and, sure enough, that was curbed by Christian leaders wanting to bring "Christ-following" back to grips with its more rugged and revolutionary roots. And there were (and still are) quite a few other young churches digging a little deeper into orthodoxy, in order to retain some type of form to Christian worship while still breeding its creative expression in art and culture. I think modern theologians often call this type of thing "ressourcement". I have recently discovered that it was a very important term used in drawing up the Vatican II documents in the 60's. Each of these movements, in its own way, was and is essentially trying to find a way to bring life to a western culture in great need of cultural identity and better health. This is all very attractive to me. In my high school and early college years, I did not notice that the Roman Catholic Church had been taking these same actions and initiatives for a very long time, while leaving a most noticeable fingerprint. It was always right under my nose, but I could not ever manage to see it.

26 percent of the world's healthcare facilities are overseen by the Catholic Church. A plethora of colleges, universities, and other educational institutions have been founded by various religious orders within the Catholic Church. She has also produced some of the most pivotal voices in global history (Tertullian, St. Augustine, St. Thomas Aquinas, Descartes, John Henry Newman, Pascal, Edith Stein, Flannery O'Connor, Mother Theresa, Pope John Paul II, Dorothy Day). And after learning about the Catholic social teaching of bringing salvation to the entire embodied human person (physically, intellectually, and spiritually), I can't help but to begin to see the relation between this Catholic social doctrine and these international phenomena.

As I grew up in a Christian school system, my developing ideas of Christianity were gradually collected from literature and different people from diverse religious, theological, and philosophical perspectives. I was really hit in the face with how complex my world actually was the first year I became a student at a more or less secular university, however. Sense that first year, my life has never been the same. My education gradually exposed me to the variety of religious representations of the Christian faith, and how plausible each one was in itself. In this way, I developed a strong sense of respect for the tradition of my faith, including Catholicism, as well as other cultural and religious traditions.

My general appreciation for Christian tradition probably began during my first encounters with Presbyterianism. My attraction to Presbyterian tradition (about my senior year in high school) struck a positive note in the context of my search for much bigger things. As a young teenager, I generally assumed that traditional church settings (e.g., Methodist, Presbyterian, Lutheran, Catholic) were reserved for cramming spirituality into a methodical category, allowing people to inhibit the possibility of a slightly less comfortable life. As a matter of fact, I often thought these people had no sense of true "spirituality" whatsoever. They did not know "true freedom" and had a repressive hand over their children and grand-children to keep them in the same fold. Like the Catholics mentioned previously, the life goal of these other Protestant groups should have been to free themselves of this enslavement. Yet, I learned that just because every-Sunday-Churchgoers at a Lutheran or Methodist or Catholic church rarely expressed their personal feelings about their faith did not mean they were not deeply and freely committed to that faith. On the contrary, I found this pervasive silence culturally reflected a reverence for faith and sincerity in one's commitments that was not present in louder and chattier contemporary church settings. Like contemporary Evangelicals, these more orthodox types had a very special way of communicating their faith. They would talk about "prayer" and the need to "live a more holy life" but would rarely announce they "loved Jesus", out of fear of being vain or simply not living up to that statement. It wasn't because they didn't deeply love their God; it was because of a holiness they recognized in their God that they rightly did not recognize in themselves.

Whenever I was painfully forced to think of Catholicism, the big word that emerged next to a stained glass window and a crucifix was “tradition." Although I never consciously thought or spoke this way, it was always in the back of my mind that tradition was inherently comprised of old and dying things. But I learned more and more, through reading Reformers like Luther, Calvin, and Edwards that upholding my Christian heritage, like any and every family heritage, was a natural component of my life as a human being. I was no less obligated to the life given by my spiritual family than my biological family; both should have mirrored each other. There was an important parallel here. I was naturally prone to honoring and loving my parents and siblings at home, because I had an inborn affection for these family members and the biological/cultural life I shared with them. We played Scrabble, barbecued outside the house, sang the same happy birthday song on everyone's birthday, and watched the same family films and shows together. These festivities comprised and nurtured the life we already shared together. They were the familiar places and activities we so often turned to and developed into rituals. Even more, I had to acknowledge that there was nothing vain about celebrating our lives together at dinner tables and living room games. They truly reminded us of who we were as a family and as individuals within that family. Every family had its rituals and familiarities that made its life, as a single unit, meaningful. My friends' families had rituals and traditions, just like ours, to illuminate the cultural uniqueness of their own households, as well. They were traditions that kept us under a common roof and a common family and allowed us to respect, honor, and celebrate our family members as fellow natural participants in the same unique narrative.

I am convinced I gravitated toward more traditional religious environments because I developed a need for a more profound and synchronized experience of the rituals I was already, albeit subconsciously, keeping. One of the most memorable experiences I had in a more formal, higher liturgical environment was attending R.C. Sproul’s conference at Twin Oaks Presbyterian Church in 2006. From the moment I walked into the church, I could not avoid the reality that these Presbyterians had a deep sense of reverence for who they were worshipping and how small they were in light of it. After more exposure to Presbyterian and, later, Lutheran celebrations, their church architecture and hymns successfully communicated this vertical dimension of the Christian Faith to me. It was something they obviously had in common with Catholics. Presbyterians and Lutherans first opened my eyes to the meaning of Catholic architecture, liturgy, and sacred space. Their archways, vaulted ceilings, organs, and vestments collectively embodied an atmosphere that taught me something about the grave importance of silence.

Sometime around my first year in college my dive into theology deepened. Authors like St. Paul (the Apostle), St. Augustine, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and contemporary authors like Thomas Merton began to paint a more complex image of Christian devotion for me. I began to understand the depths of what it means to humbly listen before speaking. Christian devotion, I learned, demanded the full offering of my whole self: mind, body, and emotions. Forms of sacred worship were to express that offering; the offering of body and soul was the same offering of Christ in the Crucifixion and Resurrection. Following Christ was self sacrifice (giving Christ our body, souls, and our undivided attention). This more holistic sacrifice of listening was a way of sanctifying the basic human act of listening and thus made one even more human and more free. It was a remarkably beautiful paradox of the Christian Faith. Through genuflecting, kneeling, and other humble postures of the human body, these high cultural and liturgical environments preserved the necessary and non-verbal form of this expression.

I progressively found this expression of devotion to be a desperate need for American Christians to understand. American Christianity was and still is in desperate need of a deeper and stronger aesthetic sense of reverence, silence and devotion. It's the type of devotion one might find at a wedding ceremony, a devotion performed with extreme care and attention to details. This was a certain beauty I later found in the Catholic Mass. Mass was that wedding ceremony I had been looking for all along. When I found the Mass, I found the depth of Christ's ultimate sacrifice. I found the Sacrifice of the Eucharist. The Eucharist is a mutual sacrifice. We come to give, because, in giving, we receive. We come to actually receive Him in the Bread and Wine by allowing Him to receive us, and this is harmonized in the ceremonial wedding portrayal of the entire Mass. It was a pivotal and humbling realization the moment I came to it. Unfortunately, I was not yet there on my journey. I did not experience the unspeakable joy of joining Christ in the sacrifice of Holy Communion just yet.

As I entered my first year of college, I met my philosophy advisor, Dr. Brown. Dr. Brown’s presence as a devout and informed Catholic had a way of provoking me to account for why I was not a Catholic. I never exactly knew why that was. For some reason, informed people who are simply “around” have an unspoken way of commanding our justification of why we are who we are and not them. It is a very unique phenomenon. Not only was Dr. Brown informed and a very reasonable person to converse with, he was a Catholic convert. “Who converts to Catholicism!?” Nonetheless, within about a year I was reading and hearing about various Protestants and other non-Catholics who later entered the Catholic Church: G.K. Chesterton, John Henry Newman, Jay Budziszewski, Scott Hahn, St. Augustine, John Neuhaus, Steve Ray, Francis Beckwith, Tony Blair ... the list goes on, and names are still being written on that list.

My stronger and more intellectual sympathies for Catholicism began taking form at this time, but I was still very far from her. I liked looking at her from a distance. Anything closer would have made me feel irritated and uncomfortable. Nevertheless, this sympathy provided me with a security in picking up Catholic literature. I was less afraid of getting “duped" into appreciation for Catholic culture, because Catholicism was already becoming an institution and culture I could sentimentally identify with at that safe distance. My exposure to Catholic literature began with ancient and medieval works (I never got into Catholic apologetics at that time).

The Catholic tradition, I grew to believe, was a sacred tradition of scholarship. It was not simply authoritative on its own two legs. Its beginning root was in Christ and the Apostles (as persons), and that was why Catholics professed belief in one holy, catholic, and apostolic Church every Sunday. I then realized the signifiance of Catholics reciting the Nicene Creed every Sunday. It was an acknolwedgment of the Apostles' personal, authoritative presence and the groundwork they laid for the Curch (as St. Paul writes to Timothy, “the church is the pillar and foundation of truth").

Regardless of all these wonderful musings about Holy Mass, at that time I still thought my arguments for my staunch Protestant beliefs could not be answered, let alone addressed, by Catholics. I did not care to hear what the Catholic Church had to say regarding my soul. Not because I was scared. It did not grip me, on a salvific level. It was not a threat. Like many Protestant seminarians and informed theology students, I acknowledged myself as a "little 'c' catholic." I was comfortably situated in a cozy and confusing middle ground between orthodox Protestant versions of Catholicism and contemporary Evangelical sentiments. I was never hostile toward the Roman Catholic Church. I did, however, feel some antagonism toward her because of my misconceptions. Archbishop Fulton Sheen once wrote that “there are not over a hundred people in the United States who hate the Roman Catholic Church; there are millions, however, who hate what they wrongly believe to be the Catholic Church.” That was very true of my condition.

New Covenant Church, the church I was raised in, had a very firm footing in community life. I naturally appreciated family and valued obligation to elders and parent figures in this church. For this reason, it may be important to make a point clear at this stage. To say I was not Catholic just because of my satisfaction with misconceptions would not entirely be true. I felt a strong obligation to New Covenant, and I felt I had no right to become Catholic even if I shared a good portion of sympathies and agreements with the Catholic Church. I certainly did not feel a moral obligation to the Catholic Church. That obligation would have to be generated by a much deeper encounter with Catholicism. For an institution that claimed to be the only true Church founded by Christ Himself, my decision could not merely come about by abstract convictions. I found this type of consideration would demand a certain experiential knowledge of Catholic people and the rituals that defined them. Like John Henry Newman and many others, I did not authentically understand Catholicism until I engaged, on some basic level, in its liturgical activity and parish life. One has to share in some kind of life of a certain culture to truly understand its scripts, stories, and sacred texts. We learn by imitating other people. It is fundamental to how we understand the world. Yet, when I did this I knew I was playing with some kind of fire, but it was fire I felt I had to play with.

As an odd combination of general religious skepticism and considerations of Catholicism loomed larger and larger in the background of my life and academic studies, I gradually became an unsteady person (emotionally and intellectually). I distinctly remember expressing some of my religious struggles with a certain friend and student I frequently confided in on a daily basis. I found myself utterly frustrated with the tension in my life. More importantly, my cultural attachments to New Covenant were certainly dying, as they had since my parents’ divorce when I was seventeen.

As controversial as they are, these are some of the convictions I came to. The influence of skepticism had me thinking that if Christianity, in particular, was going to be meaningful at all (aside from whether or not it was really true), its texts would have to be an outgrowth of an already existent tradition of people that at least claims to have written those texts in the first place. As a philosophy student, I was well aware of all the ways you can twist a text to fit your presuppositions and desires. I learned I could do it anyway I liked, and feel pretty damn honest about it, too. Because of that, I was not happy with choosing a tradition that agreed with my individual notions of Scripture or religious texts (a pervasive cultural and epistemic turn after the Protestant Reformation). It became very far-fetched and implausible to me that anyone could come to even a basic objective understanding of a cultural text written 2000 years ago (e.g., "the Bible") without the strict guidance of an identifiable tradition. At some point in our lives, we have to acknowledge that we already do receive our knowledge from other people. No one reads the Bible and has an "aha" moment without that moment being prepared by some language and culture. We define ourselves and our world by our relationships, and those relationships are given to us. We are born from, out of, and into relationships. Our freedom is in our response to those relationships and their influence on our lives. In this way, Catholic converts do not suggest anything new by responding to Rome as their Mother. They acknowledge a mother that claims to have been and still is there, before, during, and after a social revolution like the Protestant Reformation. The Protestant Reformation was a stance on something new. Rome already explicitly rejected the Protestant pillar of Sola Scriptura 3-400 years before Luther. That was the difference between me wanting to join Catholicism and someone wanting to become a Protestant. Instead of standing "alone" on some other entity (e.g. the Bible), Catho are acknowledging a Mother that claims to have the rightful claim over who they actually are. In this sense, I could not avoid the fact that the very soul of Protestantism rejected a fundamental cornerstone to Christian living. Whether or not Protestantism was "right", it cut itself off from its Mother. Although their original intention was to preserve the identity of Roman Catholicism, the end result was that the Reformers came to reject their fathers and mothers. By standing "alone", Luther affirmed his commitment to his own individual convictions, whether it was about what St. Augustine and other early church fathers "truly" taught or what Scripture taught, or a hodge-podge of both (which it was). Even more, various others joined him in that stance even after the Counter-Reformation and the Council of Trent, which made it clear that the pillars of the Reformation (e.g. Sola Scriptura, Sola Fide, etc.) were misguided and inconsistent with the Roman Catholic faith. Could western Christian culture truly understand itself at that point? I experienced an identity crisis after continuously mulling over this. I cannot say that an “identity crisis” is too bold of a categorization for this experience, either. I suffered much stress and anxiety from this personal acknowledgment. It swept everything I stood on right out from under me, before I even knew I stood on it.

At this point, the struggle was not so much figuring out what to believe. Rather, it was figuring out where I belonged, and what beliefs came along with that sense of belonging. The more I read Scripture and the more I read early Christian perspectives, the more I realized that community was absolutely essential to the foundation for individual beliefs. Most American Christians like the idea of community, because they think of things that comfort them (e.g., "support" and “fellowship”). However, for most, if not all of the early Christian writers and Fathers, the community was binding on every aspect of your lifestyle (your beliefs, your thoughts, your convictions, your actions, your decisions, and your cultural identity). You did not have a right to disagree with your pastor, because your pastor was not only your pastor; he was your father. In his Letter to the Magnesians, St. Ignatius of Antioch (at the end of the 1st century) wrote, "Take care to do all things in harmony with God, with the bishop presiding in the place of God, and with the presbyters in the place of the council of the apostles, and with the deacons, who are most dear to me, entrusted with the business of Jesus Christ, who was with the Father from the beginning and is at last made manifest." Many modern minds (which includes my own) think they have the right to judge the appropriateness of their mother and father's decisions and teachings before respectfully acknowledging them as a mother and father. The idea behind true Catholic reform is to dialogue, and maybe even argue, with Mother Church for the hope of future reform. At the end of the day, however, as harsh and overbearing as it first sounds, mother holds the right for the final say. If you still disagree, well, that's a risk you must be willing to take, and I was certainly unwilling to take that risk. I have told many people, time and again, that this was the pivotal turning point of my move to the Catholic Church. Christianity made too many far-fetched claims for me not to recognize an appeal to the final authority of Rome's Magisterium, anyway. There was too much to figure out and so little time for me to try. And it was time I was unwilling to spend, as a non-theology student.

As long as I was outside the walls of this heritage, I was on unstable ground, and I would be until I formally submitted to it. In February of 2007, I had a drink with a close friend of mine at the time. He was a fellow philosophy student and member of the church I grew up at. That night, a night that will never escape my memory, I told him I needed to regularly attend Catholic Mass. I spoke with some of my other close friends within my non-Catholic circles (greatly admired and respected) and with two of my elders at New Covenant after that. It was a very difficult and nerve-racking decision to make, but I knew I had to make it. So I made a decision I cannot deny as hasty. When you are at the point that you are feeling much like a prodigal son, however, it is hard to see any other option but to run back home. For me to deny the call of Rome, at this point, would have done moral damage to my character. That is why I did not waste any time, and one might even say I was in a daze when talking to my elders and leaders about my decision. My obligation to the Church, at this point, was a moral obligation more than anything. It involved my safety and health as a human being.

The problem may have been that I identified with the Catholic Church too early (as many have suggested). Maybe I gave too much of myself without enough evidence, and that is very possible; there is nothing unsettling in that admittance. I began to identify with the Catholic Church like I identified with my own biological family. It was not about disagreements or agreements at that point. It was about identity and which community had the rightful claim over who I actually was meant to be and how I was meant to live. I found the Catholic Church to have this human right long before the Catholic Church even gave me Scripture. St. Augustine argued that "I should not believe the gospel except as moved by the authority of the Catholic Church." The point here is that St. Augustine, like me, belonged to the Apostles before we ever belonged to the Apostles’ Words (Scripture). It is very easy to manipulate a mother's words, but it is not so easy to pretend the authority of your own mother is not actually there, that she really isn't your own mother. I belonged to a household before I belonged to that household's beliefs. That was the crux and heart of the whole issue, no matter how much I wanted to fight it. John Henry Newman rightly observed that Roman Catholicism was a fundamentally person-oriented Faith, in this regard.

Again, St. Augustine (who would later become my confirmation saint) influenced my personal desires to join Rome: "In the Catholic Church, there are many other things which most justly keep me in her bosom. The consent of peoples and nations keeps me in the Church; so does her authority, inaugurated by miracles, nourished by hope, enlarged by love, established by age. The succession of priests keeps me, beginning from the very seat of the Apostle Peter, to whom the Lord, after His resurrection, gave it in charge to feed His sheep (Jn 21:15-19), down to the present episcopate." It soon became the case that I no longer could find my identity outside this Church, nor did I feel any other heritage had the right to claim it.

Since I became apart of this Family on the night of the Easter Vigil, March 22, 2008, I have not had a single doubt that this is where I should be. I imagine doubts will come in the future, but there is also much to learn about this heritage that will keep my thoughts busy for a very long time. It is very hard to doubt when you sense you are on Holy Ground. And when you realize you are on Holy Ground, it is impossible to leave. That is how I presently feel, and it is my hope that I will spend the rest of my days here. I have always felt like non-Catholic Christianity was a part of a whole (whatever that “whole” was) that I was implicitly aware of the moment I began to take religion seriously. After being received into the Catholic Church, I never wanted to reject what I learned or lived in that non-Catholic community, and, in a certain sense, I am still living and learning in that community; I have just found a much bigger community that contains it. I have discovered that the Catholic Church rejects nothing and nobody, and she accepts everything and everyone - whether you’re coming in as a Charismatic, a Calvinist, a Jew, a Muslim, a Presbyterian, an Anglican, an Orthodox, deist, atheist, non-denominational Christian, or a Lutheran. Some people do not understand this, because all of those rigid Catholic doctrines and dogmas give the impression that it is an intolerant and repressive institution. Understandable, but within those Catholic household rules, however, are values and beliefs exchangeable and sharable with every other religion, sect, and ideology. This is true because the Catholic Church believes all of Creation is good and sacred, and a good part of a bad system is, regardless, a good part. Rome has been around too long and has learned from too many mistakes to avoid this truth. When converts enter the Roman Catholic Church, they do not often like to refer to their conversion as a “conversion” but a “full reception." Rome receives everything good that you once believed and allows you to keep it. There is a reason why the Church calls Confirmation “full communion.” Every other person in this world, by means of whatever good things and deeds they endorse, are, in some way, communing with the universal (literally, “catholic”) Church. But we are not fully a part of the Mother Church until we fully commit to her. In this sense, I always was Catholic.

I get the impression that many people expect a canned answer when they passively ask me why I became Catholic. I suppose this is mostly an American mentality. I simply cannot respond with a couple of cliché sentences when asked of my decision. It does not work. I have practiced for some shotgun lines in response to these sorts of questions, but I have never been able to settle with one. No two or three lines can communicate the immensity of this experience. That is partially because the Catholic life does not begin at any identifiable point in time. Rome is not a school of thought that can be bagged and handed out. You cannot make someone Catholic by giving them a Bible tract. The Catholic life is a life lived in dutiful and familial love, and, as I mentioned earlier, we all live part of it without even knowing it. The way I see it, asking me why I am a Roman Catholic is like asking me why I acknowledge the Nichols family as my family. It is just a part of my heritage. It is a part of who I am as a Christian in western civilization, and it is part of my duty to who I am. I feel wrong to ignore it or set my beliefs above it, at least at this point in my life. Thus, I acknowledge that my mother is my mother and my father is my father, no matter how many mistakes they make.

"Wherever the bishop appears, there let the people be; as wherever Jesus Christ is, there is the catholic Church." - St. Ignatius of Antioch (written between the year 98 and 117, Letter to the Smyrnaeans).