Journeys Home (13 page)

It was about a year after my commitment to Christ that David called
to tell me that he too had come to believe that Christ was God.
For him, this belief meant he must give his life to Christ. But
he was not ready to commit himself to any church at the time (though
he had been attending a Baptist congregation).

The increasing number of Protestant denominations and splinter
groups stood to David as a poor testimony to Christ's words that
He would build His church. Where was the unity? How, he would
ask, could sincere, born-again, Bible-believing Christians, indwelt
and led by the same Holy Spirit, come out with such varying interpretations
of Scripture?

These and other concerns led David to the study of the Catholic
Church. I was horrified and frightened for him. How could he be
a true Christian and buy into that!

It was Christmas 1978 when I visited David again. He took me first
to meet the monk with whom he was studying and who I was sure
was an agent of the devil on a mission to lead my brother astray.
Then we went to a midnight Christmas Eve Mass. It was the first
time I had ever entered a Catholic church.

I sat in shock through the entire Mass and also through the car
trip home. When I could finally speak, I said to David: "It's
like a synagogue, but with Christ!"

He said, "That's right!"

To which I answered, "That's wrong!"

Christ fulfilled the Law, I reasoned; all that ritual and stuff
was done away with. I was sick inside. How could David fall for
that?

Did he have some hang-up? Was he drawn to the liturgy, to the
aesthetics, from our Jewish background? Could he not see Christ
as the end to which it all pointed?

David entered the Catholic Church in 1979. Our phone bills between
California and New York were hefty over the years that followed.
The more he plunged into what I believed was error, the more I
devoured what I knew was truth.

Having completed the Bible institute at my church, I entered graduate
studies at Talbot Theological Seminary in La Mirada, California,
while serving as fulltime chaplain of a women's jail facility
in Lancaster, California. My deepest desire upon graduation was
to be on staff at a local church teaching women, helping them
to raise godly families and to reach others with the Gospel.

The God who gives us the desires of our hearts is the same God
who brings them to fruition. Upon graduation from Talbot in May,
1990, I was called to the staff of an Evangelical Friends (Quaker)
church in Orange County, California, as director of women's ministries.
Doctrinally, the Friends denomination did not align fully with
my beliefs, since they had done away with Baptism and Communion.
This particular church, however, under the leadership of a new
pastor of Baptist (and ex-Catholic) background, had reinstituted
both for this single congregation within the denomination.

In the fateful month of transition from the jail ministry to that
local church, I had time to visit David in New York. It was June,
1990. In one of our marathon conversations, David asked, "How
is it that Evangelicals don't seem to want to work toward unity?
Didn't Jesus pray that we'd all be one?"

I saw red. "Yes, Jesus prayed we'd be one, as He and the Father
are one ... but not at the expense of truth!"

With that, David asked me if I had ever seen the publication sitting
on his table entitled
This Rock,
which he described as a "Catholic
apologetics" magazine. I could not even fathom those two words
modifying each other. I never knew Catholics had a defense of
their faith -- no Catholic had ever told me the Gospel. Moreover,
I never knew Catholics cared that anyone else should know it.

I took the magazine back with me to California out of curiosity
and also out of some measure of respect for people who would want
others to know what they, at least, believe is the answer to life -- even if they are wrong. Inside was a full-page advertisement
that read: "Presbyterian Minister Becomes Catholic."

There's no way,
I thought to myself. I don't care what he called
himself or what he functioned as; there's no way this "Presbyterian
minister" could have been a true Christian if he entered the Catholic
Church. How could he have known Christ and been so deceived?

I ordered the four-part tape series of this ex-Presbyterian minister
(whose name was Scott Hahn). It included a two-part debate with
a professor from Westminster Theological Seminary on the issues
of justification (faith alone vs. faith plus works) and authority
(Scripture alone vs. Scripture plus Tradition). Hahn's concluding
statement summed up two thousand years of Church history and climaxed
with a challenge.

To those who will look into the claims of the Catholic Church
and judge the evidence, he said, there will come a "holy shock
and a glorious amazement" to find out that the Church which they
had been fighting and trying to save people from was, in fact,
the very Church Christ established on earth.

"Holy shock" are the only words to describe what went through
me at that moment.
Oh, no,
I thought,
don't tell me there could
be truth to this.
The thought paralyzed me. I couldn't believe
what I was thinking. And it came at a most inconvenient time.
In two weeks I would begin at the new church.

I reread the doctrinal statement of the Friends denomination I
was about to enter. It included the story of its founder, George
Fox, whose dramatic conversion in the seventeenth century filled
him with a deep love for God and a zeal to counter the abuses
of his day. In his desire that God be worshipped in spirit and
in truth, Fox did away with the only two sacraments, or "ordinances,"
that Martin Luther had left -- Baptism and Communion -- lest faith
be placed in the elements of wine, bread, and water rather than
in the God to whom they pointed.

I loved the heart of George Fox, but I believed he was wrong.
Baptism and Communion were clearly commanded in Scripture, though
I believed they were symbolic. The thought seized me:
What if
Luther did what Fox did? What if Luther, out of love and zeal
for God's honor, also discarded what God intended?

My stomach sank as my fear rose. Were my thoughts from God? Were
they from Satan? I knew only that, before God, I had to find out
what the Catholic Church taught.

During the next two years on staff with the Friends church, I
ordered books, tapes, even a subscription to
This Rock
magazine,
though I dreaded the thought of anything Catholic coming to my
mailbox. When I told David of my search, he challenged me concerning
the doctrine of
sola scriptura.
"Ros, where does the Bible teach
sola scriptura?"

The very question annoyed me. I had heard it before and chose
to ignore it. "If," I said, "you truly knew Christ, if you believed
Scripture to be the very Word of God, if the Holy Spirit were
operative in your life, illuminating and confirming His Word to
you, you wouldn't even ask such a question. Why would you have
as your focus challenging the authority of Scripture rather than
clinging to it as your food?"

He tried to assure me that he did believe the Scriptures to be
the Word of God, inspired, inerrant, and authoritative. "But,"
he asked, "where does the Bible say it is the only authority?
And where does Scripture say the Word of God is confined to what
was written?"

I ran through several verses of Scripture (2 Tim 3:16 - 17, 2
Pt 1:20 - 21, and others). But none answered his questions. In fact,
they posed a further question: "How do we know the New Testament
is Scripture? Those verses can refer only to the Old Testament,
since the New Testament was not written yet, at least not in its
entirety."

As I delved into the matter, I came face to face with the fact
that the Scriptures nowhere teach
sola scriptura.

Without revealing the nature of my search, I asked several pastors
and Bible study leaders the same question. No one had an answer
from Scripture. Each one came up with the same verses I had already
examined. When I countered that those verses really don't teach
that the Bible is the only authority, each person reluctantly
agreed.

"The verse that eludes me at the moment" never came to anyone's
memory.
How amazing,
I thought.
We are teaching the doctrine of
Scripture alone,
which Scripture alone does not teach! Still,
neither does that prove there is another authority!

But the thought hovered: Evangelicals were teaching a doctrine
outside of Scripture while denying that anything outside of Scripture
was authoritative. Something was wrong. And if we were wrong about
this, could we be wrong or blind about other issues?

How is it, I thought, that Protestants accept the canon of Scripture -- believing that God, who inspired Scripture, also led by His
Spirit chosen men of the fourth and fifth century councils to
recognize that which He inspired -- and yet discard or disregard
what those same men believed about other major doctrines: the
Eucharist, Baptism, apostolic succession, and more? Further, not
only in the first four hundred years prior to the completion of
the canon, but in the following one thousand years until the invention
of the printing press, the faith was preserved, being passed on
orally from one generation to the next.

Again, how is it that in these nearly five hundred years of Christianity
since the Reformation, with the canon in hand and with printing
presses galore, the faith has been splintered into thousands of
denominations, each with its distinctive and competing doctrines,
each "holding forth the Word of life"?

I began reading all that I could, whenever I could, until I knew
after two years that I needed to leave my church in California
and devote myself to finding out whether the Catholic Church was
what it claimed to be. I moved to New York and began what turned
out to be a two-and-a-half-year intensive and heart-wrenching
search. For months, I read every Evangelical Protestant work I
could find against the Catholic Church. I wanted to be rescued
from the fate of becoming Catholic.

To my deep disappointment, I discovered that these authors, for
the most part, were fighting something other than the Catholic
faith. They were arguing against what they thought the Catholic
Church taught, and it seemed their various understandings or misunderstandings
reflected the Protestant perspective from which they came. Archbishop
Fulton Sheen's insight in the book
Radio Replies
(1979) became
evident to me:

There are not over a hundred people in the United States who hate
the Catholic Church. There are millions, however, who hate what
they wrongly believe to be the Catholic Church -- which is, of
course, quite a different thing.

Each discovery of Catholic teaching led me to reexamine a multitude
of Evangelical doctrines. And with every thought that drew me
closer to the Church, a sense of death, of mourning, ripped through
me as I considered being severed not only from my congregation
in California but also from the only form of Christian faith I
had known and loved for eighteen years.

Prior to my leaving California, one very beloved pastor with whom
I shared my quest asked: "If there were no Roman Catholic Church,
would your understanding of the New Testament lead you to invent
Catholicism?"

My answer at the time was simple: "That's what I'm setting out
to find out."

One year later, I would say, "No, I wouldn't come up with Roman
Catholicism, but nor would I any longer come up with Evangelical
Protestantism." I had become a Christian without a home. I could
not fathom being Catholic, but neither could I return to the Evangelical
setting from which I came.

Three books were extremely helpful to me along the way: Blessed
John Henry Newman's
Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine,
Dietrich von Hildebrand's
Liturgy and Personality,
and Karl Adam's
The Spirit of Catholicism.
The more I read, the more I began to
sense a beauty, a depth, a fullness of God's design for His Church
beyond all I had known.

On every issue, including those three most famous cries of the
Reformation --
sola gratia, sola fide, sola scriptura
-- I came
to believe that the Catholic Church was in harmony with Scripture.
All that I read of Catholic teaching and life drew me to the Church.
Yet most of what I observed in that Church made me want to run
from it. Where was the Church I read about? Where was the Church
called "home"?

One Sunday, as I sat in the back pew of a Catholic parish I had
visited for the first time, I heard the priest say what I had
never heard any Catholic say before. At the conclusion of the
Gospel message, he said to the congregation, "We need to tell
the whole world!" My heart stood still. It was the first time
I had sensed a passion for souls from the pulpit of a Catholic
Church.

I burst into tears. Since the day I met Christ, I've lived to
tell others of Him. I thought: If the Catholic Church is true,
why aren't Catholics evangelical? Evangelical is not a synonym
for Protestant. To be an evangel is to be a messenger; it's to
reach out to a lost and hurting world to tell them the good news
of Christ -- that there is a Savior who came for sinners and who
gives life to all who will come to Him.

I met with that priest, Father James T. O'Connor, pastor of St.
Joseph's in Millbrook, New York, at the beginning of March, 1995.
In two meetings, he helped me immeasurably with some key areas
of difficulty, particularly concerning the Mass and the sacramental
nature of the Church. I realized soon after that the question
of three years before was answered at last.