Journeys Home (7 page)

After much pondering and prayer, we soon realized that this requirement
of obtaining an annulment was yet another great reason for seeking
this traditional Church and her teachings. I initially had been
attracted to the Catholic Church because it seemed to be the only
one that held fast to those things that serve to strengthen and
preserve families. So many other denominations had become lax
toward abortion, contraception, divorce, and more.

So I swallowed my pride and took my first big, submissive step,
bowing to the awesome power and majesty of the authority of the
Church. We really did it together, because Marcus was there, so
supportive, at every stage of the process. The annulment process
turned out not to be as daunting as I had imagined. Rather, it
was a blessing to both of us and our marriage.

Nine months later, after we had moved to Steubenville, Ohio (a
pretty good place to learn to be Catholic), we were informed of
the decree of nullity. Within a month, on December 20, 1992, not
only were we received into the Church at St. Peter's parish, but
we also had our marriage blessed with a re-exchanging of vows
and rings. What a joyous occasion we shared with many new friends!

So Marcus isn't now known to many as Reverend. But I'm glad that
I was a pastor's wife for a time. And I am eternally thankful
that our entire family is enjoying the riches of the one, holy,
Catholic, and apostolic Church.

Marilyn Grodi is the wife of Marcus Grodi (see the previous chapter),
the founder and president of The Coming Home Network International. Over the years she has devoted much of her time to homeschooling
their three sons: JonMarc, Peter, and Richard.

former Episcopal priest

VOCATION AND CONVERSION

VOICE OF SANITY?

LOOKING EASTWARD

LOOKING TO ROME

How can you go into that darkness, once you have known the light?"
In deep anguish, my mother-in-law asked my wife and me this question
when we told her we were going to enter the Catholic Church.

There was a time when the thought of becoming Catholics would
have caused us even greater distress than our news caused her.
Now, however, we were near the end of a sixteen-year pilgrimage.
We could finally see the Tiber ahead, and we were eager to cross.

For many years, we had known ourselves as seekers. Now we realized
we were pilgrims. The difference? Pilgrims know where they are
going.

Whatever its hidden roots, the "seeking that was a pilgrimage"
began not long after Ruth and I married. While the initiative
was largely mine, all those years we traveled together: reading,
praying, discussing, at times arguing -- always just between ourselves.

Yet we never walked in lockstep. Sometimes one of us would go
ahead, and the other would insist on a spiritual rest stop. (I
did most of the darting ahead and the chastened retracing of steps.)
But we were always together. For that, we are forever grateful.

During much of our pilgrimage, we knew that we were wrestling
with the problem of authority. How does one know Christian truth
with certainty? We saw with increasing clarity that this issue
underlies all the divisions among the thousands of competing Christian
traditions.

We also began to recognize that the issue of authority is at root
a Christological question: What has God done in Christ to communicate
His truth to the world?

The quest for ultimate doctrinal authority may arise out of psychological
need. Some of our friends put this interpretation on our pilgrimage.
They seemed to think I was the culprit, dragging my poor wife
along on my ill-fated journey. "Ray, we always knew you had a
need for the authority and structure you've found in the Catholic
Church."

What they said was true. It was true in a far deeper sense than
they apparently meant it.

With all our hearts, we believe every human being needs the authority
and structure of the Catholic Church. In our Episcopal years,
Ruth and I grew in our personal relationship with Jesus Christ,
loving Him and trying to serve Him. Fairly late in our pilgrimage,
we realized that we had accepted Christ on our terms, because
we had no other.

In every instance of moral decision or of personal belief, we
were the final authority as to what we should do or believe. This
is the dilemma of all non-Catholics.

The Catholic Church was founded by Jesus Christ and claims to
speak for Him under carefully specified conditions. Once the truth
of that claim became clear to us, after a long and arduous search,
we had no alternative but to submit to the Church's authority.

In that submission, we knew we were submitting to Jesus Christ
on His terms. No longer were we ourselves the final authority
in matters of faith and morals. This submission is possible only
in the Church Christ established and to which He gave His authority.

Looking back over the years, we knew it was the Holy Spirit who
long ago had put in our hearts this yearning for ultimate doctrinal
and moral authority. It was in entering the Catholic Church that
the yearning would know its fulfillment.

The discernible beginnings of our journey lie in my vocation to
ordained ministry. The first faint sounds of a call to the ministry
came to me in a summer church camp before my freshman year in
college. The sounds were so faint that when I entered a college
of my denomination, I had no clear vocational focus. I majored
in history only because it was my favorite subject.

A sophomore course in European history introduced me to details
of Catholic teaching. The two textbooks were written by Carleton
J. H. Hayes, who was to be the American ambassador to Spain during
World War II. (Only recently, I learned he had become a Catholic
while a student at Columbia.)

I began to learn about popes and monks and bishops and sacraments
and interdicts and penitent kings standing barefoot in the snow.
Hayes' books gave far more detail about Catholic belief than the
average history book. The Catholic Church was a fascinating subject,
but I was not drawn to it by my study then: It was too remote,
too utterly different from my Protestant world.

Even though entering the ministry kept coming into my mind, I
never thought of asking God to guide me. After all, it was my
decision to make, or so I thought. (I thank God that He ignored
my ignoring Him!) In my senior year, I decided to enter the seminary
at my college.

In that same year came the attack on Pearl Harbor. Soon I realized
that I could not sit in a classroom while my friends fought a
war we all believed was necessary. After graduation, I entered
officers training for the Navy. I assumed that if I survived military
service, and if the attraction to the ministry was valid, the
attraction too would survive.

During almost all of my three years in the Navy, I served as a
communications and navigation officer on an aircraft carrier in
the Pacific theater. We were at sea almost all that time, so in
my off-duty hours I read widely and studied in preparation for
seminary.

A chaplain on our ship put me in touch by correspondence with
his former professor, Robert H. Pfeiffer, distinguished professor
of Old Testament at Harvard Divinity School. Pfeiffer very graciously
guided my study of his classic introduction to the Old Testament.
My correspondence with Pfeiffer and friendship with the chaplain,
himself a Harvard graduate, led me to choose Harvard Divinity
School.

Ruth and I had been in college together, and we were married just
before the war ended. When I was released from the Navy, we moved
to Cambridge, Massachusetts, where I enrolled in the Divinity
School. I soon learned that some of the faculty and students were
Unitarian.

Until then, I had scarcely heard the word "Unitarian." In my course
work, I made a fateful discovery: I, too, was Unitarian. In my
college and especially in my Navy years, I had drifted imperceptibly
into the Unitarian belief that Jesus was only a great moral teacher,
nothing more.

My first theology course was taught by an elderly Dutch scholar
with a very impressive name, Johannes Augustus Christopher Fagginger
Auer. Without knowing it, I think, he did me a great favor by
showing me the superficiality of what I actually believed.

One day, when in a reflective mood, he admitted to us in class,
"It's not an easy thing to come to the end of your life and not
know whether there's anything beyond death." At that moment, I
realized that at most I had only a vague hope that there is something,
but no assurance. Ruth had retained the Trinitarianism of her
Protestant upbringing, but was not strong in her faith then.

After two or three months of pondering my own situation, I told
the dean I had no desire to preach and teach Christianity if what
I was learning in class was all there is to Christianity. Either
I must pursue some other vocation or go elsewhere to inquire further
into the Christian religion. I was thinking of transferring to
Yale Divinity School.

The dean was gracious and seemed to try to understand my difficulty.
Though he himself was a graduate of Yale, he recommended that
Ruth and I go instead to Union Theological Seminary in New York.
He said that Union was a more cosmopolitan environment than Yale.
After a trip to Union and a talk with several faculty members,
we decided to transfer there.

Ruth and I lived in the men's dormitory, three floors of which
had been given over to married students. We took our meals in
the refectory. For three years we ate, slept, drank, and breathed
theology.

Theological discussion was the consuming passion of everyone at
Union. We were immersed in the theological bedlam that is Protestantism -- all traditions to some extent contradicting each other, with
each claiming to be based on the Bible.

Union was indeed cosmopolitan. Dozens of denominations and many
competing theological approaches created a lively, fascinating
environment. Ardent followers of Barth argued fiercely with equally
ardent followers of Brunner; followers of Niebuhr battled with
followers of Tillich. But everyone, as far as I knew, was Trinitarian.

At Union, I heard Jesus Christ powerfully proclaimed. I became
a believing Christian, surrendering my life to Jesus Christ, while
Ruth's faith in Christ was greatly strengthened.

Amid this bedlam, we thought we heard a voice of theological sanity.
We began to learn about the Episcopal Church through one of my
professors, who was an Anglican clergyman and a persuasive apologist
for his tradition. (Anglicanism is a generic term to designate
the Church of England and all its transplanted branches, such
as the Episcopal Church in this country.)

The Episcopal Church holds that to avoid theological chaos, Scripture
must be interpreted by tradition -- in particular, by the tradition
of the early Church. Here, we thought, is a church rooted in the
past, in historical continuity with the early Church. Its theological
approach seemed very sensible. We quickly came to love the Elizabethan
language of the
Book of Common Prayer,
the distinctive Episcopal
architecture, the Englishness of the Episcopal ethos.

So we became Episcopalians. By this time, I had completed my theology
degree and a year of doctoral study at Columbia and Union. Ruth
had earned a Master's degree at Columbia while teaching nursery
school.

To prepare for ordination and life within the Episcopal Church,
we moved to Alexandria, Virginia. I attended the Episcopal seminary
there for a year and worked as a seminarian in a Washington parish.
The Episcopal bishop of Washington ordained me to the diaconate
and later to the priesthood in the National Cathedral.

In Washington I served two parishes, one as an associate rector
(pastor), the other as rector. Three of our children were born
during our Washington years.

We were happy as Episcopalians, but we became increasingly aware
of theological discord within the denomination. Anglicans may
claim that they have no distinct theology -- that their theology
is only that of the early Church. But there is widespread disagreement
regarding what the early Church's theology was. One distinctive
characteristic of Anglicanism is what is called
comprehensiveness
:
trying to embrace a wide range of differing and even contradictory
theological opinions within one communion.

The longer we lived within the Episcopal Church and the more we
studied its history, the more we saw its theological and moral
fragmentation. (We deeply regret that in recent years that fragmentation
has greatly accelerated.) Initially, at Union, the Anglican claim
of comprehensiveness attracted us. Now we saw that term as a euphemism
for chaos.

For generations, Anglicans have boasted that theirs is a bridge
church. That means they stand midway between Protestantism and
Catholicism, partaking of the good features of both and rejecting
the bad. I used to remind my colleagues that no one lives on a
bridge. A bridge is only a means for getting from one place to
another.

A ray of hope did shine on us for a time: a movement within the
Episcopal Church (and other Anglican churches) known as Anglo-Catholicism.
It is based on what proponents call the branch theory. This theory
holds that the original Catholic Church is now divided into three
branches: the Catholic, the Eastern Orthodox, and the Church of
England. Anglo-Catholics claim that all three traditions are equally
Catholic.

Anglo-Catholics believe that theological disarray within the Episcopal
Church is caused by Protestant influences. The solution is to
adopt Catholic ways in liturgy and (to an undefined degree) in
theology. The touchstone of doctrine becomes the Catholic faith
of the early centuries -- Catholic, they insist, not Roman Catholic.