lack of intelligence. How could anyone with such evident love for Christ and extensive knowledge of theology remain in the Catholic Church? To say I was intrigued would be an understatement. I was fascinated, like someone sighting a UFO in broad daylight — or Moses staring at the burning bush, unable to understand how it was not consumed.
I arranged to meet with Michael one day a week to talk theology over lunch. I really wanted to get to understand what made him tick and how he could have any kind of coherent worldview given what seemed to me, at least, his opposing commitments to Christ and to the Catholic Church. In particular, I wanted to know how he would respond to all my apologetic arguments against the Catholic Church, the ones I had used to good effect when evangelizing Catholics in the inner city. To my surprise, Michael responded to my apologetic attacks on the Catholic Church by citing Scripture. In fact, he carried a small Bible with him, and he knew how to use it. When we got into disagreements about doctrine, there were several occasions where Michael could show that the plain sense of Scripture better supported Catholicism!
How ironic, I thought. Taking Scripture in its plain, literal sense was a major emphasis of Protestantism. Against the Catholic Church, we prided ourselves in direct obedience to the plain sense of Scripture. Yet when it came to central matters of disagreement — like the Eucharist — I found myself trying to get around the plain meaning of the Bible, whereas the Catholic Church was defending it! This was shocking to me. I was outside the Catholic Church largely because of the Bible, but there were crucial instances in which the Catholic Church took the Bible more seriously than I did. Among those instances, the Eucharist loomed very large.
Michael and I continued to have conversations about points of contention between Catholics and Protestants. However, after some time we reached a kind of stalemate, of the same sort as I used to run into with fellow Protestant clergy. He had his proof-texts; I had mine. I could see his case; he could see mine. But there was no one to arbitrate. At this point in our relationship Michael suggested that we start looking together at the Church Fathers, who might serve as an arbitrator between us. That sounded reasonable to me — but, as you’ll see, it didn’t turn out as I expected. The Fathers shocked me with their early and strong affirmation of the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist, based on the plain sense of Scripture!
It began to dawn on me that if the Catholic claim that the Eucharist really was the Body of Christ was true, then that was a big deal. I began to think that, if the Eucharist really was the Body of Christ, I had to be where Christ’s Body was — and it wasn’t in any Protestant group. The implications scared me. In that moment, I saw I had to become Catholic to be with Jesus’ Body — but that would involve a huge cultural shift away from my nuclear and extended family and all that I was comfortable with into a much larger, amazingly diverse religious culture that was foreign and even distasteful to me.
I hadn’t yet solved in my head the issues with the papacy and with Mary. I wasn’t sure, in fact, that I would ever be able to reconcile myself to those doctrines. Nonetheless, I reasoned like this: At the present moment, I was putting up with many doctrines and practices in my own denomination with which I did not agree, and yet I did not have the Body of Christ in the Eucharist. In the Catholic Church, I might likewise have to put up with many doctrines and practices with which I did not agree, but I would have the Body of Christ in the Eucharist. Advantage: Catholics.
So, without fully resolving the problems I had with the papacy and Mary, I decided, then and there in my basement apartment on the campus of the University of Notre Dame in the fall of 1999, that I was going to have to enter the Catholic Church. Of course, there was a lot more that had to be worked out. I needed to talk to my wife. I had to tell my family. We had to make practical and financial arrangements. All of that took some time, and I will talk about some of the issues that came up in the remainder of this book. But finally, on February 24, 2001, on the Saturday Vigil before Ash Wednesday, my wife Dawn and I were confirmed and received into the Catholic Church at St. Matthew’s Co-Cathedral in South Bend, Indiana.
People often ask me: but how did you deal with this or that certain doctrine? How did you ever come to accept this or that Catholic practice? That is the point of this book. I want to delve into many of these different areas and explain the many lines of thought through Scripture that kept leading me back to the Catholic Church. “All roads lead to Rome,” they used to say. Indeed, what I found out during the several months I was debating with Michael was that all the interpretive “roads” through Scripture kept coming back to the Roman Catholic Church. I know that may sound strange, but I will try to explain how I was stunned by Scripture, and why and how the Bible provides reasons to be (or become) Catholic!
Chapter One
“John, I Am Your Father!”
The Bible and the Papacy
Men of my generation almost all have at least one cinematic experience burned into their memory: sitting in the theater watching a one-handed Luke Skywalker, clinging desperately to the sky bridge, stare in horror while Darth Vader announces: “Luke, I am your father!”
“No, no! It’s impossible!” Luke moans, “Noooooooooo!”
This scene captures the emotions many converts to the Catholic Church have experienced. They discover that the Pope, the man they once viewed as the Antichrist, is actually their spiritual father. To their non-Catholic friends, they seem like they have gone over to the “dark side.” Accepting the papacy is so synonymous with becoming Catholic, that many Protestants refer to conversion to Catholicism as “poping” (“Pope-ing”), as in, “Did you hear about John? He poped!”
After all, if there is one thing Protestants don’t like about the Catholic Church, it is the papacy. In fact, Lutheran theologian Stephen Long argues that it is the only thing all Protestants hold against the Catholic Church.1 After all, Protestantism is very diverse. Some Protestant group can probably be found that agrees with the Catholic Church on almost every doctrine — whether the Real Presence, or justification, or Apostolic Succession — but none agree about the papacy. Necessarily so: to come to agree with the Catholic Church about the papacy would require one to reconcile with the Pope and thus join the Catholic Church!
The papacy in one sense was not a big problem to me as a convert, and in another sense, it was. I mean this: I got over my bigotry that the Pope was the antichrist in my teen years (John Paul II helped many Protestants get past this bias). By the time I was in Protestant ministry, I had a generally positive view of the Pope. By the time I started to seriously consider Catholicism, I could even see the practical need for the Pope as a universal pastor of all Christians. The practical side of the papacy was not a problem. It was papal infallibility that took me a long time to accept.
It was only a few weeks into my conversations with Michael in the fall of 1999 that the topic of the papacy came up, and Michael (as I recall) made the point that, if we were serious about the unity of the worldwide Church, we needed one worldwide pastor. I immediately saw the validity of his point, based on my experiences in urban ministry.
During my four years of urban ministry in Michigan, I served a racially diverse neighborhood in the heart of the city together with my co-pastor, a remarkable man, a former heroin addict who had experienced a radical conversion, supernatural deliverance from addiction, and had been gifted with extraordinary graces in his walk with Christ. He was an African-American who had moved from Selma, Alabama, to Michigan as an adult. For four years, he was my closest friend and partner, and he eventually baptized three of my children.
My partner was popularly known in the neighborhood and in the church as “Brother William.”2 Both he and I were in courses of study for ordination within our denomination, although on different tracks. As God’s providence would have it, Brother
