Why I Remain Catholic

I was raised lovingly by my parents in the Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod (WELS). From 6th grade to 8th grade, in preparation for confirmation, I was instructed in the Christian faith through the lens of Martin Luther’s Small Catechism. After high school, I lived in Milwaukee and attended Wisconsin Lutheran College, a small liberal arts school affiliated with the WELS church. Later in life, when I converted to Catholicism, many of my family members and friends were surprised, not just because I was raised as a conservative Lutheran, but because for most of my twenties, as I debated restlessly between my belief and my unbelief in Christianity, I lived like the prodigal son, avoiding responsibility and pursuing selfish, sensual pleasures. Many of my friends during that time were secular. They believed religion was, at best, a harmless belief system followed by the ignorant; at worst, they believed religion was a dangerous ideology that threatened humanity’s progress, dignity, and freedom.

Today I am a devout Catholic married to my devout wife, Rebekah, and we are raising our two baptized children, Nathaniel (12) and Naomi (5), in the faith. To understand why I remain Catholic, I need to discuss my lapsed faith and eventual conversion. I received an excellent liberal arts education at Wisconsin Lutheran College (WLC). Alongside my protestant brothers and sisters, I studied history, theology, philosophy, and literature. While studying, I also began to question my beliefs, as adolescents are prone to do.

To my amazement, many of my questions were answered not by my Lutheran theology classes, but
by Catholic writers in my literature and philosophy classes. For instance, in a literature course entitled 20th Century Christian Classics, I read Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh, G. K. Chesterton, Walker Percy, and Flannery O’Connor, all Catholics! To WLC’s credit, they taught us to search for the Truth, capital T, and the school did not teach that all Catholic doctrine was false. What were some of the questions I had? There are too many examples to discuss in such a brief essay, so I will focus on one: As Christians, how do we read and interpret scripture?

As a Lutheran, I was taught Sola Scriptura (The Bible Alone) and taught that almost everything in the Bible should be read literally. However, like many young Christians, I was trying to reconcile faith and science. Were the two compatible? If so, how was I to understand the Genesis accounts of creation with the discoveries of modern science? I took a theology class on the book of Genesis, and I was given many reasons, like Young Earth Creationism, to believe the literal six-day creation story. None of the answers satisfied me. For example, and I mean no offense to Young Earth Creationists, many of them are model Christians, but even if one argues that the earth is 10,000 years old, and many scientists, of course, disagree, that does not necessarily prove God spoke existence into being in six separate days or that the other stories in Genesis are literal events.

Later, in a philosophy class where I read from Norman Melchert’s classic textbook, The Great Conversation, I encountered, for the first time, St. Augustine, whose thoughts about interpreting scripture astonished me.

Like myself, Agustine struggled with interpreting the Bible. Before his conversion, he found that it lacked “the polish of the best Roman poets, but also its conceptions seemed crude and naïve to him. In Genesis…Adam and Eve ‘heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the cool of the day.’ What a way to think of God!” (Melchert and Morrow 263) I was raised to read that line about the “cool of the day” only in a literal sense, which seemed strange, improbable.

However, reading about Augustine’s similar doubts provided me with hope. Augustine, obviously, later became a great saint. Doubt no longer seemed taboo. Later in his life, Augustine attended Masses delivered by Bishop Ambrose, whose erudition, elocution, and spiritual wisdom impressed him. Augustine discovered the power of how Ambrose interpreted scripture: “Ambrose offered allegorical interpretation to Scripture, particularly the Old Testament” (Melchert and Morrow 265). I could not believe that Christian thinkers interpreted scripture allegorically, and these were thinkers who lived in the 5th century!

I enthusiastically read Augustine’s nuanced interpretation of creation and Genesis, which were based on his nuanced understanding of time (see book XI of Confessions). Later I would come to understand the rich way Catholics read scripture. The catechism describes it this way:

According to an ancient tradition, one can distinguish between two senses of scripture: the literal and the spiritual, the latter being subdivided into the allegorical, moral, and anagogical (CCC 38).

An enlightening modern book that follows Agustine’s and the Church’s interpretive example is Pope Benedict XVI’s In the Beginning…A Catholic Understanding of the Story of Creation and The Fall.
Anyway, interpreting scripture is just one example of many, but reading about Augustine and the thoughts of other Catholic writers showed me that one could be a devout Christian, a disciple of Christ, and still defend the faith with wisdom and intelligence. Of course, intelligence is not necessary for salvation, and I would need, like Augustine himself, to learn humility, but Augustine’s ideas and the ideas of other Catholic thinkers would stay with me long after I left WLC, which was important because I still fell away from the faith, abandoning God like the prodigal son abandoned his father.

In an essay, Charles Taylor, a wise Catholic, states that “we live in something analogous to a post-revolutionary climate…a post-revolutionary climate is extremely sensitive to anything that smacks of the ancient regime (Dilemmas and Connections: Selected Essays. “A Catholic Modernity,” 176). In this quote, Taylor argues that our modern world abhors any mention of deep spiritual truths, like life after death, God, religion, scripture, and Christ.

To many modern people, mentioning any of those religious ideas is absurd; those beliefs should have been left behind with other antiquated beliefs, like sacrificing animals. And this fog of thought has even floated into the minds of many religious believers. I have had discussions, for example, with many professed Catholics or Christians who become squeamish at the talk of Jesus Christ, salvation, faith, or God. This “post-revolutionary” climate is the climate of much of Western civilization, and though the reasons for that climate are many, it is a major reason I fell away from Christianity. I followed the crowd.

Even though I knew that wisdom could be found in Christianity, most of my friends, even the believing ones, did not act like the truths of Christianity were real. Many of my believing friends avoided discussing their faith, had casual sex, drank too much alcohol, and took drugs. Many of my nonbelieving friends did the same. Living in this climate, I, like so many young people, fell away from the faith. In fact, instead of focusing on a career, I began bartending and waiting tables at different chain restaurants, all the while indulging without restraint on the base recreations our world offers so readily.

I am not proud of any of this. Like the prodigal son, I led a life of dissipation that lasted for years. Looking back now, I try to find beacons of light in the dark woods. What elements of Grace urged me away from dissipation?

At a low point, I met Rebekah and her seventeen-month-old son, Nathaniel. That is a
separate story, but for now, suffice it to say that Rebekah and Nathaniel helped show me that life
was not all about me. Slowly, I began to care about other people. Today, Nathaniel calls me dad
and Rebekah calls me her husband.

Ironically, another beacon of light was Wisconsin Lutheran College. During my years of dissipation, I still read books suggested to me through my Christian liberal arts education, so no matter how sarcastic my friends were about religion, I knew that their silly ideas about faith did not hold scrutiny against the wisdom of so many Christian men and women.

At a party once, I overheard a friend of mine, let’s call him Bob, sarcastically remark that “believing in God was the same as believing in Santa Claus.” I jumped to Christianity’s defense, citing Aquinas and his idea, Catholic doctrine, that God is not another item within the universe, not another being in the universe, but the source of being itself. Bob was stunned. He did not become a believer, but he at least realized, especially after many more conversations we had with each other, that he couldn’t discount religion so callously.

Soon after, I began discussing faith more earnestly with Rebekah, who was a lapsed Baptist. We were raising Nathaniel, and after a few years together, we started raising our daughter, Naomi June, another beacon of light. Because of our many conversations together and because we had discussed Catholicism many times together, Rebekah and I decided to enquire about RCIA with a local Catholic church, Christ the Redeemer in Houston, Texas (I had met Rebekah after I moved to Houston). Soon after, the church baptized Naomi, baptized and confirmed Nathaniel, and confirmed and married me and Rebekah.

As I mentioned earlier, there are many reasons why I became Catholic, too many reasons to discuss in such a brief essay, but if a protestant or atheist asked me right now, I could mention two reasons: Grace and Truth. According to the Catechism of the Catholic Church, “Grace is favor, the free and undeserved help that God gives us to respond to his call (emphasis mine) to become children of God” (CCC 538). The Church teaches that God offers His Grace to everyone, but that we need to cooperate with that Grace; we need to respond to God’s call. Grace had been offered to me many times, but for many years, I avoided it or ignored it. Instead, I attached myself to the things of this world. But like the prodigal son recognizing his own abasement, I began to cooperate with Grace.

I responded to God first through the wisdom I learned from the Church fathers and saints,
like Augustine and Aquinas, but I responded also by listening to others, like Rebekah and her
concerns, her needs. By responding to Grace, I began to incrementally, and only with the help of
Grace, to follow Christ more closely, Christ who is “the way and the truth and the life” (John
14:6).

In the story of the Prodigal son, one can infer, based on the father’s joyous reaction at his son’s return, that the father never stopped loving and thinking and hoping for his son to come home. But the prodigal son had to make the initial decision to start walking back home to his father. I had to do the same. Like the prodigal son, I was surprised at my own joy and the joy of God my Father when I returned. That joy was manifested in the voices and faces of the RCIA teachers and students that Rebekah and I met, and we continue to see that joy and Grace manifest in the sacraments that nourish us. I remain Catholic, we remain Catholic because the Church provides the strongest recourse to God’s unlimited mercy, love, Grace, and Truth.

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