Another Evangelical Protestant Swims the Tiber

I was raised in a Pentecostal household, where my mom and dad were the pastors of a small congregation in Miami-Dade County. Growing up, I was taught to love Jesus and the Bible, through weekly Sunday Services, bible study, youth retreats, revivals, and church events. Because my parents were the pastors, I attended many, if not all, of these events. The first time I heard the word Catholic, it was used in the negative. I remember recommending we build, what I now understand, was a shrine to a religious picture. My dad immediately quipped, “That’s Catholic, we don’t do that.” Not really understanding why, I didn’t question and moved on with the day’s activities.  

Moving into my teen years, my parents felt a genuine call to move to central Florida. Leaving dear friends and family, we packed up our moving van and settled down in the Tampa Bay area. After a few unsuccessful attempts at opening a new ministry, my parents finally discerned that God was no longer calling them to ministry and plugged in to the nearest congregation that most aligned with our beliefs. We tried a few Spanish Pentecostal churches, but ultimately settled on a Southern Baptist Church. Although I attended this community, I was aware of the differences in what Pentecostals and Southern Baptists believed. For example, I was raised to believe in the speaking of tongues. Southern Baptist do not hold to this doctrine, as they interpret Acts 2 in a different way than we did. Regardless, we shared a lot in common.

Why not the Catholic Church? Well, one of the reasons was that I was taught that Catholics worship Mary and the Saints. An example of this was given to me by my dad. He told me that my grandfather had two statues of different Catholic Saints in the living room. He would witness him taking money from one statue and giving it to the other in hopes that the Saint would hear his dad’s prayers. I was also told that Emperor Constantine drove Jesus’ true church underground through persecution and established the Catholic Church as a false church in the early fourth century. Seeing that most of this information was coming from my father, who was also my pastor, I accepted these explanations and the anti-Catholic materials supporting them without hesitation. Based on this information, I was thoroughly convinced that Catholicism was not even a Christian denomination, more like a cult.

Entering college, I was introduced to atheist and agnostic ideas and worldviews. My exposure to these ideas began with college friends, but my interest in atheism grew the more I got to know my professors. They were clever and articulate individuals, who were extremely well read in history, philosophy, and general humanities. However, they also shared another commonality. The majority, if not all of them, were atheists. Their confidence and assurance that God did not exist, pressed me to seek and understand their reasons for holding to that position. My research led to militant atheists such as Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, and Sam Harris. As I studied their writings and videos, I genuinely began to lose my faith. In due course, their arguments left me with the impression that atheism was rational and right. However, atheism did not provide sufficient answers that convinced me a god could not exist or even why I personally exist. Because of deficiencies I saw in atheism, I ultimately settled on agnosticism. Just because a god existed, didn’t mean it had to be the Christian one.

My search for the true religion and the real god began in the east. I investigated the Buddhist and Hindu religions and found them foreign and wanting in their philosophies. A deistic god such as those of the Enlightenment Philosophers was next in my search, but I could not reconcile the “Great Watchmaker” god due to the relational nature of human beings. Thus, it made sense to me that if a true god existed, that god should be a personal one. This line of thinking took me to the Abrahamic faiths (Judaism, Islam, and Christianity). I started taking college courses on the relationship between these faiths, in which my studies concluded that Christianity was the only religion that satisfied, coherently, the criteria of a relational god. Immediately, I was reminded about my Protestant faith, in the commonly known cliché: “it’s not about the religion, but about the relationship.”

I returned to my Protestant faith on fire for Jesus and wanting to know more about Christianity. Seeing a History of Christianity class offered at my university, I signed up straightaway. It also counted as an elective credit toward my degree, so really it was a win-win. As the course progressed, I was puzzled by a simple question: Why was early Christianity Catholic? Thinking the reason was that my professor was a devout Catholic, I blamed it on a bias. My teacher was Catholic, so of course, the material was skewed to favor the Catholic Church. After all, why wouldn’t the evil Catholic Church take every opportunity to spin the facts? It was responsible for subduing the true church under Constantine! My naivety didn’t stop there, unfortunately.

In that class, I made a friend, let’s just call him Elvis. Elvis was a devout Catholic, and one day wanted to meet up to continue a group discussion already begun in that day’s lecture. I agreed, and we both walked to the library and met on the second floor. With nowhere to sit, we picked a quiet corner and sat on the floor to continue our conversation. For three hours, Elvis and I debated and discussed various interpretations of what is known as the Bread of Life Discourse in the Gospel of St. John. Neither side was being convinced that day. After our intense discussion, Elvis turned to me as we were saying goodbye, “I’ll be praying for you, Manny.” To which I replied, “You can pray for me, but don’t pray to Mary, because she’s dead.” To this day, it hurts me to think that I said such a profane and sacrilegious thing about the Mother of God. After this exchange, I was convinced that the Catholic beliefs were indeed false, but Our Lord and Our Lady know exactly what they’re doing.

One late night, while surfing the web, I came across a suggested video of a young woman’s conversion story from Protestantism to Catholicism. My thoughts at first glance, were “why would you leave authentic Christianity for a cult?” I had had enough. I was going to disprove the claims of the Catholic Church once and for all and put a nail in the coffin regarding that “false church.” Reaching out to my father, I asked if I could have access to his library of scriptural commentary. My goal? To disprove the thing that I thought was the Achilles-heel of the Catholic Church: authority. If I could disprove that the papacy was not scriptural, I felt confident the claims of Catholicism would be falsified.

I began with a protestant concordance on the Gospel of St. Mathew, in which Jesus says:

“Blessed are you Simon Bar-Jonah, for flesh and blood hath not revealed this unto thee, but my Father in Heaven. And I say unto thee, thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my Church, and the kingdom of hell shall not prevail against it. And I will give unto thee the keys of the kingdom of heaven: and whatsoever thou shalt bind on earth shall be bound in heaven: and whatsoever thou shalt loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven.” (Mathew 16:17-19)

What shocked me was, in this protestant concordance, one potential interpretation noted was that Peter was the rock that Christ founded His Church on. That’s a Catholic interpretation. How could a Catholic interpretation be included as one of the possible interpretations for that scripture? Seeing the issue of interpretations being a problem, I decided to take a different approach: history. Doing research from an unbiased position, I decided to research the History of Christianity on my own. My search began by typing into my search engine, “what are the oldest writings in Christianity?” I was immediately inundated with search results from the early church fathers. The Didache, the 7 letters of Ignatius of Antioch, the Apologies of St. Justin Martyr, and so much more. Piece by piece, I devoured each of these primary sources. All dating back way before Constantine. I became increasingly uneasy, as early Christianity was looking, again, Catholic. Being very scared, I turned to Jesus and prayed, “Lord, if Catholicism is false, harden my heart, but if it’s true, convert me.” 

Having been introduced to Catholic teaching on the Eucharist in college, I wanted to see if it was biblical. The Eucharist was certainly historically accepted in the Early Church as the body and blood of Jesus, but as a bible believing Christian, I needed to see it in scripture. Re-visiting the Bread of Life Discourse in the Gospel of St. John, I understood, now in a historical context, why the Jews turned away from Jesus. The teaching of the Real Presence was right there in front of me.

“Then Jesus said to them, “Most assuredly, I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink His blood, you have no life in you. Whoever eats My flesh and drinks My blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up at the last day. For My flesh is food indeed, and My blood is drink indeed. He who eats My flesh and drinks My blood abides in Me, and I in him.” (John 6:53-56)

The final nail in the coffin were the words of St. Justin Martyr in his First Apology to Emperor Titus, (155-157 A.D.) He says the following:

 “And this food is called among us Εὐχαριστία [the Eucharist], of which no one is allowed to partake but the man who believes that the things which we teach are true, and who has been washed with the washing that is for the remission of sins, and unto regeneration, and who is so living as Christ has enjoined. For not as common bread and common drink do we receive these; but in like manner as Jesus Christ our Saviour, having been made flesh by the Word of God, had both flesh and blood for our salvation, so likewise have we been taught that the food which is blessed by the prayer of His word, and from which our blood and flesh by transmutation are nourished, is the flesh and blood of that Jesus who was made flesh.”

The only conclusion I could draw from all of this was that the Eucharist is Jesus. From this affirmation flowed the rest of my acceptance of Catholic teaching. My objections to Apostolic succession, Confirmation, Confession, the Priesthood, the Papacy, Mariology, and all that the Catholic Church taught, was answered in historical, biblical, and intellectually substantiated evidence. I discovered Christ’s true Church, and better yet, I was exposed to Christ’s desire to share something more than just His words in the Bible. His desire to give himself, Body, Blood, Soul, and Divinity, to me, an unworthy sinner. Demanding nothing less than my Fiat, my yes to Him. On February 9th, 2019, I was brought into full communion with the Catholic Church. God answered my prayer and led me to the truth. I invite you to pray the same prayer and be stirred by the words of our Lord: “Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives, and he who seeks finds, and to him who knocks it will be opened.” (Matthew 7:7-8)