Nathan, I know you are busy, but I am curious. I left the Catholic Church, you willingly joined it. [I noticed] your profile speaks to 2006 and birth control, right? OK, you set out to prove them wrong on that and wound up heavily INTO Catholicism. Can I ask you where you were BEFORE? were you raised Catholic? something else? what did you believe in 2005? I am extremely curious about BEFORE.
My mother was born and raised Catholic and I was born and raised Catholic too. However, my mother was one of the ubber traditionalists who were very against Vatican II. I want to be clear I'm very grateful for my mother and she instilled in me from a very young age about the importance of God. However, my mom did not allow me to attend faith formation at church and I illicity received the Sacrament of Reconciliation and the Sacrament of the Eucharist. I remember being very young and asking questions about faith and mom would always answer, "because the church says so." That answer always left me very unsatisfied but your a kid and you believe your parents. Then when I'd ask something like why I couldn't go to CCD with the other kids she'd say, "because Satan has infiltrated the church." So we believe all these things because the church says so, but we don't believe anything the church says because Satan took over the church? Can you see how confused I was?
Mom taught me other things like all non-Catholics who get married outside the Catholic Church go to hell. The church doesn't teach that.
So in short, I was raised Catholic but was never taught what the church actually taught. I was taught what other people thought the Catholic Church teaches. Big difference.
When I became an adult I really didn't know much about my faith. I was 19 years old and I remember struggling why people believed their sins were forgiven because a person died on a cross. A lot of people died. Why did Christ dieing matter and other people who died didn't.
Bottom line: a lot of confusion.
So I rightfully rejected the Catholic Church that I grew up in. I basically thought Christianity was somewhat a huge hoax because every Christian said they were right and everyone else was wrong. Yet every Christian said this. So I thought at the time, no one must really have the truth in Christianity.
But I knew there was a God and I knew that he was not the author of confusion. At one time I rejected Scripture all together because I thought that it was too easily able to be influenced by Satan. Wow! It's amazing how different my thinking used to be.
So my wife and I got married in Las Vegas and I was really scared about what my mom told me about getting married in outside the Catholic Church and going to hell. So my wife and I had our marriage convalidated in the church mostly out of my own fear of hell and what my mother told me as a young boy. Of course, the idiocy here is that I never attempted to use that fear to learn whether or not what I was taught was true!
My brother, Brian, became a part of a group called The Way International and he was very adamant about his own faith. His witness led me to reject much of what the Catholic Church teaches about the Pope, etc, and his witness also led me back to believe that the Scriptures (the 66 books of the non-Catholic bible, not the 73 books of the Catholic bible, but that wouldn't happen until years later) really were inspired of God.
So to make a long story short, before I was Catholic I'd say I was sort of the leader of my own church. Whatever I thought was true was what I believed.
Two things really hit me around this time which caused me to seriously consider what was truth.
1) I worked in a job where I had to learn a lot about Islam. I was very intrigued by Islam and wondered to myself, how do I know that Islam is not true? How do I know that God doesn't want everyone to be a Muslim?
2) My wife gave birth to our first daughter in 2005. I had this thought (no actual visions or voices or bells and whistles, just me in my own thoughts) of me standing before God after I die and Him saying to me, why didn't you teach your daughter about me. And all I could respond with was, "because I was playing the Playstation." (I played a lot of Madden back in the day) Well it was one thing to screw up my whole life and suffer in hell for eternity, now I had this precious little girl who was going to look to me to help her know what was truth and what was error. I didn't want to be responsible for leading her right into hell. This was my child! I wanted far better for her than I wanted for myself.
So around this time, my wife and I accepted Christianity after I rejected Islam, but we were still pretty nominal. I would skip church to watch football, etc. And we certainly didn't pray every day or even once in while.
Well, not knowing where else to go, my wife entered RCIA at the local Catholic Church. Two things kept me somewhat close to Catholicism:
1) History. I knew that if there was a church founded by Christ it would claim to have been founded by Christ. A church with a name like Church of America, probably wasn't the church founded by Christ.
2) The Eucharist. I have always thought that the Eucharist was true. Not sure why, even the idea of what looks like bread is actually God and why people would ever believe that has always captivated me.
But in this RCIA class the teacher said that Mary, Jesus' mother, was born without the stain of original sin AND committed no personal sin in her entire life. Now I was very unfamiliar with the Scriptures at this time, but even I knew that Scripture said, all have sinned. When I challenged the RCIA teacher she basically said this wasn't the place to get into such issues.
I thought to myself, not the place? We are in classes to learn what the Catholic Church teaches and this is not the right place to discuss a teaching of the church?! I was so angry. In my mind, here was another example of ignorant Catholics making stuff up which was blatantly contrary to the Scriptures and hiding behind this idea of, "the church says so," for their seemingly faulty reasoning.
I stewed for almost two months on this. I couldn't let it go I got so angry every time I thought about it. Finally I said to myself, how can anyone be so stupid as to believe something like that? So I sat down and starting doing some research on it. What I learned blew me away.
Not only did I learn that the Catholic Church had an answer, it was a strong, biblical answer. So I reached out to my non-Catholic friends asking them for sources on why this doctrine of Mary's Immaculate Conception was not true. The answers they gave me were weak and didn't really address the question. And when I gave them what I learned about what the Church taught their rebuttals were even weaker. I was shocked. I became thoroughly convinced, from the Scriptures themselves, that Mary was truly conceived without the stain of original sin and never committed any sin in her personal life. This led me to draw two major questions:
1) If the Catholic Church had such a strong biblical reason for their beliefs, how come this RCIA teacher wouldn't share it with us. (I'm sure she had no idea where this was found in Scripture)
2) How come I had been Catholic 'my whole life' and I never heard this before?
I remember thinking, I'll be darned, the Catholic Church actually got something right for a change. I mean even a broken clock is right twice a day, right? It was as if the Catholic Church had just gotten lucky or something.
Now we were still a long way from full communion with the church at Rome at this point, but this was the first time I accepted a real Catholic teaching.
And this has led me to believe that most people, especially many Catholics, really have no idea what the Catholic Church actually teaches. If they did they wouldn't reject it.
I rightfully rejected what I thought the Catholic Church was. Now I fully accept what the Catholic Church actually is, the authority on earth which preaches Christ and Him crucified to me and to all people in all times and in all places and makes the salvation of the whole world possible through the Sacraments which Christ Himself established through the shedding of His precious blood.
I am Catholic because of Jesus Christ alone. I believe the Scriptures teach that this is what Christ established and this is what He wants of His children.
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