www.happycatholic.org - Why am I a Happy Catholic ?

Why am I a Happy Catholic ?

I began my journey within a Protestant church. I was a sensitive boy and took serious interest in religion in Sunday school. I was baptized in the 5th grade and attended a bible study after the main service, something many kids my age did not do. In Junior High, I was one of the leaders of my youth group. My pastor Dave invited my friends and me to be a part of a discipleship class. During this time in my life, I never doubted whether or not I was a Christian. I believed Jesus died for my sins, read the Bible, attended church and youth groups, and tried to live differently than my peers at public school.

A change occurred in my journey when I got to High School and I began to reflect on how my peers related to one another. I did not see any difference between how the kids in my youth group at church acted compared to the kids at my public high school. I began to dislike how many of my Christian peers acted hypocritically—they were drawn to the same pleasures, the same silly words, the same cliquish mentality that I observed at school every day. I asked myself: What makes us really different?

As my disappointment grew, I did not want to be associated with Christianity anymore. At this point, my faith journey lost its religious roots. I still believed in God and thought that I was a good person. I just thought that I did not need to go to church and associate with other Christians if their lifestyle was not any different than that of the kids I encountered on a regular basis at my school.

In the absence of a Christian community, I looked for another identity that could satisfy me. From my days in High School until a couple years after my college graduation, my search continued. Whomever I tried to become—a Rastafarian hippie, a serious student, and a political junkie—I put my heart and soul into it. Since none of these activities really satisfied me, I was also intent on finding love. Here too, I worked with all my heart and soul. When relationships didn’t work out, I was deeply saddened and would get depressed. Here and there I would revisit a church or say a prayer but at this point I did not have any faith that Christianity could change my life and make me a whole person.

My attitude towards religion changed a little after I graduated from college. I had just broken up with my girlfriend and my dream of living in Italy no longer seemed plausible. Depressed and frustrated with life, I thought I would give Christianity a try again. I started going to church. I joined a small group. I hung out with friends I made at church. The feeling I got of acceptance was good but I still felt something was missing. I knew that I was still drawn to many things in life that were out of my control. I wanted to have a great career as a teacher. I wanted to have a girlfriend that would be faithful to me and love me. I was discovering that I wanted to be able to live without fear and anxiety. The more I read the Bible, the more I realized too that I wanted to be free to love other people and that I wanted to be free from sin.

My faith journey came to a really critical point when I had what I call my “desert experience”. This experience happened as I was spending a lot of time in the hills outside of Morgan Hill. Since my father’s death, I had to take out one of his cars that had been sitting idle in my mother’s garage. I would drive the car out to a secluded spot to pray and study the scriptures. Normally, I would just sit while enjoying the peaceful surroundings and reflecting on God’s plan for my life. One day, however, I had a real experience of God speaking to me. The word that I received from God was a word of repentance—“Stay away from politics!” Up until this point, I had been very engrossed in the presidential election and was very argumentative with anyone who disagreed with me. I couldn’t help myself from watching TV programs or listening to radio shows that discussed politics. It was an addiction. I cannot exactly explain what happened to me at this moment but life appeared to be open to me like never before. God spoke! God is real! I suddenly had an interest in reading the Bible and Christian books. I also had awareness now of things that were helpful or not helpful to my spiritual life—how I spent my time, what I thought about, and what people I spent most of my time with. I was a different person.

Now that my spiritual life was back on track, there were some issues that became very important to me. These issues had to do with the theological concept of justification and the practical steps of how to live the Christian life. I very much wanted to develop a clear system of how to be a Christian to the fullest extent possible. I did not want to be like someone whose faith makes little or no difference in his or her life. As I said before, I wanted to be free from fear and free to love others wholeheartedly.

Justification was an important concept for me to understand because of how it sets the goal for the Christian life. Justification refers to the passage a person goes through from a state of sin to a state of grace. When I left “the desert experience”, I felt an inward peace that I did not have to live any longer in fear. I did not have to lust after women. I did not have to be jealous of other people. I could be free to love God as he commanded me to. This experience of hope was for me what justification meant: freedom to live my life in accordance with Christ’s commandments.

As a result of this idea, my goal was to continue to live up to this reality, as “a new creation” as the Bible describes it. (2 Cor. 5:17) All the books that I was reading at the time spoke about choosing to live life as a disciple of Christ, which meant taking everything Christ said seriously and learning how to do what he taught. The authors I read showed that the development of the spiritual life was based upon learning how to obey Christ. To the degree that we did not learn to obey Christ, our spiritual lives would flounder, our souls being tossed to and fro by all of the desires raging in us and by those bombarding us from our culture. The authors also described the different parts of the human personality—the mind, the heart, the emotions, the body, and the soul—and how God’s spirit was meant to transform each one so that we could obey Christ. This was really enlightening information to me and helped me to understand what justification entailed.

There were many biblical themes that started to interest me now. One was obedience to Christ. Reading the New Testament with a new perspective, I found that all the NT authors seemed to agree that obedience to Christ was a real possibility (Rom. 2:26, Jas. 1: 22-25, 2 Pet. 1:5-11, 1 John 3:4-10); indeed, obedience to Christ seemed to be the condition upon which Jesus said that he would receive us or not into heaven. (Matt. 7: 24-27, John 8:51, 15:10) Another theme I enjoyed finding in the scriptures was union with Christ. Lest I think that obeying Christ was too difficult or perhaps impossible, many verses spoke of God’s presence indwelling us, empowering us to do good deeds. (John 15:1-7, Rom. 8:10-11, 1 Cor. 3:16 2 Cor. 5:17, Gal 3:27, Eph 3:16-17, Col. 1:27, 3:3)

Nevertheless, despite my new hope of obedience to Christ, aided by a renewed understanding of the scriptures, I knew painfully from my experience that I could not always easily obey Christ’s commandments. I knew it wasn’t like God would just zap me and make me do what I was supposed to do. I knew I had to exert some effort and do something or else my life would not really change. So I also became more interested at this time in finding out how to nurture the spiritual life. I yearned for good teachers of spiritual life.

To sum up, following my “desert experience”, my faith in Christianity was really different than my attitude before. I really knew that the Christian life was possible. Justification, the idea that God transfers us to a state of grace whereby we are empowered to obey God and not sin, was a glorious and liberating idea for me. I had heard people talk about “hearing the Gospel” before. Well, for me this was it! Once I heard it, I knew that I would have to make learning how to obey Christ my most important aim in life.

At the time that I was having these reflections on the Christian life, I decided to go to a local Seminary, where I was challenged on the issue of justification and other topics. The professors at this Protestant seminary taught a different concept of justification. For them, the passage a person goes through from sin to grace did not necessarily involve learning how to obey Christ commandments. Rather, it meant that one is now forgiven from his past sins. One of my professors even taught that obeying the Ten Commandments was no longer necessary now that Christ has died for our sins. They still taught that obeying Christ’s commandments is important for Christians but that it was a symptom in a believer’s life which followed his acceptance of what Christ has already done for us. They also taught, in contrast to what I had been reading, that the human body remains continually stained with original sin after someone becomes a Christian. I knew immediately that this view was radically different from my own and that the implications of their viewpoint would have serious consequences for the Christian life. If their idea of justification were correct, my efforts to live the Christian life would be in vain. I could try to obey Christ but I would inevitably fail. I questioned why it would be necessary to try to live in obedience to Christ if we could not really obey. The answer I got was that this was what a Christian who was really touched by God’s forgiveness would want to do. It seemed odd to me that Christ commanded us to do things that our state of sin would never allow us to achieve.

There was another important issue for me that was challenged by the staff and students at the seminary. This was the method of growth in the spiritual life. After my “desert experience”, my attitude towards the spiritual life was that we needed to exert great effort in order to become free from sin. For me, this meant that I should choose to do those things that would help me do what I could not now do by direct effort. Some of the practices that were very important for me were fasting, memorizing scripture, spending time alone, remaining silent, and reading spiritual books. As I did these practices I found myself becoming more and more capable of loving God and others. I was more clear-headed about my work, my relationships, and my feelings! I called these practices spiritual disciplines, which a favorite author of mine Dallas Willard had written about so well.

I found that as I talked to professors and fellow students about these practices, they interpreted my attitude as a works-righteousness mentality towards God. I was trying to earn my way into heaven, they implied. They pointedly told me not to mention these practices to people as if they were somehow essential to the Christian life. I realized that their misunderstanding on this issue was due to their view of justification. Since we are forgiven by Christ, we don’t have to learn how to obey Christ. It seemed that they thought since we are really saved, we should just try to obey and eventually we would obey. I maintained that obeying was not such an easy matter but required deep repentance and daily habits that kept someone focused on the Lord. My seriousness about learning how not to sin and how to obey Christ was viewed as an overly pious attitude and showed that I was trying too hard to earn my way to heaven.

As we discussed what spiritual practices were or were not helpful, I realized again that our goal for the Christian life was really different. Our view of God’s grace was fundamentally different. They misunderstood me to be saying that we do good works by our own power alone. To do that, they said, would be robbing God of his glory. I responded by saying that it was God’s grace which gave me the will to do those things and that if I did not do them I would be forfeiting the real possibility of being free from sin. Obeying Christ’s commandments and really and truly being free from sin was to me the way to give God glory! “Be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect” (Matt. 5:48) was to me the watchword for the spiritual life.

Our difference lay, I believed, in how we viewed the concept of obedience. Was it inevitably something that we had to do but didn’t like? Or could it be something that could be exciting and joyful, fulfilling our deepest needs as human beings? I knew that it was possible to obey Christ but not really change inwardly. Obedience could simply be a sense of duty hanging over one’s head. The difference I felt between my Protestant friends and myself on this issue was that I wanted to affirm that obedience could be joyful and effortless, not having a sense of duty attached to it at all. Obeying could become the naturally good thing for us to do. Obeying Christ was not something extra that we now have to do to show that we are “saved” but something that allowed us to live as we were designed. To learn how to obey in this manner did not, however, just happen by sheer will power alone. It also required insight into how our personalities are made up and what particular sins we fall prey to. We must learn what the source of the disobedience was and aim to uproot it thoroughly—whatever the cost! Our spiritual well being depended on it!

Most of the teaching that I heard at my Protestant seminary and church lacked insight into how deep our transformation in Christ could really become. Moreover, they lacked an explanation of the necessary renunciations we had to make before hoping to find the freedom to love God and others. Since they lacked a convincing analysis of the human person, whenever they spoke of obeying God, I had the impression that they were setting people up to fail! My seriousness about finding methods that helped me specifically to uproot sin was not shared by many people with whom I spoke. When I spoke about some basic disciplines that had helped me and could help others, I was told that I was off base. So, my attitude towards finding good methods for the spiritual life was another source of disagreement between other Protestants and myself.

Not surprisingly, a final issue on which my Protestant friends and I differed regarded whom we looked to as models of the Christian life. Since my “desert experience”, the figures I found most helpful were men and women like St. Francis, St. Ignatius, Thomas a Kempis, St. Teresa of Avila and John Wesley. These people’s lives were without a doubt a clear witness that the Christian life that I was striving towards was possible. The ways in which they abandoned everything for God and found practical ways to live each day for Jesus were a great inspiration to me. Who were the figures that my friends would recommend as models for the faith? Aside from a few missionaries, most of these were theologians and prominent preachers. I was not against reading about theology but I was more interested in reading about people whose lives were dedicated to developing an authentic Christian spirituality—transformation into Christ so that living in obedience to Christ’s commands was the norm. When I tried to share some of the insights I had gained from St. Teresa’s method of prayer or St. Ignatius’ spiritual exercises with friends of mine at church and fellow seminarians, there was no interest at all. I knew, of course, that my friends were probably not interested because these figures were Catholic, but their being Catholic was not a difference-maker for me at the time because I couldn’t deny that their spirituality was more practically and consistently in keeping with how I viewed my faith in Christ since my “desert experience”.

The reason that I didn’t become a Catholic while I was having these reflections was that I found one group of Protestants that was amenable to my spiritual orientation. The group was called Renovare and it included the philosopher Dallas Willard who had helped me see the possibilities for the spiritual life. This group is non-denominational and promotes the reading of spiritual classics, many of which are by Catholic saints. I attended Renovare conferences and read many of the books of their affiliated authors. It seemed like they were on to something really big and my soul was nourished by a lot of what they wrote. I visited various churches in the hopes that I would find one where the pastor was as committed to promoting the spiritual life as much as the Renovare movement was. The more I read and studied on my own, however, the more I was beginning to see that my views were different than most of the pastors whose churches I attended. Their attitude on justification and methods for the spiritual life were different. They did not know about many of the spiritual masters whose writings I loved either.

My decision to become a Catholic finally came closer once I realized that my search for a church that embraced my view of the spiritual life might be in vain. My pastor at the time was someone whom I respected for his zeal for discipleship. He was also a person I considered a close friend. I had begun to see that there had to be a way to establish for believers a method or methods that were the sine qua non for discipleship. There had to be some authority structure in place that could instruct people about what justification, for example, really meant. It was not just one professor’s opinion. It was truth. There had to be an authority that could affirm the need to renounce our sinful desires and teach us how to obey. This teaching had to be true for all Christians, not just for some spiritual elite. If Teresa and Augustine had lived and written about transformation and their teaching conformed to what we know from the Bible, we should be able to teach those truths not as just one person’s opinion but as the truth. I was increasingly getting anxious to find the overarching principles that underlay any Christian spiritual formation for anyone; no matter what tradition or denomination they happened to belong to. There had to be truth on this matter, or else people would start to live out their Christianity in their own way, perhaps totally differently from one another. It now started to dawn on me that perhaps Catholics were in agreement on some basic aspects of the spiritual life, since so many of the writers on the spiritual life had been referring to Catholic saints. So I started to share with my pastor some of my curiosity about the Catholic Church and its teachings. Through our conversations, I quickly found out that he was not really open to what the Catholic Church taught on matters that I had been reading about, such as confession, justification, and the communion of saints. He also clearly misrepresented many Catholics devotions as work-righteousness, which I knew from reading of many Catholic saints that this was anything but the case. Though we both agreed that Christians’ life was one of radical transformation, which was the reason I decided to attend his church, I soon got exasperated with his inability to see how many Catholics had written about transformation and lived it. All their writing was shot through with insights from scripture too, which were more penetrating than what I had heard from most of the Protestant professors and pastors with whom I had been familiar. I also noticed points in my friend’s theology, which resembled some of my seminary professors’, whose very nature seriously hindered the spiritual life he was purporting to pursue. The growing discomfort I felt caused me to leave my spiritual readings and look for a theological explanation of the differences between Catholicism and Protestantism. I now pondered for the first time that Protestant Christianity could be fundamentally flawed.

The book that I read at this point in my faith journey, The Spirit and Forms of Protestantism by Louis Bouyer, convinced me that I should become a Catholic. The book showed me that the Catholic Church was the teacher I had been searching for ever since my “desert experience”. First, Bouyer demonstrated how Martin Luther’s view on justification was flawed because of his adherence to the nominalist philosophy that was prevalent during his time. Nominalist philosophy essentially denies that the language we use to describe things corresponds to actual things. We cannot talk about being changed by grace from outside of us (God’s law, dogmas, sacraments), without confusing God and our own activity. On the issue of justification, this philosophy entailed that our justification was either totally from within us (Pelagianism) or totally from outside of us (Extrinsicism). Martin Luther, in response to proponents of the former argument, adopted the latter viewpoint, and thereby denied the teaching of the Catholic Church that grace is a real gift from God that becomes ours. Luther’s view of justification, therefore, was that man was not really changed by God’s grace and it was exactly the kind of teaching I had heard from my seminary professors. This was important because I realized that my own view on justification was closer to what the Catholic Church taught and not to that original German protestant who started the Reformation. I believed from my experience and from reading about spirituality that God really does change us when he justifies us. Second, Bouyer also explained the Catholic Church’s teaching on the sacraments and their relationship to spiritual growth, which was a subject I had never pondered before. I considered for the first time that the sacraments were God’s chosen means by which we can grow spiritually. They did not primarily depend on the disposition of the receiver. They had power by virtue of Christ’s declaration. Being as serious about the spiritual life as I was, I had to stop and consider this teaching. I thought about the Eucharist for the first time and studied the passage in John 6 where Jesus says “Unless you eat my flesh and drink my blood, you have no life in you.” I was amazed that I had never thought of this passage before! My view of spiritual growth had mostly consisted of individual activities and had never included what we called the Lord’s Supper. Learning about the Catholic Church’s teaching on the sacraments was important because I had found in the sacraments a missing element of the church as I had experienced it in my journey. The Catholic Church taught that the sacraments were necessary for all Catholics since they were the appointed means Christ chose for us to grow spiritually so that we could increasingly become more and more like Him. This meant that the spiritual life for all Catholics had similar and consistent lines of development. No one who really intended to follow the Church and obey Christ could dispense with the belief in the real washing away of original sin in baptism. No one could set aside the need to confess his sins to a priest. Everyone had to believe in the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist and take necessary steps for receiving Him in a worthy manner. The sacraments were for everyone. It made perfect sense to me as I thought more about it that God had meant for there to be real signs for our spiritual lives which he worked through and that he meant for all of us believers to share as one church. Third, Bouyer’s book contained a chapter that showed with penetrating logic that once the Reformation took place, there was no longer a stable, consistent, authority for Protestants to follow. The Catholic Church’s claim to teach had always been, and is to this day, that she preserves within her the original teaching of the twelve apostles who received their teaching from Christ himself. Bouyer showed that the Reformers’ belief in the Bible as a self-interpreting text inevitably led to subjectivism and hence many divergent opinions. Moreover, he demonstrated the fallacy of the Reformers’ belief in the authority of the Bible alone by pointing out that when there was no consensus among the faithful about what had to be believed, the Reformers imposed their own particular views of scripture on their churches. Thinking through the issue of sola scriptura, the Protestants’ idea that the bible alone is the sole authority, then, I saw for the first time the reason for the multiple denominations within Protestantism. There was no authority within each denomination other than the subjective interpretation of each individual or the demanding authority of a given church’s pastor. I wondered now: Was this what Jesus intended when he prayed that his disciples would be one (John 17:21)? Also, and most importantly, I saw that there has really only been one church whose views on fundamental matters like baptism, marriage, justification, and the Lord’s Supper had never changed and those were the teachings of the Catholic Church. I realized now that in order for the truth of his teachings to remain after he left, Jesus gave the apostles his authority to bind and loose (Matt. 18:18). God’s spirit was with them as they developed doctrine and taught about the spiritual life so that Christians all over the world could find the truth to live by. There was no other way to avoid confusion and subjective authoritarianism otherwise. Rethinking now what the reasons were for the Reformation, the selling of indulgences chief among them, I understood that there was no reason for the Reformers to split from Rome. They left the only church that could claim authority to teach what Christ had taught and what the inspired scriptures meant. Fourth, as a bonus to all these revelations I was having, it occurred to me that the spiritual masters I had admired, Francis de Sales, St. Teresa, St. Francis, were not Catholic by coincidence! They were my spiritual brothers and sisters and the Catholic Church had affirmed many of their own practices and teachings as her own.

To sum up—I had to be Catholic because I discovered that the Church has persevered a teaching about justification that recognized the possibility for spiritual growth. Second, I had to become Catholic because I discovered her teaching on the sacraments, specifically the Eucharist, which I realized were absolutely essential for the spiritual life. Third, I had to become Catholic because without an authoritative teacher of doctrine and morality, Christians would either carry out the Christian life through their own subjective interpretations or have to follow the equally subjective views of their own pastor. Fourthly, I had to become Catholic because she revered the teachings and lives of many figures that had been so crucial in my own faith journey.

Since I made the decision to become Catholic in January 2009, I have experienced an incredible amount of joy and satisfaction in my life. First, in this world of tumultuous events in which people can form such a wide range of opinions, it is very reassuring to have the Church as a guide. I know that on the issues that really matter, the church has clear teachings or at least clear principles that can aid people to understanding the truth and help them to do the right thing. Secondly, it is very gratifying to be a part of a church in which people from all over the world share the same teachings, the same practices, and the same liturgy regarding the spiritual life. As a Protestant, it was disconcerting to find people from one church to the next disapproving of what your church taught and practiced, not to mention your personal approach to Christianity. In the Catholic Church, we can speak of unity and really mean it! Finally, I am so proud of being Catholic because I am a member of the Church of St. Teresa, St. Augustine, and St. Ignatius, all of whom were my spiritual heroes. It is staggering to think that I was called to be a part of their church, which is the Church that has lasted for over 2000 years. It is wonderful to know that in my own way, I can be a witness to the truth of the Church. For the first time in my faith journey, I feel a part of a family; a family that does not disown my experience, which does not disregard sound teachings on the spiritual life, and which does not change its doctrines to adapt to the society around it.

Joseph Polizzotto
November 20, 2009