Twenty-five years ago, my wife and I entered the Catholic Church, and I began work on my master’s degree in theological studies through the University of Dallas. I also wrote my first published essay, “Turn About,” in the June 1998 edition of This Rock (the precursor of Catholic Answers Magazine). That essay (available online at catholic.com) detailed how my wife and I, former Fundamentalists and graduates of Evangelical Bible colleges, made our way into the Catholic Church. I actually wrote the essay for a new Catholic friend who asked me about our conversion journey; after reading it, he forwarded it to Karl Keating, the founder of Catholic Answers.
It was fitting that our story caught the attention of Karl, whose writing had been so helpful along the way. As I wrote a quarter century ago about Karl’s seminal book:
I finished reading Catholicism and Fundamentalism by the next evening. At times it was like reading about my childhood and the beliefs I had been taught, especially regarding false ideas about the Catholic Church. But I was most impressed with how well the author understood and accurately presented Fundamentalist teachings and showed the inherent flaws of the assumptions behind them. It was as if several years of stored up questions, implications, inferences, and frustrations were flushed out into the open, asking to be fully dealt with and solved.
As I told Karl a couple of years later, “Thank you for saving me a lot of time!” My experience demonstrates the place and power of authentic apologetics: to remove obstacles, address falsehoods, and explain the truths of the Faith.
I’ve never regretted entering the Catholic Church, but that is not the same as saying it has been easy. Quite the contrary! Such journeys are not smooth, nor should they be. Ours was occasionally bumpy or frustrating, even while it was often surprising, challenging, and joyful. “Men and women enter [the Church] by every conceivable gate,” wrote G.K. Chesterton in The Catholic Church and Conversion (1926), “after every conceivable process of slow intellectual examination, of shock, of vision, of moral trial, and even of merely intellectual process. They enter through the action of expanded experience.”
Before and after entering the Church, I’ve been deeply edified in reading so many stories of conversion, ranging from St. Augustine’s Confessions to the accounts found in books such as Joseph Pearce’s masterful Literary Converts (Ignatius Press, 2000), to the many contemporary compilations of stories by former Protestants, atheists, Jews, skeptics, Muslims, and others. The robust catholicity of such accounts demonstrates that while there are an innumerable number of ways to the Church, there is only one Way into the Church, precisely because the Church is his Mystical Body.
Looking back on the many articles and handful of books I’ve written over the years, I believe—I hope!—that they are decidedly Christocentric in nature but permeated with an emphasis on ecclesiology. My first book, Will Catholics Be “Left Behind”? (Ignatius, 2003), a study of premillennial dispensationalism (aka, the “Left Behind” theology), has been understood as zeroing in on eschatology—what the Church teaches about the end times. Which is true, but that misses the real point.
As I emphasized throughout the book and in talks on the topic, it is just as much a book about Christology and ecclesiology, because Christology shapes ecclesiology, and ecclesiology forms eschatology. Our understanding of who Jesus is and what he did molds and informs our beliefs about the nature and mission of the Church, which then forms and undergirds our views of the “last things.”
This simple theo-logic, I believe, needs continually to be emphasized in apologetics, catechesis, and evangelization. As Joseph Ratzinger noted in his introduction to Eschatology, “The truly constant factor is Christology. It is upon the integrity of Christology that the integrity of all the rest depends, and not the other way around.”
Yet far too much of what is called Catholic today seems to ignore or even forget this fact. We all know that one of the largest “religious groups” in the U.S. today consists of non-practicing Catholics, just as we know that the term cultural Catholic is another way of saying practical atheist.
Posing as Christians
There are also, of course, the anti-Catholic former Catholics and the anti-Christians posing as Christians. The late Tim LaHaye, creator and co-author of the Left Behind novels (65 million sold), was baptized a Catholic but raised Fundamentalist after his parents left the Church when he was a toddler. Dan Brown, author of the mega-selling The Da Vinci Code (more than 80 million copies sold), insisted years ago, “I am a Christian, although perhaps not in the most traditional sense of the word. . . . I am a committed Christian!”
The reason I wrote my book on the “Rapture” and then co-authored The Da Vinci Hoax (Ignatius, 2004) was that both the LaHaye and Brown novels, under the cover (literally) of popular fiction, promoted fictions about Jesus Christ and his Church. The Left Behind books are badly written, Fundamentalist works of pulp fiction that rightly asserted that Jesus was God but claimed that he was forced to abandon his mission to the Jews and resort to a backup plan, which was the Church. And only a few people who “rightly interpret the Word of God” understand this and can correctly foresee and explain the fast-approaching end times.
The Da Vinci Code is also badly written pulp fiction but is informed by radical feminist and gnostic ideas at the service of portraying Jesus as a mere mortal “prophet” married to the “goddess” Mary Magdalene. The books are remarkably similar; both are neo-gnostic mythologies based on radical misinterpretations of ancient texts, and both posit an elaborate conspiracy on the part of the Catholic Church to keep the “real” truth from people.
As technology and communications have advanced, over the past decade or two the appeal of neo-gnostic belief systems (“Only a few of the enlightened really know the truth”) and the facile treatment of historical facts and various texts (including the Bible) has increased in reach and intensity. Sensationalism is so widespread that what is truly sensational—that is, the truth about Christ, his saving work, and the Church—is dismissed as superstition, boring, or even a form of patriarchal oppression.
Catholics need evangelizing
The fracturing so evident in cyberspace, in social media, and increasingly in “ordinary” life has made it difficult to communicate and explain the remarkable coherence of the natural world (and what we call “natural law”) as well as the deep order disclosed by divine revelation about the supernatural world. So often in the past twenty-five years I have seen one of two basic reactions from Catholics: (1) either they hold tight to their faith via short and clear statements of faith without going any deeper or (2) they embrace an increasingly hazy view of doctrinal and dogmatic truth, which too often leads to an abandonment of living faith.
At the heart of the former is either immaturity or insecurity, and in my experience many such folks are hungry (even desperate!) to plunge deeper into the mysteries of the Faith. They can also be fearful of exposing their faith (or the Faith) to questions and challenges. Apologetics plays a vital role here in working with catechesis and evangelization.
It is worth noting that evangelization is not just about those people “out there” but also is for those within the Church. Pope St. Paul VI wrote, “Thus it has been possible to define evangelization in terms of proclaiming Christ to those who do not know him, of preaching, of catechetics, of conferring baptism and the other sacraments” (Evangelii Nuntiandi 17). So this proclamation is to both non-Catholics and Catholics; we are all in need of evangelization.
The problem with the second group is far more challenging. Over the past couple of years, a time of serious upheaval and unsettledness for countless people, I’ve watched on social media as individuals have publicly abandoned the Church and faith in Christ. The problem with Twitter or Facebook, to be blunt, is that while you learn a lot, it’s not clear how much of what you’re “learning” is true or real. People have become quite sophisticated at deflecting and denying, even while they’ve not advanced in clarity or transparency.
That said, human nature remains human nature, despite all sad and destructive attempts to mutilate or medicate one’s way to another “gender” or “identity.” Christ and his moral teachings are certainly a stumbling block. What Archbishop Fulton Sheen observed decades ago remains true: “Most people basically do not have trouble with the Creed but with the Commandments; not so much with what the Church teaches as with how the Church asks us to behave.” Hence so many new flavors of Catholicism fixate on ignoring some aspect of moral doctrine (usually sexual in nature) while presenting themselves as some form of advanced and enlightened faith.
For such folks, dogma is the problem. But dogma is not a dirty word. It is a light and a guide given by God through the Church founded by Christ. If people find dogma dull or dry or difficult, it is likely because they do not understand it––or do not care to. But without dogma the Christian faith would have eroded into mere sentiment and vague emotionalism centuries ago. Jesus claimed that he is “the way, the truth, and the life,” and the Church has spent twenty centuries explaining and defending that fact, often in the form of authoritative and definite dogmas.
I am more convinced than ever, after twenty-five years a Catholic, that the Church alone possesses the theological truths and metaphysical insights desperately needed by a culture given over to a suicidal spirit. The world, we must remember, “was created for the sake of the Church.” And “God created the world for the sake of communion with his divine life, a communion brought about by the ‘convocation’ of men in Christ, and this ‘convocation’ is the Church. The Church is the goal of all things” (Catechism of the Catholic Church, 760). But too many Catholics view the Church as either a backward human institution requiring constant overhauling (mostly based on scientistic ideology or sentimental clichés) or a glorious museum rather than as the nexus of divine-human communion.
The dogma is the drama
It’s not just that Western culture has forgotten what it means to be human—it actively seeks to destroy what is truly human. And it does so while blathering about “empowerment” and “actualization” and other nonsense, language that surely delights Screwtape and his technocratic minions. Secularist power (that is, power in the service of an ideological “-ism”) and individualistic passions can be answered only with Christ’s kenosis and Passion.
But compromise with anti-human anthropologies has become ordinary within the Church: the Reign of Gay has rapidly moved to the Tyranny of Trans, capitulation is peddled as mercy, and the objective moral order is cut off at the knees with the dull blade of an ill-formed—or unformed—conscience.
The great irony of the Culture of Death is that its practitioners are willing to kill—the unborn, the aging, and even their own true nature—to avoid dying to oneself. Contra the self-emptying of the Incarnate Word, they desperately, even savagely, try to fill their empty and restless souls with politics, power, and pleasure.
St. Pope John Paul II, in a homily given the night my wife and I entered the Church in 1997, explained that only by and through Christ’s death will we know, see, and live true life:
The many different themes which in this Easter Vigil liturgy find expression in the biblical readings come together and blend into a single image. In the most complete manner, it is the apostle Paul who presents these truths in his letter to the Romans, which has just been read: “Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? We were buried therefore with him by baptism into death, so that as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life” (6:3-4). These words lead us to the very heart of the Christian truth. Christ’s death, his redeeming death, is the beginning of the passage to life, revealed in his resurrection.
The Resurrection is creedal and dogmatic; it is essential. The Creed, says the Catechism, “culminates in the proclamation of the resurrection of the dead on the last day and in life everlasting” (CCC 988, emphasis added). It is only the Resurrection that reveals to us the fact and reality of creation in the Trinity. These are dogmatic statements, and, as Dorothy Sayers famously insisted, “The dogma is the drama.”
And yet, in my time as a Catholic, I have seen more and more Catholics expressing concerns about dogma, abandoning dogma, and outrightly attacking dogma. But dogma, wrote Fr. Romano Guardini in his classic work The End of the Modern World (1950),
in its very nature, however, surmounts the march of time because it is rooted in eternity, and we can surmise that the character and conduct of coming Christian life will reveal itself especially through its old dogmatic roots. Christianity will once again need to prove itself deliberately as a faith which is not self-evident; it will be forced to distinguish itself more sharply from a dominantly non-Christian ethos. At that juncture the theological significance of dogma will begin a fresh advance; similarly will its practical and existential significance increase. . . . The absolute experiencing of dogma will, I believe, make men feel more sharply the direction of life and the meaning of existence itself.
Looking back, I see how wise the Church is in pointing to “the organic connection between our spiritual life and the dogmas. Dogmas are lights along the path of faith; they illuminate it and make it secure. Conversely, if our life is upright, our intellect and heart will be open to welcome the light shed by the dogmas of faith” (CCC 89). This is because Christ himself is the source and author of all dogma. We might even say that Jesus Christ is the Dogma—the truth, the way, and the life.
(Several paragraphs of this article appeared in the essay “On 25 Years a Catholic” [April 7, 2022] at catholicworldreport.com.)