I never planned to become a Catholic, let alone a Catholic TV evangelist. I was raised Lutheran. My father’s parents came to North Dakota from Iceland in the 1890s when Iceland was still religious. My mother’s people, who arrived in America about the same time, were Irish ex-Catholics who “took the soup” during the Irish Famine of the mid-nineteenth century. (During the famine, British Protestant missionaries offered food to starving Catholic Irishmen who agreed to leave the Church. Needless to say, I am ambivalent about this sort of evangelism, since our line survived; one and a half million others refused to renounce their faith, starved to death, and left no descendants.)
My mom’s family members retained a great devotion to our Lord but were confused and angry towards the Catholic Church, which they somehow blamed for English Protestant food policies. My dad was devout, but it was Mom who encouraged our memorizing of Bible verses for Sunday school. Both families were strongly anti-Catholic, as was the Lutheran church back then. I considered myself a loyal Lutheran, but when I challenged Luther’s denial of the need for inner conversion, my pastor told me that I thought “like a Catholic.” Maybe I did, but I remained Lutheran through my undergraduate years at Harvard University, clinging rather desperately to beliefs that no one, aside from my parents, seemed to really believe.
I was drafted out of the University of California at Berkeley’s Law School in 1969 for the Vietnam War. After basic training, I tired of watching bewildered young men going off to die for no apparent reason. I concluded that if God really does “move the heart of the king,” as Luther wrote, then I wanted nothing more to do with either God or the king. This meant choosing a new line of work, because I was one of North Dakota’s budding young Democrats, grooming myself for a shot at the U.S. Senate—maybe higher.
I chose medicine and worked hard, staying near the top of my class. During my last year of medical school, in order to relax from the grueling regimen, I began practicing transcendental meditation. TM was great, like Valium or a couple shots of whiskey without the hangover: deep relaxation for twenty minutes, tapering over the next hour back into normal life.
But with it came unforeseen baggage. Watered-down Eastern theology entered my mind by osmosis. I began believing in reincarnation, in karma, in good and evil being two sides of the same coin, yin and yang. During my surgical training in San Francisco, I lived like a pagan, surrounded by beautiful women lonely for male attention (a side effect of being a heterosexual man in a predominantly “gay” city). In that setting, believing good and evil were two sides of the same coin proved convenient.
I owe my return to our Lord to my wife, Alison—although at first neither of us could have imagined our final destination. We met at the feet of an Indian guru in Santa Barbara. Within a year of our meeting, we were married. Sixteen months later, we had a son. Soon after, I completed my San Francisco surgical training and went to London for a fellowship in liver and pancreatic surgery.
We lived there in university housing, and, as they watched the children play, my English-born wife and her friend Barbara argued for hours. Alison would tell Barbara all about reincarnation and karma, and Barbara would reply, “Actually, the answer is Jesus,” and Alison would try again. Eventually my wife began reading spiritual books by American Fundamentalists filled with signs and wonders. Sometimes she would read them to me. But I was committed to meditation. I had seen my guru do signs and wonders, so I knew the spirit realm was real, but I thought all spiritual powers were on the same side.
Furthermore, I thought meditation brought peace to our marriage, so I insisted she keep meditating. Nevertheless, in April of that year (1984), she stopped meditating and accepted Christ as her Lord and Savior. She didn’t dare tell me.
In June, we decided to have our son, Iain, baptized. The assistant Episcopalian pastor and his wife came to our house for dinner. He was unwilling to baptize a child whose parents did not fully accept Christ, and he insisted that we become Christians.
I could see no reason for him to be so restrictive, since as a “Hindu-Christian” I believed that Jesus, Moses, Krishna, Buddha, and the rest were all avatars of divinity, personal manifestations of the deep, impersonal energy source underlying all things. I had seen my guru perform two miracles. Maybe Jesus’ miracles had been more numerous and impressive—so what? I could see no reason to choose Jesus over my guru. Wasn’t my guru the reincarnation of Jesus?
After several hours of discussion it was getting late, and I was getting tired, so I decided on the spur of the moment to renounce my guru and accept Christ. As soon as I did, the “scales” fell from my eyes, and I could see that good and evil were at war, that Jesus is God, and that my guru’s spiritual powers came from the other side. Thirty seconds earlier, I had not been able to see any of that. I hadn’t actually lied to myself— truly I had been spiritually blind.
Alison and I burned our meditation materials that night and began looking forward to my upcoming surgical job in a Seattle suburb. Some of the spiritual books we had read had been written in Seattle, so we expected find great spiritual riches in the Pacific Northwest.
Our first Sunday there, the man giving the Episcopal homily announced that his true worth had finally been noticed—he had just been chosen bishop of a Midwestern see, and he would no longer have to hang out with riffraff like us. The next Sunday, his replacement informed us he was grateful somebody out there believed in Jesus, because he personally found it hard to believe in much of anything.
We spent the next year church-hopping, but when our second son was born with Down’s syndrome, we were desperate enough for spiritual sustenance to commute twenty-five miles to Seattle to the charismatic Episcopal church we had read about while in England. It was impressive at first: dedicated Christians, good sermons, a pastor who believed (or hoped) that Christ is truly present in the Eucharist. Eventually, several of our friends were “led by the Holy Spirit” to commit serious sins and minor crimes. We bailed out to join a Presbyterian Church in America parish and were happy for a while.
But my surgical practice had grown so much that I seldom saw my family, and I became more and more dissatisfied. My partners and I made buckets of money, but I spent most waking hours and large chunks of the night operating—many a surgeon’s dream practice, but not a good one for the father of several small children.
I searched for more manageable practices in other states but found none. I began praying for guidance, and in 1990 spent the entire Saturday after Thanksgiving fasting and praying. I reminded the Lord that I was neglecting my family and didn’t see any way out, and that since I was not good at discerning his will, if he had something else in mind for me, he would have to make it very obvious.
Monday morning I woke up with a rash on my hands. I attributed the rash to cold weather, for we had had snow, which happens once every two or three years in Seattle. I figured the rash would go away when it warmed up. A week later the temperature was back in the fifties, but my rash persisted.
I consulted a dermatologist and changed soaps and scrub solutions until eventually I ran out of approved brands. Still the rash persisted. My hands had become both a potential source of infection to my patients and a potential source of AIDS for me. By April 1991, I had to quit surgery.
Two days after I did my last operation, I got a call from a board member of Human Life of Washington, asking if I would be willing to help lead the fight against the euthanasia initiative that the Washington state legislature had just put on the upcoming ballot. He said had heard me speak at the legislative hearing in February. That was one of those rare times when the Holy Spirit gives the words, which just flow through you, leaving neither pride of authorship nor credit for their impact.
I formed my own “medical association” to oppose the euthanasia initiative. Practically every time I did a debate or TV appearance, some Catholic homeschooling mother would come up and say, “We are offering all our Masses for you and your family between now and the election.”
I was polite but, as a Protestant, unimpressed. Yet after the campaign I began feeling an urge to study the Reformation, to read Protestant and Catholic accounts of the history and theology of that period and then decide for myself who was right.
At first, I put my Reformation reading on the back burner. Partly, I was worried that the Catholic arguments might prove stronger, and I feared losing my soul to the satanic “Whore of Babylon.” Also, I was happily immersed in the practical nuts and bolts of opposing California’s 1992 euthanasia initiative.
One of my jobs with the campaign was to appeal to Protestant ministerial associations for support. I would give my best speech and have them tearing their garments and throwing dust on their heads—until I suggested there were things they could do, at which point the rooms emptied faster than a fire drill. I began to wonder about “faith alone” versus “faith plus works.”
My wondering was compounded when I found that we had raised over three million dollars from eight million California Catholics and eleven thousand dollars from nine million California Protestants. It seemed the Protestant clergy thought it sufficient to feel deeply about the issue; doing something about it was for Catholics.
About the same time, Fr. Robert Spitzer, now president of Gonzaga University, and I spent two weeks training the 1,500 priests of the Los Angeles Archdiocese on how to oppose the issue, raise money, and the like. One evening, I asked Fr. Spitzer the fateful question: “Why do you guys worship Mary?” He explained true Church teaching on our Lady. I then said, “Well, what about the saints? Why do you worship them? And statues? I’ve seen Catholics worshiping statues.” He explained those matters as well.
“Why do you think you can earn your way into heaven with good works?” Once again, Fr. Spitzer explained true Church teaching.
I was shaken. Maybe the “Whore of Babylon” wasn’t the Catholic Church after all. I had to find out more. So at midnight one Saturday, I went to Moe’s Bookstore on Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley and found a used copy of Fr. John Hardon’s Catechism. I bought it and began studying it, comparing it with Scripture, with Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion, and various essays by Luther.
I found that Fr. Hardon was far more faithful to Scripture than Luther or Calvin. In fact, Luther was a loose cannon, probably manic-depressive to my medical eye, devoid of consistent theology; and Calvin was dishonest, taking verses out of context to build his doctrine while ignoring contradictory scriptures.
Both consistently misrepresented Catholic teaching, then used selected Scripture passages to rebut their misrepresentations. Fr. Hardon, the Catechism of the Council of Trent, Augustine, and Thomas Aquinas presented a very different Catholicism from the one Luther and Calvin rebelled against.
Our friends began to worry, and to send us anti-Catholic books and articles. These actually spurred my wife and me toward the Church, because every Protestant apologist, without exception, misrepresented Catholic teaching, usually in the same ways. This consistent distortion of Catholic teaching hit me hard. I thought “if the Protestants are right, why can’t they address the teachings of the Church as they actually are? Why do they have to distort them and then rebut distortions? Who, after all, is the Father of Lies?”
I began to see where this line of thought was heading, and so did my wife. This did not please her, for two reasons. First, she prided herself on descent from the infamous Bishop Ridley, one of the “Oxford Martyrs,” Elizabeth I’s defiler of churches. No doubt she would have preferred that I return to my guru rather than become Catholic.
I wasn’t pleased by the prospect myself, but I spent two years full time on this search, looking for a loophole: some Catholic doctrine or practice that contradicted Scripture, some historical proof of apostasy or of a Galatians 1–style “new gospel” different from that preached by the apostles.
I couldn’t find one. Instead I found that the Christians of the first century believed that Christ is truly present in the Eucharist; that the authority given the apostles by Christ in John 20 and Matthew 16 and 18 had been handed on to their successors, the bishops; and that the ultimate judge of questions on faith and morals was the bishop of Rome, successor to Peter, heir to the keys to the kingdom of heaven. Every early Christian writer, Greek or Latin, believed these things.
I looked into Eastern Orthodoxy, but they hold to the same apostolic doctrine taught by the Catholic Church. They are still angry about the French Crusaders sacking Constantinople 800 years ago. Had that not happened, they would no doubt have long since come back into Communion with the Church. Some Anglicans believe in the Real Presence and the apostolic succession, but their apostolic succession was systematically destroyed by Elizabeth I four hundred years ago. There was nowhere to go but the Catholic Church
Alison and I entered RCIA at a local parish, a program taught by an ex-nun whose chief reference was Fr. Richard McBrien’s forbidden Catholicism. My wife describes our RCIA experience as “crushing boredom interspersed with flashes of heresy.” But at last, in December 1994, we and our older children enjoyed our first confessions. It was the finest day of my life, when I shed the guilt of years of pagan behavior. An even better day followed: December 18 we received our Lord and Savior in the holy Eucharist—body, blood, soul and divinity—and he filled the God-shaped hole in my heart.
Now I have the privilege of reaching out over the airwaves to people who are like I was twenty years ago—”ashamed sinners” who hear our stories, repent, and return to our Lord in confession and the Eucharist. They will have joy forever.
I can’t imagine doing anything else.