In this video, Joe Heschmeyer responds to a caller who asks whether it’s okay to become Catholic even without fully understanding everything. Joe offers insight on faith, trust, and what it really means to be ready to enter the Church, in a conversation hosted by Cy Kellett.
Transcript:
Caller: I am not Catholic, I guess, because I was unfortunately taught somewhere along the line that the Catholic faith is heretical and idolatrous and all these terrible things. But I am working my way back home, which is why I’m calling.
Cy: Well, you’re working your way back home, but there’s a lot of people working on you, too, on the other side. There’s a lot of people praying for you to get into the church. So God bless you, brother.
Joe: Yes, well, are there major areas that are still like kind of obstacles or speed bumps for you?
Caller: So I guess. And I’ve already started to make inroads. I mean, I’ve been going to Mass, I talked to the father, talked to a deacon, you know, so I’m really kind of on that journey to come back. However, the question really is, is it okay that I don’t fully embrace other dogmas? Not because I am rejecting them or intellectually just opposing them, it’s simply that, you know, it’s just. It’s a complete paradigm shift. And it’s something that I simply has not been part of my faith. Namely, of course, you know, the Marian doctrines, you know, praying to saints. So there are a few things there that I know. Like, I don’t even. I wouldn’t even know how to begin. I can’t even see myself praying to Mary. And I again said that I don’t want to. It’s still going to be, you know, those are the next steps, I suppose. But I guess should I still proceed?
Joe: Yeah. No, no. That’s a great question. And the answer is yes. So here’s what I always tell people in terms of how they should know if they’re ready to become Catholic.
And I start by just saying, well, consider how you would know if you were ready to follow Jesus and become a Christian. It would be more than you heard some interesting things that he said, but it would be less than you understand everything that he teaches, because the disciples of Jesus don’t.
And so the cutoff point seems to be that you know enough, you understand enough to be able to say, okay, Jesus seems to be the real deal. He seems to be who he says he is.
And so likewise, when you’re discerning Catholicism, it needs to be more than, oh, I share this teaching with the Catholic Church. I think they got this one right. But it’s less than, I understand all of Catholic theology.
In fact, the danger of trying to get everything right before you become Christian or before you become Catholic is that you’re trying to do it apart from the help of divine grace. And so it ends up actually putting too much of an emphasis on you.
And so you should recognize once you get to a place where you can say, okay, the Church really is who she claims to be, this really is the institution created by Jesus Christ. If you can say that, you might still say there are 60 different issues that I’m baffled as to why the Catholic Church teaches X and not Y.
But as long as you can say I trust the church is right and I’m not, and it’s just a matter of I’ll have to understand it better as I go along, totally fine. Totally, absolutely fine. You can give an assent of knowing this thing’s true, even if you can’t give an explanation for why it’s true.
You know, you can believe in the Trinity before you can give a theological defense of how we know there’s three persons and one substance. You can believe in the real Presence without understanding the underlying kind of causality in the argumentation, all of it. That’s totally fine because you know enough to say yes in the come follow me invitational sense that’s laid out in Christianity.
So if that’s kind of where you’re at, I would say you’re in a great spot.
Second, a lot of this stuff sounds like it’s not even so much doctrine as maybe just practices. Things that feel very alien might be uncomfortable. People going from very free-flowing prayers to doing rote prayer where it’s, you know, prayer that’s been pre-written can sometimes feel like there’s something sort of stilted and artificial. That’s totally normal.
People who’ve been taught that, you know, even saying a prayer, asking their angel to intercede for them, or asking for Mary’s intercession, that this is idolatry, they’re wrong. But you can understand if that’s a psychological burden and you’re just like, I’m not totally comfortable doing it yet.
As long as you get exactly what you described to me, that’s fine. You don’t have to be totally comfortable with all of that stuff yet because you’re still in a place where you’re growing and moving forward. And it’s not as if the church is going to be like, we want to watch you say a rosary before we’re ready to confirm you. It’s not that. It’s normal to grow in this thing. Does that help?
Caller: Yeah, very much. And it’s not super alien. I mean, I forgot to mention this. That’s why I said coming back home, because I was born in the Catholic faith. I was baptized. I had my first Communion. And so I do have some recollection of having prayed to Mary at some point, but very, very, very faint.
And then after that, I mean, I’ve been a Protestant for multiple decades. I even been in ministry. I went from being a Baptist to being Reformed. And so, and here I am, still moving. And so it’s just been an interesting journey.
And actually, it’s kind of ironic because I remember years ago, this whole thing in part started because I was asked to do a study on the Lord’s Supper. I was at the Baptist church at the time. And delving into that, it’s just. It’s like, wait a minute. There really. There’s just something off here. This doesn’t really quite make sense that this would just be symbolic.
And this is, we’re going back, like, now seven years. So this has been a long coming journey for me, so.
Cy: Well, God bless you, brother.
Joe: That’s beautiful. I’m so happy to hear that. Is there a book that you would really like? We’d be happy to open the storehouse for you.