Eye of the Tiber: My Journey to Catholicism Pt.1

    It has been asked of me, understandably, why I left the International Churches of Christ and decided to join the Catholic Church. In this series of posts, Eye of the Tiber (I am amused at myself with that pun), I explain my journey, my thoughts, my emotions, and my spirit. Because I am not officially a Catholic at this moment and still have to complete my Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults (RCIA), I will also be describing that road as I walk it up until I finally take my first communion.

    It started with Father Robert Sirico, founder and President of the Acton Institute. In 2011, a conference was held in Irvine on Christianity and Economics. Dinesh D’Souza headlined the event. I enjoyed the whole conference, but one speaker blew me away, and that was the Catholic priest, Robert Sirico. His style of speaking was colorful as he would pepper his talk on the intimate connection between economic freedom and human freedom with parables.

  I’ll always remember the story he told about his tree. When Sirico was living in a house with other priests, he would sit in his back porch and stare at the tree growing in the backyard. One day, he noticed that some of the leaves were dying, and upon closer inspection, he discovered that almost a whole half of the tree had dying leaves while the other half seemed to be prospering. He looked in awe at this peculiar tree and decided to call a botanist. The botanist arrived and took samples of the dirt and of the bark. He returned to Father Sirico and told him to cut down the tree immediately. “But why?” he asked. “I see that tree is still growing and blossoming.”

    “No, no,” replied the botanist, “What you see is just an illusion. The roots are dead. The leaves are feeding off the left over sap. So you need to cut it down immediately because the truck is getting weaker and a strong enough wind can knock it over and destroy the house.” What a fruitful story for metaphor! Stories like this made me a fan. After the conference, I told my best friend Devin about him and how impressed I was with him, and we began to follow him on youtube. So when in 2012 the conference was being held again, I insisted that Devin come so that we may finally meet him. And so we did.

    The conference, as expected, was amazing (that year, it was headlined by Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse) and Sirico gave his speech. During break, I shook off my star struck paralysis and walked up to him. We thanked him for coming and speaking, and he politely made small talk with us, asking us what we were studying and where we attended school and what our ambitions were. He then asked us if we were Catholic. I’ve been asked this before, and my standard response, or my stand joke is, ‘No, I’m a recovering Catholic’ and without thinking, I blurted it out, with a chuckle. In retrospect, that probably wasn’t the wisest thing to tell a Catholic priest.

    “Well, Adrian, we have to get you back home” he replied. This put me in an awkward position. How was I to respond? Was I supposed to say, ‘No, no thanks! I’ve already made up my mind!’? That sounds too closed-minded, and I didn’t want to be rude. So I told him I was open to that. Now, when I told him that, I didn’t expect him to engage me right on the spot. I thought maybe he would tell me to email him questions I had to him later, at which point I would not do anything in hopes he would forget he ever tried to reach out to me. But, he wasted no time and posed me this question, “How do you justify inspiration?”

    This shocked me. Why? Well, you have to understand that I’m coming from a background of atheism, and I was converted through an evidential route. Contrary to what some people will have you believe about the nature of conversion, I was “argued into being a disciple.” So, I believed the Bible to be true, and that a man named Jesus did exist, and that he died, and that he was resurrected, and he was God, etc. However, one thing I realized I could not convince myself of was that the Bible was the inspired word of God. The Bible is true, yes, but was it inspired? Is it really a message intended by God for mankind? That was a different claim. That was a claim I didn’t know how to justify.

    So how did I proceed then to becoming a Christian? In a way, I didn’t in this respect. While I acknowledged that the Bible was true, and didn’t know why it was inspired, I told myself that inspiration is not necessary for me to be a Christian. My faith is not rooted in the Bible. It never was. My Christian faith is rooted in a man named Jesus, a man who was real, and who really died, and who really resurrected. My faith is rooted in a historical event. I learn about these events in a book we call the Holy Bible, but the Bible needn’t be inspired for an event in history to have occurred. So, I quietly remained agnostic about the issue, and took the Bible to be inspired anyways. It just seemed to come with the package of being a conservative (ahem, orthodox) Christian.

    The worry was always in the back of my mind that an atheist would ask me how I know the Bible was not just true, but inspired. I would worry what they would make of my answer, should I be honest with them, that I wasn’t sure, but insist such a teaching wasn’t necessary for being a Christian. So when Father Sirico asked me the question that I thought would come from the mouth of an atheist, I was intrigued. I happily told him, as if I were dying to telling to him before but was holding it back, that I had thought about the issue before, but never found a solid answer. So I asked, him, “How do you justify it?”

    He tells me to think of it like this: you can have a Church without a Bible, but you can’t have the Bible without the Church. The Church gave us the Bible. At that moment, it clicked. I understood. I finally understood! Or maybe I didn’t fully understand, but I was excited to have finally have found an answer that was much better than my liberal view that the Bible is not really God’s word and falling back on agnosticism to avoid the kind of liberalism you see rampant in Lutheranism and Unitarianism. So I told Father Sirico, “Wow! I’ve never thought of it that way before!” And I paused. I paused because I expected objection to come to mind. That’s one thing I pride myself in, is my critical mind. And I waited. I waited for an objection. Or a flaw that I may not have immediately caught. But it didn’t come to me. And there Sirico stood, observing my facial expressions as what is known as the doctrine of Sola Scriptura started to deteriorate and the Catholic way of seeing the world began to infect me. I told Sirico I would think about it and get back to him, and he gave me his card to ensure that would happen. Devin got a card too.

    In the next post, we will look at how some of my friends dealt with this challenge when I posed it to them.