Sheena George
The spiritual journeys of Protestant-turned-Catholics always make fascinating reading. The story of Scott Hahn and wife Kimberly, evangelical Protestants who converted to the Catholic Church and chronicled their journey to Catholicism in the famous book ‘Rome Sweet Home’, is one of the most gracious, moving and convincing spiritual expeditions of recent times. Scott's talks and books have been effective in helping thousands of Protestants and fallen away Catholics to come back to the Catholic faith.
A similar inspiring story emerged in Sweden last year when Ulf Ekman announced he and his wife, Birgitta, are converting to Roman Catholicism. Ekman was the founder of Word of Life, a megachurch in Uppsala, Sweden. “A process of many years of prayer and reflection led to this decision,” Word of Life Ministry said in a report on its website. Ekman has an India connection. He met and married Birgitta, daughter of a Methodist pastor and his wife and raised in India where her parents were missionaries.
Recently, I came across the writings of Paul Whitcomb, a Protestant for the first 32 years of his life who later became a diehard Roman Catholic. Confession of a Roman Catholic by Whitcomb is simply a graphic recounting of a rather extraordinary spiritual odyssey, a journey which had its finale in the Catholic Church. What was the driving force behind this odyssey? It's nothing else but faith.
For Whitcomb, the transformation is much more than an intimate glimpse of one man's soul. It's the testimonial of one man's faith.
Whitcomb was a through and through Protestant. He was born of Protestant parents -- an Episcopalian father and a Methodist mother. He was baptized a Protestant-Episcopal because his brother before him was baptized a Methodist. He was reared a Protestant and sent regularly to Episcopal, Methodist, Congregational, and Baptist Sunday schools, and enlisted in various Protestant youth movements. His parents were staunch "liberal" Protestants: they believed that one church is as good as another -- so long as it is Christian and Protestant.
He was an avid student of the Bible as he believed that the Bible is the sole Christian rule of faith. “But, as Divine Providence would have it, the more I studied the Bible, and the more I made it my rule of faith, the more I realized that my faith was not wholly what God had ordered. I discovered voids in my religious fabric, voids which had to be filled if I were to know real peace of soul,” he writes.
According to Whitcomb, this feeling of spiritual insecurity led him inexorably to a study of comparative religion; and, again, as Divine Providence would have it, the more he studied comparative religion the more he came to realise that the Catholic faith was the one faith that could fill the voids in his religious life, the one faith that could give him the real peace of soul he longed for.
What was his first discovery? The church – Roman Catholic Church – he had been most opposed to was the church most united in Christ. The spectacle of 825 million Catholics, three-fifths of all professed Christians, perfectly, indomitably united in belief, in organization, and in worship – the historical fact that Catholics, consistently the largest body of Christians in the world, have always been thus perfectly united – was evidence he could not ignore, he says.
Whitcomb says in his booklet, “it was quite obvious that Christ did not give this teaching authority to all and sundry, that is, to the whole Church, but only to His duly appointed Apostles, those who were to be the administrative body of the Church.” Had He meant that this teaching authority was to be exercised by all of the faithful He would have addressed His words to all of the faithful, or he would have instructed the Apostles to so advise all of the faithful - neither of which He did.
Searching
the Scriptures further, he learnt exactly how Christ intended to give
His Flesh and Blood for the faithful to eat and drink.. “I found
the full explanation contained in the account of the Last Supper,”
he says. And whilst they were at supper, Jesus took bread, and
blessed, and broke: and gave to his disciples, and said: Take ye, and
eat. And taking the chalice, he gave thanks, and gave to them,
saying: Drink ye all of this." (cf. Matt. 26:26-28; Mark
14:22-24; Luke 22:19-20).
The bread and
wine of Holy Communion, that was it. “The bread and wine of Holy
Communion were not mere symbols, or representations, of Christ's
Body, as I had been led to believe, but were in very truth bread and
wine miraculously transformed by the power of God into Christ's true
and living Flesh and Blood, only the appearance of bread and wine
remaining,” he says.Once Whitcomb made up his mind, it did not take him long to make the transition from Protestantism to Catholicism. “And what a glorious adventure it was, too, to become a Catholic, to receive those several weeks of instruction in true Apostolic theology, to make that solemn profession of faith, to receive a Catholic Baptism, to cleanse my soul in the Sacrament of Penance, and then, finally, to receive the living and true Christ in Holy Communion,” he says.
Archbishop
Fulton Sheen of the US, whose cause for canonization as a saint
officially opened in 2002, once said that there are not 100 people in
the US who hate the Catholic Church, although there might be millions
of people who hate what they mistakenly believe the Catholic Church
to be and to teach. “Thankfully I discovered I fell into the second
category. Because for years I opposed the Catholic Church, and I
worked hard to get Catholics to leave the Church. But I came to see
through a lot of study and considerable prayer that the Roman
Catholic Church is based in Scripture,” Scott Hahn wrote after
becoming a Catholic.
Whitcomb's
study of the doctrines and practices of the various Christian
churches revealed most clearly that only one, the Catholic Church,
exercises the same kind of teaching authority that was exercised by
the church of the Apostles and primitive Church Fathers. “Only the
Catholic Church functions for her members as an unerring interpreter
of God's revealed truth. Only the Catholic Church dares proclaim to
the world that when she teaches the truths of Christian doctrine, it
is Jesus Christ, who can neither deceive or be deceived, teaching
through her,” he says.
“I
had to make a change. In conscience I had to become a Catholic,”
Whitcomb writes.
Ulf Ekman wrote
in a blog, “the Charismatic life, with its emphasis of the power
and the leading of the Holy Spirit is necessary, and it is an amazing
gift. But it cannot be lived out in its fullness in a schismatic and
overly individualistic environment.” Understanding this opened
Ekman and others to the realisation of the necessity of the Church in
its fullness, with its rich sacramental life.
